ReportOUT is delighted to publish our Pride month blog series "Love In A Time of Populism" which will be appearing over the coming weeks. This year, we are focusing on different corners of Europe and what the resurgence in right-wing populism means for LGBTQ+ lives experiences across the continent. Elections to the European Parliament scheduled for 6th - 9th June are projected to return a right wing majority to power and parallel national movements winning power in the Netherlands and Slovakia and projected to enjoy further success in multiple nations.
As our communities celebrate Pride month, these developments serve as a timely reminder that the progress towards increasing equality in most parts of Europe is neither linear nor guaranteed and demonstrate why the work of NGOs and charities supporting LGBTQ+ equality remains vital.
Written by ReportOUT Human Rights Researcher, Ross Othen-Reeves, this blog series will visit multiple European countries from the US-style attacks on freedom of expression in Hungary to the more subtle erosion of rights in Italy by a government keen to bolster its credentials as an EU power-broker. Ross also considers Georgia, an EU candidate state where the question of LGBTQ+ rights is intrinsically linked to decisions over the country's future pivoting towards Europe or Russia.
We hope this blog series gives you renewed energy and conviction for the fight for equality that is far from won.
The New Leviathan: Equality Vs the Radical Right
From Iberia to the Caucasus, the Populist Radical Right (PRR) is now either in power or else shaping the national political discourse throughout Europe - and all have something to say on the matter of lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) rights. In this blog series, we’ll focus on four case studies from across the continent, honing in on Italy, Hungary, Georgia, and the Netherlands. Together these examples provide a snapshot into some of the varied ways in which far-right parties instrumentalise queer issues for political gain.
With the European Union (EU) parliament elections coinciding with the start of Pride season this June, we’ll be looking at both the impact that the PRR has on sexual and gender minorities within these national contexts, while also reflecting on the wider tensions these parties and their LGBTQI+ focused policies wrought on the EU. Stakes are high, given that far-right parties are poised to make unprecedented gains in the elections, and which could therefore shape the bloc’s policy positions on queer issues in the years ahead.
But before ruminating on what the future may or may not hold, it’s worth first considering how and why the PRR has gained traction in Europe over the past several decades, as well as understanding the two principles, seemingly contradictory, approaches taken by the PRR towards sexual and gender minorities.
What’s Caused Europe’s Political Shift to the Right?
Many observers believe it’s no coincidence that the far-right’s unprecedented rise in recent years has coincided with the propagation of neoliberal economics, which has contributed to financial volatility, diminished workers’ rights, and increased inequalities between rich and poor. Populists have leapt on the resultant public discontent, arguing that political elites are to blame for these economic woes. The remedy they claim to offer is order and security (through necessarily authoritarian means) and, for those within the club, the reassertion of state sovereignty over the perceived supranational power and excessive liberalism of the European Union (EU).
The rise in populism cannot be explained by economics alone, however. Other issues coopted by the far-right include immigration, resurgent nationalism, a defence of ‘traditional family values’, and Christian fundamentalism. All of this is deeply troubling for minorities and women, who are all disproportionately affected by the ultraconservative policies of such parties. Yet taken as a whole, the PRR across Europe is far from a homogenous group, which makes tackling the overall trend all the more complex.
The Blunt Tool of Political Homophobia
For most parties on the far-right, queer citizens and their lifestyles are symptomatic of societal decay which should not be tolerated. At the same time, combating this scourge offers a convenient distraction to political and economic challenges.
Two of the best-known proponents of political homophobia are Hungary and Poland. Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party has prohibited public depictions of LGBTQI+ identities, and prevented trans people from gaining legal gender recognition - and the list goes on. Likewise, Poland’s Law & Justice Party (PiS), which held power between 2015 and 2023, famously attacked what it claimed was an “LGBT ideology” and enabled the creation of municipal “LGBTQ+ free zones”.
These examples are well known, but in recent years this disturbing trend has continued its incremental spread to Europe's political and geographic peripheries, as well as wheedling its way to the very heart of the European project.
In the Caucasus, the Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Garibashvili, has called LGBTQI+ rights a “catastrophe” for traditional family values. His rhetoric has emboldened right-wing extremists who have attacked Tbilisi Pride each year since 2021.
Georgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party also claimed to be defending the ‘traditional family’ when the party recently began annulling the birth certificates of children born to lesbian couples via insemination. As a founding member of the EU, Italy is a highly influential player in European politics, and such overt anti-LGBTQI+ policies could set a worrying precedent amongst other (hitherto) liberal democracies across the continent.
Yet in some Western and Northern European countries, where tolerance of LGBTQI+ populations has traditionally been higher than in other parts of Europe, PRR parties have adopted a more inclusive approach towards LGBTQI+ rights, pitting them against the non-native ‘other’ which is seen as the greater risk to national identity.
The Insidious ‘Support’ of Homonationalism
Jasbir Puar’s influential concept of homonationalism (2007) explains how some political parties have appropriated LGBTQI+ rights in defence of Western secular values against the perceived threat of homo/bi/trans (HBT) phobic immigrants - particularly from Muslim communities.
This has arguably been best documented in the Netherlands, where the openly gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and his LPF party ran on an anti-immigrant and Islamophobic campaign during the 2002 elections until his assassination that same year. The tradition of the Dutch far-right supporting sexual and gender minorities has continued through to Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV), which in November last year won a landslide victory in national elections.
In Norway, the populist FRP, or Progress Party, successfully negotiated changes to the country’s immigration policy while serving in a coalition government between 2013 and 2020, in which LGBTQI+ refugees and religious minorities (specifically Christian minorities) were prioritised over other (read: Muslim) refugees. This was in apparent defence of the Norwegian tenets of tolerance and equality.
Even Marine Le Pen’s historically (and infamously) HBT-phobic Rassemblement National party in France has dabbled - with some success - in courting the so-called Lavender Vote.
White gay men were particularly susceptible to Le Pen’s overtures when, in the 2017 elections, she presented her party as the only credible defender of LGBTQI+ rights against the supposed tyranny of Islam.
Uncomfortable Bedfellows
If the PRR’s defence of queer rights makes the vast majority of us within the community more than a little uneasy, it seems the sentiment goes both ways. The Netherlands’ PVV’s manifesto vows to stop ‘gender insanity’, Norway’s FRP has said no to recognising a legal third gender, and Le Pen has gone conspicuously quiet on LGBTQI+ rights since 2017, and even then, never wavered in her opposition to same-sex marriage.
Words to Live By
These facts serve as a chilling reminder that populism is, in the words of political scientist Cas Mudde, “an ideology that separates society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups” in which LGBTQI+ rights will likely never emerge as a true victor, no matter the form populism takes. On the contrary, our community, and indeed all European citizens, might do well to recall the EU’s motto which has underpinned the peace and prosperity we’ve taken for granted for so long - a rallying cry which reminds us that Europe is strongest In Varietate Concordia: United in Diversity
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