Pink-Pilling Citizenship: Young European Women, Depoliticisation, and the New Right Turn

Contemporary politics increasingly appears as technical, inevitable, and “common sense”, pushing young people out of visible conflict and into a depoliticised, spectator role. Against this backdrop, a striking development has emerged: a subset of young women – long assumed to be the most reliably egalitarian, pro–welfare and liberal constituency – are being pink-pilled: drawn into conservative and radical-right projects through gendered narratives of security, care, and moral order. This paper asks how young European women learn, imagine, and perform citizenship in such a context, and why some come to endorse illiberal choices as the most meaningful way to act politically. Focusing exclusively on young women, the study combines theories of depoliticisation, value realignment, and youth citizenship with the emerging literature on pink-pilling and digital right-wing femininities. Using original cross-national survey data from seven countries (Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechia, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy), it employs a conjoint experimental design in which young women repeatedly choose between political profiles that differ in their stance on civil liberties, rule of law, and electoral standards. These behavioural choices are linked to batteries measuring majoritarian authoritarianism, nativism, attitudes to migration, distrust and alienation, as well as value hierarchies (freedom–security, freedom–equality). The paper identifies distinct constellations of young women for whom right-wing narratives reintroduce conflict, clarity, and belonging in a landscape otherwise framed as technocratic and apolitical. It shows when and why promises of protection, bounded community, and moral certainty outweigh liberal commitments to universalism and European integration – and how this is shaped by experiences of depoliticisation, gendered socialisation, and precarity. It offers a gender-sensitive account of the conservative youth turn, reframes pink-pilling as a form of learning and performing citizenship under depoliticisation, and explores its implications for democratic legitimacy, representation, and the future of political education in Europe.