The Digital Cordon Sanitaire: Christian Democratic Responses to Transnational Anti-Feminist Mobilisation in the Brosius-Gersdorf Affair

Anti-feminist mobilisation is increasingly transnational and digitally mediated, but we know less about how such mobilisation is taken up by mainstream actors in national political arenas. This article introduces the concept of the digital cordon sanitaire to analyse how formal non-cooperation with the far right is enacted, weakened or defended in individual MPs’ public social media communication. It examines CDU/CSU MPs’ responses to abortion-centred anti-feminist mobilisation during the Brosius-Gersdorf affair, a controversy surrounding a nomination to the German Federal Constitutional Court that centred on abortion. The analysis is based on the public communication of all 208 CDU/CSU MPs in the 20th Bundestag on X, Facebook and Instagram. I screened approximately 600 posts, reposts and replies across 203 Facebook accounts, 207 Instagram accounts and 105 X accounts, and analysed a case-specific corpus of 119 posts through qualitative multimodal discourse analysis. The findings identify six response patterns: ignore, reject, adopt, justify, sanction and downplay. The article argues that the digital cordon sanitaire was enacted unevenly. Many MPs ignored the controversy. A smaller group adopted anti-feminist campaign frames and claims. Rejection emerged as a limited counter-pattern, while sanctioning of conduct that weakened the boundary remained marginal. Several MPs justified contested conduct through references to conscience, human dignity, constitutional responsibility or Christian-democratic values. Others downplayed criticism of alleged boundary violations by presenting it as partisan exaggeration, ideological pressure or restriction of conservative speech. The article contributes to research on anti-feminist mobilisation, cordon sanitaire politics, mainstreaming and political communication by showing how formal non-cooperation can coexist with discursive congruence, communicative uptake and public justification of transnationally circulating anti-feminist campaign frames.