The first von der Leyen Commission’s response to anti-gender politics in the EU: A successful feminist institutional response?

Abstract

Presenter: Lucrecia Rubio Grundell MSCA-COFUND-UNA4CAREER Fellow, Dept. Ciencia Política y de la Administración Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Abstract: In the last fifteen years, the European Union has witnessed an exponential increase in opposition to gender equality and LGBT rights, both at national and supranational levels. However, EU institutions have only recently started to regard such opposition as a threat and to respond accordingly. The first von der Leyen Commission took unprecedented action in this regard, exceeding the rhetorical focus of its predecessors. Indeed, it mobilised a comprehensive set of institutional strategies to defend equality and democracy, including discourse and symbolic representation, institution-building and rule-making, rule-enforcement, and inter-institutional coalition-building. In contrast, the second von Der Leyen Commission shows clear signs of backsliding in all these domains. In this article, we analyse the feminist institutional strategies adopted by the first VDL EC to counter anti-gender politics in Europe, assess their success, and identify the main factors that contribute to it. We draw on feminist literature on the rise of anti-gender opposition and feminist responses at EU level and develop a qualitative content analysis of policy documents, including European Parliament reports, resolutions, plenary debates, Commission communications, strategies, press releases, and infringement decisions, and twenty-six semi-structured interviews conducted between September and December 2023 with members of the VDL Commission, the European Parliament, and EU-level pro-equality organisations. Our analysis shows that feminist institutional responses are most successful when the defence of equality and democracy as EU values is paired with the recognition of enforceable rights, strong rule-making and enforcement, substantive rather than procedural understandings of democracy, and an intersectional approach.