Challenging anti-gender and right-wing narratives: a critical insight into the ‘’progressive’’ politics in CEE and the Balkans

Anti-gender organizations and their influence on policies related to family, sexual and reproductive health have become a political reality in CEE countries, with a significant echo in post-Yugoslav countries (Kuhar and Paternotte, ed. 2017; Kovats and Poim, 2015). Their relation to the right-wing populist parties has been addressed, emphasizing reliance on politics of fear (Kuhar and Paternotte, ed. 2017; Kuhar and Zobec, 2017) and importance of gender and sexuality in creating modern right-wing agenda (Dietze and Roth, ed. 2020). The paper contributes to this debate, by focusing on three narratives that can be identified in these political camps in CEE and post-Yugoslav states: • ‘’anti-communism’’, articulated through critical stance toward 1989, when communist elites were only transformed into liberal ones, continuing to dominate in these societies in a destructive manner (Mark, et al. 2019). For the anti-gender organizations, anti-communism is related to dismantling of family as private sphere, subjected to the totalitarian state control, through the mechanisms of social welfare that should be revised and minimized (Agenda for Europe, 2014; Cooper, 2017). • ‘’anti-colonization’’ narrative is articulated as white, Christian resistance to the vision of Europe as designed in the Brussels – enforcing human rights, multiculturalism, global capitalism and ‘’gender ideology’’ as unnatural understanding of gender and traditional family values (Krastev, 2016; Korolczuk and Graff, 2018) • creation of a ‘’new society’’ as a final aim of both anti-gender and right-wing political actors, settled in traditional, conservative values, adjusted to the new political and social circumstances, presenting mono-cultural society, with strong national conscience and nuclear family as its key pillar (Toplisek, 2019, Djurkovic, ed. 2017, Agenda for Europe, 2014). Going further, the aim of the paper is to shift the attention to the ‘’progressive’’ political forces, focusing on how these discourses are being challenged by LGBT organizations in post-Yugoslav region (Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). My key argument is that the success of right wing politics, and strengthening of anti-gender narratives in this region, lies largely on the lack of criticism among ‘’progressives’’ in relation to the following issues/problems: • ignorance of local LGBT organizations (and civil society in general) of the destruction of social welfare state during the neoliberal transition and marginalization of social and economic rights in relation to political human rights (Kovats, ed. 2017; Fraser, 2013; Cakardic, 2013) • uncritical embracement of the orientalist discourses on EU periphery, especially in relation to the sexual rights and freedoms (Rexhepi, 2016, Klapeer, 2017); • failure in providing alternative narratives on the nationhood, by insisting on the ‘’anti-nationalistic’’ values of morally superior, ‘’urban”