Our study provides a critical analysis of the debates in the two chambers of the Romanian parliament on the necessity of a “referendum for family.” These debates took place between 2015 and 2018, thus spanning two parliamentary mandates (2012–2016; 2016– 2020).
This analysis contributes both empirically and theoretically to the field. Empirically, by examining the Romanian context, it provides nuance to similar analyses in other Eastern European contexts, such as Croatia (Vučković Juroš, Dobrotić, and Flego 2020; Slootmaeckers and Sircar 2018), Czechia and Slovakia (Guasti and Bustikova 2020), Slovakia (Mos 2020), and Slovenia (Kuhar 2017). Focusing on the parliamentary debates on the topic that took place in both chambers between 2015 and 2018, it also makes an empirical contribution to the handful of scholarly analyses of the 2018 referendum in Romania, which examined either the various factors behind the failure to mobilize voters (Gherghina et al. 2019; Stănescu 2020), the adaptive strategies and tactics of LGBT+ organizations and the oppositional retrogressive mobilization engaged in the plebiscite (Mărgărit 2019), or the relationship between religion and party politics (Soare and Tufiş 2021). Theoretically, by employing the concept of retrogressive mobilization (Bouvart, De Proost, and Norocel 2019) in plebiscitary circumstances, it contributes to scholarship on anti-gender politics (Kováts and Põim 2015; Panternotte and Kuhar 2017; Verloo 2018). The concept enables us to show how Members of Parliament (MPs) from across the political spectrum in Romania, both from the conservative-liberal PNL and other right-leaning parties, as well as from the nominally left-leaning PSD and even independent MPs, provided discursive consistency to a promised beatific narrative scenario, in which the Orthodox Romanian heteronormative family would be confirmed in its hegemonic position in Romanian society, once the referendum had been successful. The discursive alternative was a doomsday narrative scenario, in which marriage equality was an omen of the imminent dissolution of Romanian society.
