From Marriage to Electoral Reform: Anti-Gender Mobilization and Direct Democracy in Croatia

In 2013, the year Croatia joined the European Union, the civil initiative On Behalf of the Family (OBF) launched a successful nationwide campaign for a referendum to constitutionally define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Central to this campaign was an appeal to direct democracy: OBF framed the referendum as a means of restoring popular sovereignty, arguing that political elites were acting in defiance of the “will of the people” and thereby producing a democratic deficit. Following its success, OBF continued to mobilize referendums to demand reforms of the electoral system, including expanded preferential voting and improved access for smaller parties to parliamentary representation. Drawing on an analysis of OBF’s political rhetoric across these referendum campaigns, this paper examines how ideas and practices of direct democracy are strategically deployed within anti-gender mobilization. It focuses in particular on how “the people” are discursively constructed and mobilized as a political subject. The paper argues that appeals to direct democracy enable OBF to legitimize its political goals and to present itself as participatory and inclusive, while simultaneously obscuring and normalizing the exclusionary effects of its agenda. By doing so, the paper contributes to broader debates on the relationship between direct democracy, populist rhetoric, and anti-gender politics in contemporary Europe.