When the far right wins epistemic struggles: Germany’s constitutional court and reproductive rights in the age of far-right normalization

In 2025, Germany witnessed an unexpected controversy over the nomination of legal scholar Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf to the Federal Constitutional Court – an appointment that, by precedent and procedure, should have been routine parliamentary business. A respected jurist with an established record in constitutional and social law, Brosius-Gersdorf became the target of a coordinated campaign by far-right fringe media. Anti-feminist online activists and networks attacked her as an allegedly radical feminist and extremist on the issue of abortion, misrepresenting her academic record as evidence of moral unfitness for the highest judicial office in the German liberal-democratic system. What began as a niche smear in fringe outlets rapidly migrated into mainstream political discourse: within weeks, large segments of the center-right CDU/CSU bloc echoed the far right’s misogynist tropes of the jurist’s alleged bias and activism. Ultimately, they rejected her candidacy: the far right won the epistemic struggle. Through a critical discourse analysis of media and parliamentary publications from spring and summer 2025, this paper uses the Brosius-Gersdorf case to show how misogynist and anti-feminist framings of female expertise and reproduction rights infiltrate and shape mainstream politics in the age of far-right normalization. It argues that this episode exposes a broader transformation in democratic political culture, namely the far right’s growing ability to redefine epistemic legitimacy, determining what counts as credible expertise, impartial judgment, and moral authority. Anti-feminist mobilization against reproductive rights, their defenders, and powerful women more generally functioned here as mechanisms of what can be called ‘epistemic capture’, where gendered narratives of moral panic delegitimize institutional integrity and feminist movements under the guise of neutrality. Situating the case within a comparative international context, the paper concludes that reproductive politics have become a central conduit for the normalization of far-right epistemic power.