lOn 7 August, the Bulgarian parliament adopted by a large majority an amendment submitted by the far-right party Vazrajdane (Renaissance), aligned with pro-Russian positions. This makes distribution to minors illegal. “non-traditional sexual orientations” and gender identity “different from organic”Despite a request for a presidential veto by the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, 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 controversial re-election to the presidency, 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 university environment is part of the strategy of destabilizing liberal democracies led by Russia. This strategy is also successfully applied in the former territory of Russian imperialism, from the Caucasus to Central Asia: Georgia, recently admitted as a candidate country to the EU, saw its Parliament adopt similar legislation on the initiative of the Georgian Dream party. in June. Already in 2015, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan had passed laws of this type, suspended under international pressure. A legislation finally enacted in 2023 in Kyrgyzstan and which could be adopted in Kazakhstan since a parents’ organization filed a petition in this regard in June.
Anti-Western Agenda
Elsewhere, from the Sahel republics under junta control to Lebanon, where a comparable project was submitted to parliament in 2023, the Kremlin’s influence is exerted through intermediary relays of influence: mercenaries from 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 defence of a supposedly besieged heterosexuality and of the patriarchy the spearhead of an ultra-conservative reconquest.
This “counteraction” against decades of progress in the LGBT+ cause and gender freedoms, of course, finds support in various configurations even in the most established democracies, from the “Make America Great Again” movement initiated by Donald Trump in the United States. The natalist and nativist obsessions of the Reconquista! 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 Telegram or WhatsApp messages during electoral processes, lists for political groups, and from a presidential election. ukase dated 1Ahem September, residence visa “ideological” offered to victims of the promotion of “satanic values” Western.
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