Recurring ideas: Searching for the roots of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe

‘Gender’ was the most popular word media used in 2013 in Poland, when the centre-right, liberal coalition was still in power. ¹ But the general public was not necessarily enthusiastic about the concept. Catholic media, newspapers and TV stations connected to the right wing and nationalist party Law and Justice, who were at time in opposition, were portraying ‘gender’ (as a word, concept, category) in line with the Catholic Church’s interpretation, that is, as ‘deeply destructive’ to ‘the person, interpersonal relations and all social life’ and ‘deeply rooted in Marxism and neo-Marxism as endorsed by some feminist movements’ (Polish Bishops’ Conference, 2013).

The battle against ‘gender’ was initially aimed at undermining the very idea of gender education at schools and kindergartens by misrepresenting it as ‘forcing boys to wear girls’ clothes’, while sexual education was presented as ‘organized, collective rape of the child’s soul’ (Oko, 2013). The reaction of the left and the liberals was to ridicule the moral panic around ‘gender’ as an embodiment of backwardness, ignorance and obscurantism. Not even 2 years later, the conservative Catholic media triumphed, when Law and Justice won both Presidential and Parliamentary elections and all these anti-gender ideas surfaced – together with an outburst of anti-Western and nationalist ideology – at the forefront of the new government’s agenda. At first, what was soon labelled a ‘gender war’ or ‘culture war’ (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018) seemed to develop mainly in Poland and in Slovakia (at least within the Eastern Europe context). However, even though the discursive war did not take place to the same extent in Hungary, it was the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, who took the ultimate step to fight ‘gender ideology’ and institutionally banned gender studies as a separate university subject in 2018. In other words, the political successes of right-wing populism went hand in hand with the ideological war on one of the most important conceptual pillars of a modern approach to human rights and the human condition, which is the recognition of gender as being beyond biological determinism.

In order to understand the co-articulation of the ‘gender war’ with the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe, we need to go back to the moment when the old system collapsed. Popular hopes linked to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe were perhaps best symbolized by the poster issued by the Solidarity movement before the first semi-democratic elections took place on the 4 June 1989 in Poland. The poster features American actor Gary Cooper, from the movie High Moon, walking, with a ballot paper in his hand, and the sign ‘Solidarity’ in the background. Apart from mobilizing the citizens to participate in the elections, the poster symbolizes a departure from everything that was connected to a communist regime, and a movement towards the new, Western, capitalist democracy. This vision of a prosperous future brought hope and gave strength even when the East European societies started to experience the hardships of a transformation to a capitalist market economy, as they soon did.

Considering this historical context can also help in understanding the societal transformations taking place in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. Before an Eastern European citizen could become a homo economicus, (s)he needed to overcome her homo sovieticus nature – a term coined by Aleksander Zinoviev (1986) and popularized by the Polish priest Józef Tischner, to describe a passive type of mentality, ‘lazy’, ‘incompetent’, awaiting state assistance and used to decades of the state organizing their life and providing them with goods and services. The ideological construction of homo sovieticus contrasted with the principle of individual responsibility; it was seen not only to be the antithesis of entrepreneurship, but also a barrier on the path to ‘normalization’, modernization and prosperity (Woźniak, 2014). When the ‘shock therapy’ of capitalist transition hit countries like Poland or East Germany, the processes of privatization meant that many people lost their jobs and at the same time, lost protection against social risks, with welfare states unable to cope with massive unemployment. After the first decade of transformation, unemployment rates increased to over 20 percent (40% among university graduates), alongside increasing inequalities and the division between those who benefitted from transformation and so-called ‘transformation losers’ (Piróg, 2013). But those who complained were labelled as not flexible, unwilling to ‘reskill’ and ‘retrain’, and not ‘innovative’ enough; they were blamed for their lack of entrepreneurship and their inability to cope with their new situation. Alternatively, they were assured that the logic of ‘J-curved’ economic recovery meant they needed to go through the downfall (the ‘valley of tears’ low point of the ‘J’) in order to then progress and benefit from overall prosperity (Wagner, 1996). At the same time, some sociologists (at least) took some blame away from the poor homines sovietici, pointing to the effect that years spent under a communist regime had had on them. Thus, the ‘learned helplessness’ of the poor and the passive was understood to have resulted from ‘prolonged infantilism matched by state paternalism’ (Sztompka, 2000 as quoted by Ferge, 2008), and ‘directly shaped by communist propaganda and indoctrination’ (Sztompka, 2008: 137 as quoted by Woźniak, 2014).

