Elżbieta Korolczuk is a sociologist, commentator and an activist. She works at Södertörn University in Stockholm and lectures at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on gender, social movements and civil society (including anti-gender and populist movements).

She is the author of numerous academic articles and books, including Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment (with Agnieszka Graff, Routledge, 2021). 

Elżbieta Korolczuk: Yes, it is. And there are at least three trends involved.

The first trend is the rising strength of right-wing populist parties, which often form coalitions with anti-gender movements. This is something that Agnieszka Graff and I call an “opportunistic synergy” in our book Anti-Gender Politics in a Populist Moment. 

Often right-wing populist parties don’t have a very strong ideological project. They take on the issues around gender, sexuality and reproduction in order to spread fear and deepen polarisation, to mobilise the electorate, and to create a strong division between “us” and “them”.

The second trend is what we call the “femonationalist” narrative, which we can see in Sweden, Germany and in many other countries. In many European countries the question of gender has become very much intertwined with the question of race and migration. Right-wing parties use references to gender equality as a way to construct their racist and Islamophobic positions in a way that is not openly racist or Islamophobic. The message is: “We are not racist, we just want to protect our women from the sexual violence at the hands of black and brown men from Africa and Middle East!”

These right-wing parties say that they want to protect “their” women from being raped by invaders and are constructing a very strong divide between white “gender equal” Europe and the immigrants from Africa and Middle East, who are supposedly barbarians posing a threat to women and the LGBTQ community. This helps the right-wing parties to win over the electorate, to mobilise people through deepening social divisions and spreading moral panics and fear.

The third element regards changes in the party-political landscape globally. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have published a book called Cultural Backlash, which shows how the usual right and left division no longer applies toparty politics, due to a number of issues, such as the economy no longer being so clearly constructed as a right-wing or left-wing project. Thus, cultural issues become the most important political cleavage. Studies analysing German voters show for example that fears concerning gender order – the decline of traditional masculinity and the gender binary – are much more prevalent among AfD (far-right) voters, both men and women. Similarly, in Poland, young men voting for the radical right are much more afraid of “gender ideology” than the rest of the population.

These three trends facilitate gender becoming one of today’s main issues in political struggles.

What is the role of Russia in this scenario? 

We can analyse the role of Russia in two aspects. One concerns Russia’s organisational and financial support for gender conservative groups and actors in Europe. For example, the report by Neil Datta on the financing of anti-gender politics in Europe shows that between 2009 and 2018 Russia spent $188.2 million (out of 707 million spent in total) on support for anti-gender groups. And this is just the part of the money that could be traced. Russia has been a source of financial support for such movements in Europe for quite some time now, and research has also documented cooperation between Russian actors and the American religious right.

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Between 2009 and 2018 Russia spent $188.2 million on support for anti-gender groups

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Of course, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, quite a few politicians and civil society organisations have stopped talking about Russia as some sort of beacon of hope for Western Europe in terms of moral revival. But I don’t think that they have actually changed their ideological position. It’s more like they’re trying to avoid criticism for connections with Russia.

Russia has long-held and significant ambitions when it comes to providing a counterweight to the Western liberal order, especially in the European context. And they have managed to do this in many post-Soviet countries. In this perspective, the war on Ukraine is a logical next step in Russia’s plan to save the West from its own decadence and moral decline. Scholars Petr Kratochvíl and Míla O’Sullivan show that the opposition to gender equality and sexual rights has been a crucial element in the Russian propaganda legitimising the attack. We moved from culture wars to actual wars. 

It’s interesting to compare LGBTQIA+ issues in Ukraine and Georgia from this point of view...

In Ukraine, the support of LGBTQ rights, as well as gender equality more broadly, has risen because it helps to construct a sharp division between Ukraine and Russia as two very different countries. So, now in Ukraine, even the right-wing groups agree that politicians should introduce some gender equality measures or that minority rights should be protected because it shows that “we are different from Russia”, that “we are not under Russian influence”.

Georgia has chosen a very different path. They have tried to negotiate or navigate their closeness to Russia, while also leaving the door open for the European Union. However, in Georgia the religious influence of the Orthodox Church is much more pronounced, and this is an important element of the whole scenario. In the end, Georgian authorities, the ruling political parties, have basically chosen the path of authoritarianism. The LGBTQ issue is one obvious sign of this, but there are also connected issues, like the way in which Georgia adopts the solutions created by Russia in order to limit the independence of civil society organisations. 

