Mobilising against the Right-Wing Populism: New Feminist Protests in East Central Europe

Based on ethnographic data with activists, collectives and social movement organizations in Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic, this paper explores the new feminist mobilizations that challenge the right-wing populism in East Central Europe. Since 2016 East Central Europe has experienced a significant increase of women’s protests and feminist mobilizations. While there has been a global wave of women’s and LGBTQI movements and protests occurring across the world, in the context of East Central Europe these dynamics are an expression of the resistance against the anti-gender course (Kuhar & Patternote 2017) that has dispersed across the political spectrum in the region. The anti-gender politics in generally identifies with an “attack on gender ideology” (Grzebalska, Kovats, Peto 2017), opposing questions around ‘gender’, including access to abortion, LGBTQI rights, or elimination of violence against women. Particularly in Poland, attacks on reproductive rights have mobilized diverse actors around the large-scale protests across the country. Around these, an important activist platform called Black Protest or Polish Women’s Strike have formed, challenging the anti-gender policy-making decisions, as well as inspiring other activist platforms. Similarly, in Slovakia, a new wave of protests around the platform We Won’t Be Silenced have emerged as a reaction to the new attempts to limit legal access to abortion by a newly elected ultra-conservative government. At the same time, while there have been no large-scale protests in Czech Republic, a significant transnational connection of practical solidarity with the protesters from the neighbouring countries has been created. While the initial protests were focused on anti-gender policies, the mobilizations have quickly evolved into a broader movement for a systematic change, linking thus the feminist activism in East Central Europe with social movements across the globe opposing austerity, environmental justice, or nationalism (Korolczuk 2016, Majewska 2018). Drawing on ethnographic analysis this paper explores the inner dynamics of new feminist mobilizations in East Central Europe and the social movements networks (Diani 2015) that drive the protests, looking at following questions: what tactics do the feminist social movements use to tackle anti-gender politics in the region? How does the emergence of anti-gender movements and anti-gender political discourse challenge the feminist movements in their struggle towards systematic change?