In a recent survey, Poles were asked to identify what they felt to be the biggest threats facing them in the 21st century, choosing from options such as the climate crisis, renewed aggression from Russia and a possible economic downturn.

Among men under 40, the most popular answer was “the LGBT movement and gender ideology”. The survey, conducted by Ipsos for the Polish website OKO.press, suggested that a government campaign against the nebulous concept of “LGBT ideology” was having an impact.

In Poland, and elsewhere in central Europe, there has been a notable rise in tolerance and empathy towards the LGBT community in recent years, illustrated by the emergence of a confident new generation of activists in smaller towns and cities. But across the region, populist politicians and church leaders are using the issue to mobilise their conservative bases.

On Thursday, the continent’s biggest annual gathering of LGBT activists was told that the iron curtain that once divided Europe between communist east and capitalist west remained intact for gay and transgender people, amid a rising tide of homophobic hatred, violence and discrimination.

Adéla Horáková, an advocacy director at the Czech group We Are Fair, said that 30 years after the end of communism, former eastern bloc countries still lagged behind their western European counterparts in granting fair and equal treatment to members of the LGBT community.

“The iron curtain … still stands,” Horáková said at the opening of the three-day ILGA conference in Prague. “While life for them isn’t perfect on either side of the [former] curtain, in none of the eastern European countries can they get married, in none of them can same-sex couples jointly adopt children.”

That message will resonate with activists in Poland, where senior members of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) have engaged in an increasingly ferocious campaign portraying so-called “LGBT ideology” as a menace akin to that of Soviet-imposed communism. In the run-up to parliamentary elections this month, which PiS narrowly won, the “LGBT issue” emerged as one of the main campaign grounds.

Zbigniew Nosowski, the editor-in-chief of Więź, a relatively liberal Catholic quarterly in Warsaw, said the tactic was seen to have worked in May’s European elections. “They provoked people who were usually passive in the elections to come to the polls and vote, because they perceived the threat from supposed LGBT and gender ideology with anxiety,” he said. Read more via the Guardian