Activism after EU Leverage
This chapter completes the close comparison of Poland and the Czech Republic. In 2004, both became EU members, a change that weakened transnational leverage and reshaped the political opportunity structure such that the costs of repressing LGBT-rights movements fell. In Poland, this shift led to an immediate increase in direct and indirect repression under a newly elected hard-right government. Over the longer term, however, this backlash reinforced solidarity, prevented internal framing contests, and helped win movement allies. The chapter focuses in particular on how Polish activism became electorally mobilized through an alliance with the political party Your Movement. The Czech Republic, where the hard right remained irrelevant, saw no such backlash; nor, however, did the Czech movement reap backlash’s benefits. Instead, it continued the demobilizing and deinstitutionalizing trends described in the previous chapter.