How progressive is ‘progressive’? Sexual orientation debates in the 2024 Romanian parliamentary elections

The 2024 parliamentary elections in Romania reconfigured the party system, expanding the number of right-wing populist and extremist actors, and consolidating support for their main representative, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). In this context, the purpose of this article is to look at where political voices advocating rights based in sexual orientation might come from, how strong they are and how they articulate the issue in terms of their electoral offer. The key argument advanced here is that – despite the prominence of public debates on the issue of LGBTQ+ rights, which highlighted a cleavage between those regarded as progressive on the one hand and socially conservative and traditionalist actors on the other – a pro-LGBTQ+ agenda was not very salient as reflected by party positionings on the issue. Moreover, those progressive parties who promoted such an agenda were unsuccessful, failing to come anywhere close to obtaining parliamentary representation. By contrast, mainstream and radical rights retrogressive parties, who now share an overwhelmingly large number of seats in the parliament, managed to undermine, weaponize, and de-legitimise the term ‘progressive’ and pushed even further back the chances for any meaningful reform relating to LGBTQ+ rights in Romania. While exploratory in nature, the article uses the Romanian case as an illustration for further potential research of the mutually reinforcing nature of current retrogressive mobilisation, drawing on inter-imperiality as a conceptual key.