By Stavroula Koskina
With just 4 percent of the vote, Greece’s far-right party NIKI succeeded in reshaping the national debate on LGBTQ+ rights. By mobilizing Orthodox Christianity, the party reframed same-sex marriage and adoption as existential threats to the nation, family, and faith. Through moral panic, religious symbolism, and strategic populist framing, a marginal political actor launched a powerful cultural counteroffensive, revealing how influence in populist politics often far exceeds electoral weight in moments of social change.
On February 16, 2024, Greece became the inaugural Orthodox-majority country to legalize same-sex marriageand grant same-sex couples the right to adopt children, under the right-leaning government of New Democracy and Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis. Formally, the reform marked a significant progressive triumph, supported by left-of-center parties and passed despite fierce resistance from the parliamentary right. Politically, however, it triggered something else: a symbolic rupture that far-right actors seized upon to launch a broader cultural counteroffensive. What followed was not a routine legislative dispute but an intense wave of mobilization, with protests spreading across the country and turning LGBTQ+ rights into a focal point of national and moral confrontation.
It was at this point that the Democratic Patriotic Popular Movement—better known as NIKI (meaning “Victory”)—an ultra-conservative, far-right populist party grounded in Orthodox religious rigorism, moved to the forefront of the backlash. As noted by Papastathis and others, NIKI was prominently involved in the protests and, rather than merely opposing the law, portrayed same-sex marriage as a theological emergency, a symptom of moral decline, and a betrayal of the Greek nation. This response was the commencement of a broader political campaign aimed at delegitimizing LGBTQ+ inclusion, and, more broadly, tolerance and human rights.
Now, some might ask: Why bother with a party that only received 3.7 percent of the vote? Because in populist politics—and often beyond it—influence is not proportional to votes; it is about narrative control.
NIKI functions as a conversational enhancer, amplifying themes and frames far beyond its electoral weight. Its discourse circulates through social media, places of worship, and family WhatsApp groups. In an era of algorithm-driven virality, a 4 percent faction can influence a much wider conversation. Additionally, these dynamics collectively demonstrate how religion operates as a type of symbolic power in an ongoing cultural conflict, allowing political figures to leverage moral authority that transcends their formal institutional or electoral influence.
By strategically generating moral panic, anti-gender narratives gain disproportionate traction in public discourse, reshaping political priorities and societal norms. In this context, anti-genderism is normalized via populist rhetoric, presented not as extremism but as the defense of tradition, morality, and the “people” against supposedly corrupt elites. This process serves as a litmus test for democratic resilience, revealing the ability—or inability—of democratic systems to uphold pluralism, gender equity, and minority rights under pressure. Importantly, these dynamics are not confined to Greece but form part of a larger transnational far-right network, wherein religious and populist participants are linked by a shared opposition to a perceived worldwide “woke agenda.”
But how does NIKI discursively construct LGBTQ+ rights as an existential threat? And how are morality, gender, and femininity mobilized as political weapons in this construction?
To analyze this, I draw on four key concepts that illuminate how the far right operationalizes exclusion: moral panic, Orthodox revivalism, femonationalism, and populist antagonism. Through a discourse analysis of speeches by NIKI MPs in the Greek Parliament in the three weeks leading up to and following the legislative vote, I show that NIKI deliberately deploys anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric to construct a sacred national identity set against “woke,” Western, anti-Christian, and immoral elites. In this framing, gender and sexuality shift from policy questions to ethical boundaries, where upholding tradition comes to require the rejection of queerness.
NIKI builds an ideological chain that merges LGBTQ+ rights with a “woke false religion,” same-sex marriage with “phony marriage,” LGBTQ+ advocates with a “New Age” and “globalized left,” and their families with derogatory labels such as “pedophiles” and “perverts.” Through this discursive process, core liberal ideas like “woke,” “democracy,” and “equality” are systematically stripped of their original meaning and recast as floating signifiers associated with moral decline, external imposition, and civilizational threat. At the same time, in NIKI’s rhetoric, concepts such as “tradition,” “light,” and “truth” are elevated from vacuous values to central organizing symbols within a dominant counter-discourse that unifies Orthodoxy and nationalism, placing religious legitimacy and national integrity at the center of social and political life. These rhetorical devices transform liberal principles into perceived dangers while reframing tradition, family, and God as foundational political categories.
