Across Central and Eastern Europe, far-right actors increasingly approach education policy as a strategic arena for moral boundary-making and political mobilisation (Băluță 2026 forthcoming; Băluță O. & Băluță I. 2025; Berg, Jungblut, & Jupskås 2023). Because far-right actors and formations are entangled and cannot be cleanly bounded—as they shade into one another through overlapping networks, discursive repertoires, and issue coalitions—I conceptualise them as a far-right continuum (Norocel 2023), in dialogue with work that captures their “unity in heterogeneity” as a heterogeneous constellation (Blee, Simi, & Futrell 2024) and, relatedly, as a complex (Dietze & Roth 2020). Building on this conceptual move, the paper brings into dialogue two further bodies of scholarship: research on anti-gender politics as a repertoire targeting the “traditional family,” sex and gender education, marriage equality, LGBTQI rights, reproductive rights, and related policy domains (Kuhar & Paternotte 2017; Băluță 2024; Norocel & Băluță 2023), and scholarship on the political work of apocalyptic imaginaries in contemporary societies (Norocel & Pettersson 2023; Torre 2024; Norocel & Goldman 2026). Bringing these literatures together, I argue that sex education operates as a particularly productive “contested issue” through which actors across the far-right continuum translate diffuse civilisational and moral anxieties into narratively coherent doomsday scenarios—revealing both nationally specific logics and transnational alignments.
Empirically, the paper analyses parliamentary debates (2020–2026) on sex education, supplemented with AUR governing programmes (2020, 2024) and George Simion’s 2025 programme framed around “rebuilding Romania.” Methodologically, I combine qualitative discourse analysis with attention to ”fantasmatic logics”—the affective narrative structures that organise political meaning-making around lack, threat, and promised restoration (Clarke 2011)—and to the vocabulary through which apocalyptic imaginaries circulate in political argumentation (Norocel & Băluță 2023; Norocel & Pettersson 2023).
The analysis shows how the apocalyptic imaginary produces “unity in heterogeneity” across the far-right continuum by enabling convergence on a shared civilisational and moral narrative while sustaining internal differentiation (Blee, Simi, & Futrell 2024; Dietze & Roth 2020; Norocel 2023). It traces how this doomsday framing also facilitates alignment among actors positioned across a broader democratic–anti-democratic spectrum, generating common interpretive repertoires and coalition possibilities around sex education. At the same time, it clarifies how sex education becomes a privileged node where exclusionary and dehumanising ideas, alongside nationalist-demographic threat constructions, are intensified and normalised (Idriss-Miller 2020; Torre 2024). The paper thus offers a framework for studying far-right engagement with education policy as an apocalyptic politics of gender and sexuality (Berg, Jungblut, & Jupskås 2023; Norocel & Goldman 2026).
