The Political Right and the Women’s Rights: An Honest Song

What does the right mean when it says it stands for women’s rights?

The text is partly based on the official programmes of the two parties of the right-wing bloc in Serbia, and this review already provides a significant part of the answer: women’s rights are found almost exclusively in the part of the programme that concerns family and social policy. When the right says women’s rights, it primarily means the rights of women as mothers, pregnant women and participants in the state’s fight against negative population growth.

Several popular measures are therefore being promised: from direct cash payments for each new-born child to tax cuts for mothers with multiple children and increased amounts paid during maternity leave. The outcome: as stated in one of the programmes, “This is the best way to take care of future generations and support biological reproduction and population growth, and to stop unfavourable demographic trends, such as negative population growth (…)”.

In and of themselves, these measures seem progressive, but the logic behind them is extremely worrying. Thus, not only does the woman become a civil servant in charge of the birth rate, but these measures also encourage her complete distancing from a professional career – the right-wing parties are offering her compensation for the regular source of income she would be giving up. The math proposed to female voters boils down to: “Why should you work eight hours a day when I can help you?”, while relief measures look more and more like gifts borne by Greeks.

If we (at least for a while) come to terms with this right-wing approach to women’s rights, we can also notice a very interesting trend in its contemporary political activity: the right has learned to live in a world of post-truth and so-called gaslighting. In that world, it has acquired excellent persuasive mechanisms that it uses, completely bypassing the facts, to explain to women who they are and what they should be striving for.

In its appearances, the right is conciliatory, even sorry for women, and these are the essential points of successful gaslighting. It exudes certainty because it knows the truth about the true feminine essence and feels sorry for the woman who has lost herself in modern society. It is also important that it always has a set of essentialist premises up its sleeve for the needs of the performance, with which it “butters” the audience: a woman is by nature mild-mannered, conciliatory, empathetic and caring. She is the pillar of the family.

This right-wing performance concludes that the fight for equality with men harms women; women should direct their above-listed qualities towards the family because the capitalist system needlessly exploits them. But right-wing politics is there to protect them, and to reform society so that the harsh labour market is left to men, who are strong and capable of dealing with it.

In the end, we should not forget that, in case the gaslighting session does not go as desired, there is always the argument that carries much weight, especially in Serbia: women’s rights and feminist efforts are a Western conspiracy against normal family and gender relations. So, if the audience completely fails to react to compliments about mild nature, right-wing politics can always draw the strongest card, which is fear – the fear of “Western” propaganda that wants to destroy us by undermining our traditions.

Written by Dragana Radusilović, intern at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy