Feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in the European Parliament

Often presented as a champion of gender equality, the European Parliament (EP) is also a political institution where radical right populist actors have a strong presence and where the expressions of anti-gender politics thrive. This paper’s aims to, first, spell out the specificities of anti-gender politics in the EP context (before the 2024 elections) and, second, to outline the feminist institutional responses to such politics. Drawing on previous literature, we describe the core strategies that anti-gender actors use at the EP level to block and alter gender equality policies. We show that despite some successes, anti-gender politics do not dominate, and ambitious gendered policies are still put forward in the EP (Berthet 2022a, Berthet 2022b). Notably, strong and established feminist alliances – especially in the specialized FEMM Committee on women’s rights and gender equality – protect gender equality policies (Elomäki and Kantola 2023) and react to anti-gender politics with formal and informal institutional strategies. In the specific supranational context that the EP represents, we assess the institutional opportunities that enable anti-gender politics to thrive. Although Eurosceptics, these actors turn their presence in the EP as strategies to undermine gender equality policies from within. Whilst anti-gender, they sign up for additional responsibilities in the FEMM Committee and import a range of formal and informal strategies to alter the Committee’s objectives. With the use of legal expertise, ‘blue cards’, alliances with uncivil societies through funding, expertise and lobbying tactics, they fashioned FEMM into a place where anti-gender politics and feminist institutional responses meet. Our material consists of interviews with parliamentary actors involved with gender equality issues in the EP and parliamentary debates on issues of violence against women, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and LGBTQI+ rights. Our qualitative study sheds light on the feminist strategies and responses in the EP to anti-gender attacks and substantiate four strategies previously identified in the same context (Kantola and Lombardo forthcoming). This new data enables us to identify a new strategy – democratic engagement – which highlights the inclusion of anti-gender actors into the democratic process of decision-making and stresses their limits.