And yet, as pointed out by Hungarian sociologist, Zsuzsa Ferge (2008), ‘(p)eople had to have many skills to organize everyday life under conditions of a shortage economy and do it on a shoestring’ (p. 145). When they had to deal with the hardship of transition to market economy, they mobilized all of these skills and mastered new ones in an endless everyday effort of making ends meet, often beyond formal exchange, in a grey zone, using barter exchange, doing small repairs or cleaning houses in exchange for food, managing micro loans, developing hidden coal mines with hazardous methods, practising their creativity, true flexibility and openness to dealing with new hardships everyday (Rakowski, 2009). In other words, these ‘losers of transformation’ were by no means ‘passive’, ‘helpless’ or ‘demanding’. The poor were often pro-actively silenced while also hoping to benefit from the economy ‘going up’ on a J-curve.

The power of this positive vision of the capitalist future, combined with a disciplining discourse around homo sovieticus, had a particular effect on gender relations. Eva Fodor’s (2006) study of coping strategies adopted by women in poor households illustrates how women struggled to maintain hegemonic gender roles in the situation when their husbands lost their jobs or any other source of income. Although their ideal vision was the mid-20th-century Western (utopian) male breadwinner family, where women’s role was strictly domestic, in reality, women needed to become active managers of everyday life – while at the same time having to be creative about restraining their husbands’ gender shame that resulted from their inability to be the breadwinners. Such coping strategies included balancing their husbands’ loss of manhood with offering nice food and still performing most of domestic chores even when they were themselves employed; bearing the public shame of representing the family in welfare offices and asking for loans from neighbours; or allowing the husbands to remain ignorant about the family’s tight budget; while sometimes men would spend the majority of the family’s income on costly delights, just to be able to feel like ‘knights in silver armour’ (Fodor, 2006).

What was the reason for East European women accepting this new fate? Barbara Einhorn’s (1993) foundational work on gender and citizenship in Eastern Europe after the fall of state socialism discusses the ways that the transition to a market economy and democracy was made to seem like a new opening for East European women to utilize their newly granted freedoms. As Einhorn’s book title – Cinderella Goes to Market – suggests, the market was portrayed as enabling and potentially empowering, and as now opening endless possibilities for self-fulfilment. However, as the author argued, ‘The introduction of market forces seems to foreclose choices for women: newly privatized women’s magazines construe their idealized woman as a consumer, mother and homemaker, or pander to escapism and the politics of envy’ (Einhorn, 1993: 11). At the same time, the state was withdrawing from policies that supported women’s autonomy during the state-socialist regime: many of the day care centres closed down, financial support for families was cut, women disappeared from politics and, in Poland, their reproductive rights were limited, as the Catholic Church presented itself as a hero fighting against communism, demanding an abortion ban in return.

Even if after a closer look at the socialist state it turns out it was patriarchal, and therefore the principle of gender equality was not fully implemented, women felt that official policies and gender equality principles were imposed by the communist propaganda (Gal and Kligman, 2000). Now Polish, Czech, Hungarian or Bulgarian women wanted to ‘go back to normal’. Their vision of the West was utopian and selective. While Western feminists preached about the need to treat the ‘private as public’ and ‘personal as political’, East European women, after decades of state-socialism’s control over the citizen’s private life, wanted the opposite to exposure of their private issues. While the little house in the suburbs became the symbol of oppression for (White, middle-class) women in the United States, this was the dream of women in post-communist countries, tired of a double burden of paid and unpaid work, the latter never really shared by men. The new role for women was also emphasized by the nationalist ideology that told women that ‘their primary responsibility is “to produce babies for the nation”’ (Einhorn, 1993: 257). This wave of anti-feminism spread through almost all of the countries in the region and ‘feminism’ became a dirty word.

