The Hate Review

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 3.00 / 4  ·  Impact 3.00 / 4

The trajectory of anti-gender activity in Bulgaria has been one of escalating mainstreaming, with the decisive rupture coming in 2018. Before that year, opposition was largely confined to nationalist parties and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church mobilising around Pride events. The Istanbul Convention ratification debate transformed “gender” into a political slur and produced the largest anti-gender mobilisation in Bulgarian history; the 2019 “Norwegian model” disinformation campaign subsequently blocked the National Child Strategy. Through the early 2020s, anti-gender actors pursued judicial entrenchment, progressively closing legal pathways for gender recognition through successive constitutional and Supreme Court rulings. Alongside this, four successive foreign agents bills and repeated attempts to restrict gender-related content in education — culminating in the 2024 school propaganda law — reflect a sustained effort to institutionalise anti-gender norms. The defining feature of the Bulgarian case remains the extent to which this agenda has been mainstreamed across the political spectrum, enabling anti-gender legislation to pass with broad cross-party support.