What is the relationship between the far-rightand women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights and sexual freedom? In the West, far-right movements (and leaders like Jordan Bardella in France) often claim that they support women’s rights.

My current research within the CCINDLE Horizon Project is focused on Sweden. And what we see in Sweden and other Western European countries is that gender equality and the concept of gender is shifting as the right employs many terms and concepts which originated in feminist, progressive or left-wing movements. 

In Poland or Hungary, right-wing forces are openly anti-feminist and want to marginalise feminism, ban gender theory or gender studies. In the western context, right wing actors claim to defend gender equality and especially women’s rights. 

So, the struggle is now about how gender equality is defined and which groups of women will be included or excluded from it. For example, Michael Rubbestad, MP from the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party and the second biggest party in the Swedish parliament, claims that he is a feminist. The Sweden Democrats openly state that they are the “right” type of feminists, the ones who are really protecting women’s rights, in contrast to the feminist activists who support trans and migrant rights. 

Similarly, in many countries there are “gender critical feminists” who claim that feminists have taken the wrong direction and that “gender ideology” is a threat to biological women and girls. In the UK and Italy these actors helped preventing the introduction of new legislation that would afford more protection for trans and non-binary persons. So today, these struggles take place not only between feminists and anti-gender actors, but also within feminism. 

This leads us to question the role of feminism in political and social change.

As feminists, we have to ask the question, what type of gender equality have we managed to promote and implement? It is often the case that existing gender equality legislation is of most benefit to white, middle-class women. Such legislation is rarely genuinely intersectional and helps to prevent discrimination due to class, race or ability. We have largely failed to include minority women and working-class women in gender equality measures, and even the feminist movement itself.

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The Right employs many terms and concepts which originated in feminist, progressive or left-wing movements

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And this has backfired. It’s not just that the far-right are the “bad guys” and they want to use our vocabulary to hide their actual racism, the problem lies also in the ways in which gender equality is often introduced and which ignore things like citizenship status, economic conditions, and so forth. So I think that we have to really be vigilant about the ways in which we implement gender equality and how we define it.

So how can we counter the anti-gender takeover of the gender equality narrative?

When we encounter right-wing activists that claim to be fighting for gender equality, the question we should always ask is, equality for whom? Are all women included in the gender equality that they’re fighting for? In the Polish context, you can see very clearly who is excluded. And it’s not just migrant women, or women who want to have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. It’s also, for example, single mothers. While there have been many reforms introducing cash transfers for families with children, the support system for single mothers has not been reformed for the last two decades.

There is a very strong exclusionary orientation in “gender equality” that the right claims to fight for. So we always have to ask, who is included and who is excluded in the new laws that they propose? Because it is all too clear that they exclude a lot of minority groups from what they consider gender equality. 

What about reproductive rights and sexual freedom?

In some countries there is still a strong social opposition to abortion rights, usually because of the strength of religious institutions which oppose reproductive rights. These forces tend to be openly anti-abortion and anti-reproductive rights, which is certainly the case in Poland. But it’s interesting to look, for example, at Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats and the Christian Democrats cooperated a couple of years ago to push for small changes which would diminish reproductive rights and access to healthcare for women.

For example, they supported introducing a freedom of conscience clause in the healthcare system. This backfired because, in countries like Sweden, abortion is a non-issue, and it’s incredibly difficult to gain any support for reducing access.

Now they have taken a U-turn, and claim that they are proponents of reproductive rights, going so far as to propose enshrining the right to abortion in the Swedish constitution. So it’s interesting how they are adapting to these issues. This is something we also see in the US, for example where Republicans accepted marriage equality but fight against the right to abortion.

It shows the anti-gender movement’s flexibility. So when, for example, marriage equality becomes widely accepted in a country, they move on to another thing, which now is usually trans rights. They move from issue to issue, to test what has the potential to mobilise people, including people who were previously disengaged. Right now, the trans issue is particularly problematic, because it also divides the feminist movement. The right can be very smart when choosing their targets, and we need to be at least equally smart about the ways in which we fight for women’s rights. 

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Elżbieta Korolczuk

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