However, around mid-1990s, the perspective of integration with the European Union became real: the institutional confirmation that the East European countries are indeed part of Europe (even if geographically they have always been there). This meant extra mobilization to demonstrate East European readiness to become part of the European Community. Nationalist sentiments were to be hidden; projects financed by the pre-accession European Union (EU) funds implemented the EU horizontal principles of gender equality and gender mainstreaming. All of these countries also adopted antidiscrimination legislation and met conversion criteria, including indicators of macroeconomic performance. It seemed that the difficult transformation from communism was over; East Europeans joined the club of the wealthiest nations in the world. The 2004 EU enlargement gradually opened European labour markets to migrants from the new Member States, which often led to a rapid decrease of unemployment in their home countries. There were new roles for the East European migrant workers employed in the West European countries, illustrated by the image of a pretty nurse and a handsome, masculine plumber promoted by the Polish government as an example of ‘nation branding’ (Johnson, 2011). In these early years, it seemed, the transition to democracy ‘did not lead to critical debate about the value of Western free market principles’ (Fox and Vermeersch, 2010: 328), and integration with the EU silenced any emerging debates on the issue.

And yet, the EU neither contributed to the disappearance of nationalist identities and anti-feminist sentiments, nor was it able to radically improve the situation of those social groups that were left out by the 1990s marketization processes. As noted by Fox and Vermeersch (2010),

the EU provided not only the institutional context but also, in some ways, the discursive resources and even incentives for the reconfiguration of political space in national terms. EU conditionality established the institutional terms of accession; EU discourses elaborated its spirit. (p. 329)

There was also demand for these new political forces: the groups and ideas that were ‘forgotten’ and neglected during the East European countries’ process of integration with the EU. Those who had not benefitted from transformation lost their patience and raised their heads in the search for a new representation – and this time, it would come from the right wing of the political scene, who provided an alternative vision of the national community against the individualistic and atomised neoliberal utopia (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018). The new movement was against individualism and Western liberal values, against elites that benefitted from transformation, against diversity and multiculturalism and against gender equality as a concept that was ‘imposed’ on the new Member States by the EU. Emerging after the fall of state-socialism, suppressed when the countries applied for the EU membership, the project of nation-building returned to the agenda once the countries’ position as European democracies was established. Coming back to this unfinished project, right-wing populist parties managed, on the one hand, to confront the liberal, open and left-wing political parties and elites with the renewed vision of community, which was pitted against the processes of globalization and Europeanization; and on the other, to mobilize against the ‘alien’ cultural influence which was threatening to be brought in by refugees and migrants. As noted by Kalb (2009), right-wing populist parties based their discourses on the ‘anthropologies of fear, crisis and the nation’, creating an opposition between the cosmopolitan elite classes that forsook the project of the nation as a community of fate versus the ‘Fordist’ (male) manual worker as a representation of an ‘ethnic folk’.

The populist right has also re-deployed ideas about conservative gender roles and understanding women’s roles predominantly through their reproductive capacities, which reflected the set of ideas and discourses present during the first wave of anti-feminism in the 1990s (Szelewa, 2014). Right-wing articulations of the histories and struggles of maintaining national identity have been now coupled with discourses of demographic downfall. Faced with falling birth rates, right-wing populists employ discourses about the ‘dying nation’, often placing these within a broader historical context of partitions, wars, Western invasions and martyrdom (Jaskułowski et al., 2018; Mishtal, 2012). Various statements of government officials and other influential political actors underline the similarity between the EU’s strategic goals for women’s employment and the priorities of the state-socialist regime that mobilized the female labour force. As a result, EU objectives with regard to gender equality, and recommendations of EU institutions concerning work and family reconciliation have been treated as ‘totalitarian’ and as a threat to the ‘normal functions of the family’. ² Anti-gender campaigns, often orchestrated by the Catholic Church, also provide ‘a new source of cohesiveness’ (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018: 804), a common enemy or ‘a symbolic glue’ (Kováts and Põim, 2015). Proclaiming gender studies ‘a scientific hoax’ (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018: 807) and pointing to the similarities between state-socialist and EU-led ‘forced commodification’, the populists have been/are now able to mobilize the new form of resistance, addressing cultural colonialism and neoliberal exploitation at the same time. As before, popular culture has embraced and strengthened national symbols. Gary Cooper from the election poster has now been replaced by gadgets and trinkets commonly referred to as ‘patriotic’; they portray the symbols linked to important historical events, usually tied to the fight for National independence. Thus, for example, symbols related to the uprising in occupied Warsaw in 1944 are now available for sale on T-shirts, or even socks or bed sheets. Anna Novikov, while researching The Visual Language of Neo-Nationalism, noted that ‘during their annual patriotic assemblies, Hungarian right-wing activists wear Mongolian inspired attire; Kazakh female pop singers dress themselves up as nomadic amazons; and Russian girls wear blouses with portraits of Putin’ (Novikov, 2017).

