The Hate Review

Country Group: Moderate dual entrenchment

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 3.00 / 4  ·  Impact 2.33 / 4

North Macedonia’s anti-gender movement as it exists today is a phenomenon of the 2020s, but it did not emerge from a vacuum. Before 2021, anti-LGBTIQ+ positions were held by traditional institutional actors — the Macedonian Orthodox Church and the conservative party VMRO-DPMNE — within their established roles. What changed from 2021 onward was the emergence of entirely new civil society actors, brought together with those institutions under a single coordinating structure, and a decisive shift in narrative register from moral condemnation to the “gender ideology” frame with its child protection language and transnational toolkit. This transformation was not organic but the result of coordinated action by pro-Russian and other international actors on terrain made fertile by enlargement fatigue and economic grievance. With the return to power of VMRO-DPMNE in 2024, the dynamic has shifted from blocking progress to actively reversing existing protections.