“We will stop these fascists with rights!”: feminist democratic responses to far-right, anti-gender opposition in Parliament

The rise of the far right across Europe in the last decades has made the legacy of fascism in today’s liberal democracies particularly visible. Far right anti-gender parties tend to evoke symbols and employ knowledge and ideas that echo fascist discourses and mobilization of violent passions that, beyond the historical past experiences, show signs of what Umberto Eco (1997) has named ‘eternal fascism’. Features of the latter include traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, sexism, racism, hyper-nationalism, anti-communism, conspiracy and xenophobia, anti-parliamentarism, cult of violence and war, and basic-poor language that limits critical and complex reasoning. Feminist institutional responses to far-right active opposition against gender/LGBTI/race equality in parliament defend democracy through a variety of strategies, including antifascist discourses. With the aim of understanding the role the fascist legacy plays in struggles around democracy in parliamentary institutions, we ask: How does ‘eternal fascism’ manifest in the far-right parties’ opposition against gender/LGBTI/race equality in parliament? How do feminist parliamentary responses to far-right, anti-gender opposition frame and strategically use the concept of ‘fascism’? And what factors enable parliaments’ articulation of antifascist democratic responses to the far right? We argue that understanding -from a feminist perspective- the meanings of fascism and antifascism articulated in parliamentary disputes, as well as the contextual factors that make feminist antifascist responses possible is crucial for making a diagnosis of overlooked problems with liberal democracy that make it vulnerable to anti-gender antidemocratic forces. We address these questions through a multilevel comparison between the Spanish parliament (2019-2023) and the Catalan parliament (2021-2023) conducted via content analysis of parliamentary debates and semi-structured interviews, developed as part of the Horizon-Europe CCINDLE research project.