Political competition has become increasingly focused around a cultural cleavage, dividing green, alternative, and libertarian (GAL) positions from traditionalist, authoritarian, and nationalist (TAN) stances. Scholarship so far has treated the set of issues within the GAL-TAN dimension as a cohesive whole, overlooking potential cross-national variation and relying on an implicit assumption of equivalence. Addressing this assumption, this paper investigates how the specific issues that citizens bundle together to form this cleavage diverge across countries. I argue that elite polarization and far-right issue entrepreneurship influence which issues citizens incorporate into the cultural cleavage. Focusing on two issues, namely LGBTQ rights and climate change, this study uses multilevel confirmatory factor analysis to analyze how dynamics of party competition shape citizens’ embedding of these issues into the cultural dimension across 31 European countries. The findings reveal that in countries where parties are more polarized along LGBTQ rights, citizens’ attitudes towards LGBTQ are more strongly linked to their views on immigration and European integration. Conversely, in contexts of little party polarization over LGBTQ rights, citizens do not link this issue to other cultural issues. Moreover, where far-right parties take more extreme positions on climate change, citizens more strongly connect their attitudes towards climate to other cultural concerns, while this pattern is not observed where the far-right takes more a centrist position. These results challenge the assumption of a uniform cultural cleavage across Europe and highlight the role of party competition in shaping issue-bundling among citizens.