Transnational Sisterhood on the Far Right? Appropriating Feminism Across Europe

While femonationalism has been a growing trend at the level of elite and party politics over the past decade (Farris 2017, Scrinzi 2023), it increasingly manifests at the level of social movement activism, with emerging women-only formations (Della Sudda 2022). Over the past five years, Europe has witnessed the rise of far-right women-led collectives that mobilise in the name of women, suggesting that beyond the strategic instrumentalisation of feminist rhetorics lies a deeper and growing appropriation of feminism at the far right (Calderaro 2025). This article analyses the emergence of women-only far-right collectives in Europe as a transnational appropriation of feminism. Drawing on qualitative case studies of Némésis (France and Switzerland), Coordinamento DAria (Italy) and the Women’s Safety Initiative (United Kingdom), it examines how young women activists on the far right construct a transnational collective identity through the appropriation of feminist causes. The analysis combines semi-structured interviews with members of Némésis, long-term digital observation of the three collectives and analysis of their discourses and online practices. I identify three main mechanisms through which the transnationalisation of far-right women’s activism unfolds, encompassing both coordinated efforts and more diffuse processes of alignment. Far-right women deploy efforts to build a transnational far-right women’s movement first through organisational expansion, as exemplified with the export of the French collective Némésis to French-speaking Switzerland, and second through coalition building, which takes both material and symbolic forms. Third, and more counter-intuitively, transnationalisation also operates through non-coordinated frame alignment, with the three collectives reproducing strikingly similar frames. Three stand out across contexts: the women’s safety frame, which racialises street harassment and violence; the “real woman” frame, which reasserts essentialist and hegemonic femininity, and the postfeminist frame, which rejects feminist approaches in terms of structural gender inequalities. Together, these mechanisms articulate a transnational narrative of “endangered European womanhood” within a shared ideological project. This phenomenon signals a shift in far-right gender politics, from a top-down co-optation of feminist discourse by far-right parties to a more bottom-up appropriation of feminism enacted by young activists, contributing to our understanding of how femonationalism unfolds transnationally.