The Hate Review

Country Group: Nascent mobilisation

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 1.55 / 4  ·  Impact 1.55 / 4

The trajectory of anti-gender activity in Montenegro over the past two decades is one of slow structural embedding rather than acute mobilisation. Opposition to the rights of LGBTIQ+ people has operated primarily through existing religious and political institutions — the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate and successive pro-Serbian parliamentary formations — without generating purpose-built anti-gender organisations or dedicated campaigns. The mass conservative mobilisations of 2019–2020 framed around church property proved pivotal: they installed political actors who have since functioned as a permanent veto on equality policy. Anti-gender positions are now embedded in the governing coalition’s arithmetic rather than expressed through street campaigns, and Montenegro is experiencing a quiet but steady drift: stagnation in law and policy, with the structural conditions for a more organised movement gradually forming.