The Hate Review

Country Group: Advanced entrenchment

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 3.00 / 4  ·  Impact 2.78 / 4

Over the past twenty-five years, anti-gender activity in Romania has followed a trajectory of steady escalation and progressive mainstreaming. Beginning with church-led resistance to decriminalisation in the 1990s, the movement built its first mass infrastructure through the Coalition for Family’s constitutional campaign, culminating in the failed 2018 referendum. The entry of AUR into Parliament in 2020 brought anti-gender narratives into the political mainstream, and the 2024 presidential campaign of Călin Georgescu — whose anti-gender, sovereigntist and conspiratorial messaging reached millions through coordinated social media amplification — marked the movement’s integration into the broadest currents of Romanian populist politics. The trajectory of the country is one of deepening entrenchment, not episodic backlash.