The Conditional Transnationalism of Far-Right and Anti-Gender Politics

Claims about the transnationalization of the far right have become increasingly prominent, yet we still lack systematic evidence on how cross-border engagement is structured and when it becomes politically salient. The project addresses this gap by examining anti-gender politics, a core mobilizing field of the contemporary far right, and by focusing on online communication, where transnational exchange is widely assumed to take place. The analysis examines referencing practices on Twitter/X, including retweets, mentions, and hashtag use, among 148 anti-gender organizations in Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland between 2012 and 2022 in order to trace patterns of cross-border exchange and joint dissemination. Empirically, the findings show that transnational engagement is limited, uneven, and highly context-dependent. Anti-gender organizations remain primarily rooted in national arenas, intensifying cross-border online activity when domestic political opportunities narrow. Transnational ties are sustained by a small number of influential brokers who bridge national and supranational spaces. Rather than engaging in overt coordination, these actors co-create transnational visibility through parallel framing and shared hashtag campaigns. This suggests that far-right transnationalization is conditional rather than continuous. Anti-gender politics thus provide a shared repertoire that can be selectively activated across borders when needed, while national arenas remain the primary locus of political action. This helps explain both the reach and the limits of contemporary far-right transnationalism and cautions against overestimating the coherence of a European “nationalist international.”