LOn August 7, the Bulgarian Parliament adopted by a large majority an amendment tabled by the far-right Vazrajdane (Renaissance) party, a pro-Russian party. This makes it illegal to distribute to minors “non-traditional sexual orientations” and gender identity “different from biological”Despite the request for a presidential veto by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, the amendment will enter into force.
After Lithuania in 2014, Hungary in 2021 and failed attempts in Romania (2020 and 2022), Bulgaria is the third country in the European Union (EU) to adopt such legislation. It is a copy-paste of the Russian law imposed in 2013 by Vladimir Putin shortly after his contested re-election as president, and extended to adult citizens in 2023, in the context of the war in Ukraine.
The cultural front thus opened for a decade against sexual freedoms and gender studies in the academic field is part of Russia's strategy of destabilizing liberal democracies. This strategy is also being successfully pursued in the former backyard of Russian imperialism, from the Caucasus to Central Asia: Georgia, recently admitted to the status of candidate country for the EU, saw its Parliament adopt similar legislation at the initiative of the Georgian Dream party in June. In 2015, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan had already passed similar laws, suspended under international pressure. Legislation finally promulgated in 2023 in Kyrgyzstan and which could be adopted in Kazakhstan since a petition to this effect was launched in June by a parents' organization.
Anti-Western Agenda
Elsewhere, from the Sahel republics under the thumb of military juntas to Lebanon, where a comparable project was presented to Parliament in 2023, the Kremlin's influence is exercised through interposed relays of influence – mercenaries of the Wagner group or pro-Iranian militias. This enterprise converges, with an anti-Western agenda mixed with decolonial aspirations and with that of various religious proselytisms, to make the repression of sexual freedoms, the defense of a supposedly besieged heterosexuality and patriarchy the spearhead of an ultraconservative reconquest.
This “backlash” against decades of progress for the LGBT+ cause and gender freedoms is of course supported by various configurations even in the most established democracies, from the “Make America Great Again” movement sparked by Donald Trump in the United States to the pro-natalist and nativist obsessions of Reconquête! in France or the AfD in Germany. But it cannot be separated from its ideological matrix, nor from the tools of subversion available to the Kremlin: bot farms, pseudo-online media, campaigns orchestrated through encrypted messaging services Telegram or WhatsApp during electoral processes, loans to political parties, and since a presidential ukase dated 1er September, residence visa “ideological” offered to victims of the promotion of “satanic values” Western.
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Source: Lemonde
