Populist Politics in Czechia and Poland: A Double-Bind for Women of the Radical Right

(4) My paper focuses on the gendered and sexualised aspects of populist radical right-wing political parties (Mudde, 2007) in contemporary Poland and Czechia. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses of social media and other textual and audio-visual sources, and on one-on-one interviews with party members, I seek to understand and compare the ways in which these parties articulate and embody certain gendered and sexualised hierarchies, both in their discourses and in their acts, including their internal workings. I have done extended work on the political parties Konfederacja (Confederation) in Poland and Svoboda a přímá demokracie (Freedom and Direct Democracy) in Czechia, and I argue that they have a strong gender (and sexuality) dimension that goes beyond the political rhetoric to also express itself in the parties' representation and organisation. In line with existing scholarship insisting on the importance of the national context to explain populist radical right positions on gendered and sexualised issues (Akkerman, 2015; Spierings & Zaslove, 2015), I show how the discourses and practices of the two parties are articulated in the Czech and Polish contexts. More concretely, I expose the ways in which these discourses are intertwined with particular ideas about the nation, morality and liberty. Building on insightful feminist criticism of the ideational approach to populism (Geva, 2018), I look at populism beyond its ideological content to consider the ways in which it also constitutes a political style (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014). Doing so, I seek to expose the gendered aspects of populism that are not be articulated in a political programme, but support a particular way of doing politics that tends to limit women's possibilities. This includes the language, the tone, the dress and the mobilisation methods chosen by the populist radical right. Using the idea of hegemonic masculinity and femininity (Schippers, 2007), I argue that such style limits female party members and politicians because it submits them to a 'double bind', between the aggressive style embraced by the populist radial right politics and the need to uphold stereotypically 'feminine' heterosexual behaviour norms (Geva, 2018). Thus, my paper is an attempt to link both content and style of populism in Poland and Czechia to show that the specific rhetoric and dynamics are contingent on the local context, but always tend to reproduce and even worsen existing patterns of exclusion of women (and LGBT+ people), in society, in politics, and in the populist parties themselves.