Playground Politics

A party collapses not from ideas, but from fear

As I face expulsion from my party, the Austrian Greens, it’s time to talk about how a political movement destroys itself. As with so many institutions and spaces, it became not just normal, but mandatory, to surrender every ounce of integrity to fantasy beliefs and peer pressure. Rarely was this the result of grand strategy. More often, it took just one trans-identified man (or the spectre of one), a few malicious “allies,” and a flock too cowardly or incompetent to resist.

On stage at the final major demo before the 2019 election — against right-wing extremism and fascism — just before entering Parliament with the Greens.

Yes, there are many unhinged men who seize every opportunity to bully, harass, and vilify the women who say no to them—weaponising anything at hand, from calls for kindness to pages ripped from queer-feminist theory. But it is the seemingly reasonable, competent, accomplished leaders—no longer able to say what a woman is—who are jeopardising their movements by letting them collapse under the weight of this madness, exposing their most authoritarian selves.

In my case—as with many—the pattern has been playing out for years.

I was shouted at, maligned behind my back, ridiculed, and isolated—for saying that biological women and trans women are not the same. My reputation was dismantled. Accused of aligning with the far right. Lectured about feminism by party leaders who self-identify as feminists. Staff were instructed to compile dossiers on events I had attended, and explain why they were supposedly “fascist.” (Case in point: LGB Alliance and Kellie-Jay Keen’s Let Women Speak.) Screenshots were circulated at internal meetings to “contextualise” media outlets I had written for as part of a “fascist continuity.”

Of course they did not suddenly find a fascist in their midst. They knew who I was. They had known me for years. They knew that fighting the far right, extremism, and discrimination had been the core of my political work for three decades. That I had put myself on the line—for women, for migrants, for refugees—when many of them chose silence. This is who I am. This is what got me elected in the first place. It was what I promised to do with my mandate. And I did. But there is a class that does not act out of politics, but performance. When outrage was required, they performed—then made sure everyone else did too. The most basic script of authoritarian groupthink.

The same colleagues would later ask—with pseudo-concern—whether I was doing alright. Whether I’d lost weight. That I didn’t look well. Sandwich in hand. Glass of prosecco raised. After all, what they had done was only their professional duty. Nothing personal. It was all in the name of collegial responsibility. And party rationale.

As news of my impending expulsion spreads, some expressed shock, others guilt—over their prolonged silence. The well-meaning ones still advise me to use “correct” pronouns. When I explain that I no longer take part in collective roleplay, nor accept punishment for wrongthink, the response is the same: silence. Predictable, by now.

There was silence in 2022, when high-ranking party members signed an Open Letter against me. It passed with little more than a shrug. I heard nothing in 2023, when the same trans-identified man now seeking my expulsion posted a photo of my parliamentary seat with the caption: “First important step completed… Faika’s seat in the National Council taken.” The post was picked up by a journalist and viewed over 300,000 times. A grotesque, public appropriation of a political mandate—met with silence, as if it were nothing unusual.

When I stood for election before the Green Assembly in April 2024, I was questioned about allegedly supporting a “hate and extremist group”: the LGB Alliance. The front rows welcomed the spectacle.

At a recent Assembly, I was attacked again by the same trans-identified man—by then a board member of the women’s group—who stood on stage and called me and another woman from the Greens “inhumane” and “disgusting.” The audience applauded. The presidium remained silent. And just in time for International Women’s Day, the Green student organisation published a series of social media slides urging people to “keep your environment clean—TERFs included.” They named me and my Green colleague directly. The message was clear: we were to be swept out. Keep the party clean. The party did nothing—again.

I’m not even counting the threats and slander that came from party members, affiliates, NGOs, and assorted concerned individuals. Not once was I backed by my party—or by colleagues who, at best, advised me to tone it down and drop it.

Every organisation can survive an unguided missile or two—most have them. But it is negligent and irresponsible to sit back and watch as they tear through the shared project—attacking women and turning the party’s mission into wreckage. Those in the driver’s seat are “experts.” In everything from traffic management to climate change, urban planning to social work, law, engineering, public administration, education—and, of course, gender studies. Some are even biologists. They form a technocratic class cloaked in moral vanity. None of this makes them smart or good people. In the context of a political movement, this isn’t just demoralising. It’s self-sabotage dressed up as virtue. The Greens have been leading the charge in undermining the very force they once hoped to become. (Though the Social Democrats and Liberals are catching up fast.) When it comes to the trans issue—the Faustian Gretchenfrage of our time—they behave like toddlers: pretend you had nothing to do with the mess. Pretend it isn’t your job to clean it up. Pretend that if you ignore it long enough, it will simply go away.

One of the charming things about toddlers is their disregard for time: yesterday, today, and tomorrow blur into a single playground of non-responsibility, punctuated only by naps. Politicians are not much different. Their calendar is split into the time before elections, between elections, and after elections. In that circularity, responsibility vanishes.

I do not believe my soon-to-be-former colleagues (because one way or another, this will end) genuinely reject the evidence before their eyes. Nor do I believe they are toddlers. They’re adults playing dodgeball with reality. Once you strip away titles and credentials, what remains are the same playground personalities you’ve spent your life avoiding—wrapped in institutional power, intellectual incapacity, and moral laziness.

Twelve years ago, I joined the Greens. For ten of those years, I held a political mandate—most recently serving five years as a Member of Parliament. During this time, my trajectory went from poster girl to pariah. Today, the relationship feels less like political engagement and more like institutional abuse. It has happened to me, as it has to other women before me, and elsewhere. And it deserves daylight.

They say to keep a journal to process grief. Consider this mine. I am done grieving. One question remains for the Greens to confront and settle, now and for good: Will they stand up for women’s rights? Or will it be playground politics once again—driven by cowardice, incompetence, and political sabotage?