Especially in debates surrounding child adoption by same-sex couples, with or without surrogacy, NIKI’s rhetoric constructs a stark conflict between the “unblemished” Greek Orthodox populace and a corrupt elite tied to foreign, unethical interests. This exemplifies a classic moral panic: the populist portrayal of a deviant minority (LGBTQ+ individuals) as endangering the cohesion of the imagined national community. Within this framework, the figure of the “child” functions as a fluid signifier that establishes a moral order and helps legitimize authoritarian actions.
This is where the paradox emerges. NIKI presents itself as the defender of women and children, but only as a means of excluding others, drawing on a strange form of femonationalism—the co-optation of feminist language to reinforce heteronormativity and nationalism. Religion operates here as an adhesive that binds these elements together. Orthodoxy, in this context, refers not to personal faith but to a mode of political existence. The Church appears not merely as a spiritual authority but as a source of autonomous moral and legal legitimacy, with apostolic tradition recast as a basis for political judgement. Within this logic, enacting same-sex marriage is portrayed not only as unconstitutional but as an affront to the Trinity. This is where religious populism becomes fully visible.
Nonetheless, I want to emphasize that all these elements feed into a populist illusion: the belief that granting rights to the LGBTQ+ community will inevitably lead to the downfall of the Greek nation. Understanding why this belief takes hold is key to grasping the reasoning behind NIKI’s discourse.
In NIKI’s rhetoric, same-sex marriage and adoption serve as a Trojan horse for a supposedly “fascist,” woke Western elite. The party presents itself as the last line of defense—the sole remaining guardian watching over the nation, the light set against darkness.
It is not simply a case of “anti-LGBTQ+” rhetoric but rather a constitutive populist fantasy in which political conflict is recast as an existential civilizational struggle. Through this Manichean narrative, society is divided between a morally pure Orthodox national community and a corrupt, foreign-imposed order, thereby legitimizing exclusion, moral hierarchy, and authoritarian claims to represent the authentic will of the people. Consequently, NIKI’s rhetoric produces sharp discursive polarization, pitting a “genuine Greek populace” against “globalized, immoral elites,” with gender and sexuality serving as the primary frontlines of this struggle.
Moral panic operates as a key political tactic, exaggerating LGBTQ+ rights into a dire danger to the family, faith, and the country, while displacing substantive policy debate with fear and emotional mobilization. By sacralizing national identity, Orthodox Christianity is not only invoked but also raised to a dominant framework for reinterpreting citizenship and political legitimacy, rendering LGBTQ+ identities symbolically sacrilegious. Simultaneously, NIKI engages in femonationalist manipulation, selectively adopting feminist terminology and child-safeguarding discourse not to advance equality but to reinforce heteronormativity and justify exclusion. Ultimately, the temporal clustering of discourse, as illustrated by the heatmap below, indicates that the surge in anti-gender rhetoric around critical legislative milestones is not a spontaneous reaction but part of a deliberate strategy of populist mobilization via moralized crisis narratives.
Source: Author’s own work
In summary, NIKI’s involvement in the debate on same-sex marriage should be understood not merely as a reactive ethical stance but as part of a larger initiative aimed at redrawing the boundaries of democratic inclusion. By portraying LGBTQ+ rights as a fundamental threat to the nation and to Orthodoxy, the party aids in the normalization of moral panic as a method of political control—one that converts pluralistic disagreement into civilizational strife. This strategy extends beyond cultural resistance: It validates exclusive citizenship hierarchies, reconceptualizes gender as a site of ethical oversight, and enables the politicization of religious power within democratic processes. In this sense, anti-gender politics operates not as spontaneous moral outrage but as a strategic populist repertoire through which actors with limited electoral power can claim moral authority and speak in the name of a threatened “people.”
More broadly, the Greek case illustrates how far-right religious populism in Europe increasingly functions through protective rather than overtly punitive language. Rather than relying on open repression, these movements mobilize feminist discourse, the purity of childhood, and moral concern to promote illiberal objectives. Religion, in this configuration, is deployed not only to sanctify national identity but also to anchor political claims in moralized understandings of belonging, authority, and legitimacy within democratic systems.
Gender is not a side issue. It is a frontline. And in the case of NIKI, it is the terrain where religion, nationalism, and exclusion converge to transform a marginal electoral minority into a self-styled moral majority.
Stavroula Koskina (she/her) is a researcher currently engaged in the HFRI-funded POPREU project and an external research fellow at the HEPP Hub, University of Helsinki. Born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, she is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), where she also earned an MA in Political Theory and a BA in Psychology and Islamic Studies. She has held research positions at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, and the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