All these attacks on the idea of gender (equality) go hand in hand with expanding family policy measures, often attached to women’s status as mothers, and therefore, reinforcing a rigid gendered division of labour. But somehow that also means that there is a recognition of women’s roles as mothers and carers, and this offers a resolution or at least a mitigation of the conflict between family and professional activities – because women’s labour is seemingly valued in a way that it was not under previous regimes. Might this be an important reason for the right-wing popular parties’ success among female voters? On one hand, in the 2018 parliamentary elections in Hungary, a majority of women voted for the Fidesz-KNPD coalition led by Orbán (Grzebalska and Kovats, 2018), while young, poorer Polish women still preferred Law and Justice despite their otherwise progressive views on various issues, including their positive attitude towards the EU (Pacewicz, 2018). On the other, the results of the most recent elections in Poland (October, 2019) show important gender divisions: if support for both of the radical right-wing parties is taken together (Law and Justice and the new party ‘Confederation’), they are slightly more popular among men (Danielewski and Ambroziak, 2019). Most recent survey on voting preferences shows even bigger disparities in the case of young voters: while 66.6 percent of men aged 18–25 would vote for the right-wing parties, the same indicator for young women is 36.6 percent and, overall, the most preferred political option for young women is the Left (26%) (Pacewicz, 2019).

Although the nationalist symbols and anti-gender rhetoric remain the ‘cultural arm’ of right-wing populists, they have also been met with a counterreaction, often by feminist activists. For example, we have seen the recent wave of pro-choice mobilization in Poland under the umbrella of ‘Black Protests’, when thousands of women went on strike in protest against a complete abortion ban in 2016 and again, in 2018. It represented the biggest act of social protest in Poland since 1989. Instead of simply denying the historical symbolism of the populist right wing, the protesters were using ‘patriotic’ slogans, such as: ‘Poland is a Woman’ and ‘Poland for women, women for Poland’; they held posters with the sign ‘Solidarity’, but this time with a picture of a woman replacing Gary Cooper (Graff, 2019). Apart from claiming the symbols of ‘Solidarity’, Polish feminists referred to ‘independence’ when arguing for the liberalization of abortion law: they drew a parallel between the fight for independence of the Polish state and the fight of Polish women for independent decisions with regard to their bodies (Graff, 2019).

Despite the fact that this ‘women’s rebellion’ and their claiming of patriotic symbols did not take place to the same extent in other countries of the region, it is likely that the ideas and discourses employed by right-wing politicians are also going to be contested and repurposed by women elsewhere. The wave of protests in Hungary that took place in December 2018 that were aimed against a new labour law (labelled a ‘slave law’), which significantly worsened workers’ position in relation to employers, was primarily led by female politicians as the most visible members of the crowds gathered in front of the Hungarian parliament. Will this new mobilization of women threaten the ‘Hungarian political culture of men in suits’ (Barry, 2019)? Hopes could be raised by the example of Slovakia, where Zuzana Čaputová was elected as the first female Slovakian President ever, in 2019. And when the aggressive attacks of Čaputová’s right-wing (male) counter-candidates warned the Slovaks that her pro-LGBTQ stance and her attachment to environmental protection and equality were ‘against our traditional Christian values’, this only brought them defeat. Perhaps when women present their own counter-vision of solidarity and independence, any new projects of resistance might become a meaningful political challenge to the current triumph of right-wing populism.