Gender and the Far Right: How Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Hides in Gender-Skeptic Discourse

Today’s far-right parties across Europe have swapped skinhead boots for suits and slogans about race for discussions on “family values.” By attacking feminism and LGBTQA+ rights, they make use of widespread biases while hiding more extreme views. This new image, wrapped in tradition and respectability, allows racism and xenophobia to stealthily creep into mainstream rhetoric, normalizing it for a wider audience.

Over the past 20 years, European far-right parties have worked intensely on rebranding themselves. They reject now, at least officially, overtly racist or fascist labels and strategically deploy populist euphemisms to describe their political programs. The German “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) is “against the elites.” The former French “Front National” has softened its name to the “Rassemblement National” in 2018, and the Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS) and the Romanian Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) call themselves “sovereign” and “euro-skeptic.”

Anti-Feminism as a Far-Right Bridge Ideology

They have also cast off their historical uniforms and visual incarnations. A German neo-fascist sympathizer, for instance, today no longer shaves his head, wears combat boots and a bomber jacket with the number “88.” The new far-right portrays itself as middle-class in appearance, professional, and even sometimes, cosmopolitan. This image is linked to the voters they are trying to reach: the political moderates, the undecided, and not least, the middle class. In an attempt to appear more palatable to these groups, many far-right parties have been especially careful to distance themselves from racism and antisemitism, labels that many Europeans do not want to identify with.

They have instead embraced a more widespread form of bigotry: anti-feminist and anti-LGBTIQA+ stances. In Germany, for instance, anti-feminist views are estimated at 25% of the overall population, whereas anti-trans positions are even more widespread at 37% (Kalkstein, Pickel, and Niendorf 2024). These numbers increase further when you factor in more general sexist attitudes, like the belief that men are naturally superior and belong at the top of a traditional heteronormative gender hierarchy. And importantly, these views show up across the political spectrum. Additionally, they are often coupled with a preference for traditional gender and parenting roles, which are also viewed as natural. Ultimately, this means that sexism and anti-feminism work as important bridge ideologies into far-right paradigms (Kalkstein et al. 2022).

Other authors have also spoken about anti-gender and anti-feminist stances acting as a kind of symbolic glue (Kovatsa and Poim 2015) within the far-right scene, uniting disparate factions and providing enough common ground to permit the transmission or exacerbation of other forms of bigotry: islamophobia, anti-migrant sentiments, and racist attitudes. However, the processes through which this contagion happens need further research.

Family Values Versus Gender Ideology 

A related term that has gained popularity among European far-right parties in recent years is that of the so-called gender ideology, a very wide umbrella term, deployed differently depending on national context. However, its common denominator is the denial of socially constructed gender identity and roles, in favor of biological sex and the essentialist roles that emerge from it. This focus on biological sex over gender also excludes the possibility of ambiguity in gender identification and gives ammunition to deny the existence of trans- or non-binary individuals. Crucially, the term has deeply populist connotations as it juxtaposes “innocent, gender-conservative people against corrupt, immoral elites” (Graff and Korolczuk 2022), or in other words: family values versus gender ideology.

Indeed, it is through this ideological framework that the far-right has managed to stylize itself increasingly into defenders of the European family, against others: LGBTQIA+, feminists, healthcare providers who offer abortion services, etc. I argue that it is precisely this strategic political positioning that has allowed them to whitewash anti-migrant and racist attitudes, and diminish the stigma associated with them within society.

Family, Motherhood, and the Fear of Replacement: How the Far Right Rebrands Racism Through Gender Norms

The connection between traditional gender and parental roles, reproductive health, and racism or ethnocentrism is not new. Theories of the Great Replacement of White, Christian Europeans by others have been around for decades and are deeply rooted in reproductive racism. This is the idea that certain groups of people should be allowed and encouraged to reproduce, whereas others’ reproductive rights should be limited (Indelicato and Magalhães Lopes 2024). Through their positioning as protectors of the traditional, heteronormative family, far-right parties have achieved a dangerous normalization of these theories.

In this context, the German AfD is an interesting example of a far-right party that carefully weaves racist and eugenic ideology with the rhetoric of defense of family values, in an attempt to position itself as conservative, but not extremist. For a long time, this strategy was successful, allowing them to attract sympathizers from the middle classes through their official political messaging, which focused on family issues, while being more explicitly racist, anti-immigration, and Islamophobic in their public presentation and social media posts (Heinemann 2022).

This double-speak is similar to the strategies deployed by Central and Eastern European far-right parties, in recent presidential elections. In the run-up to the first round of the Romanian presidential elections, annulled by the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) in December 2024, the extreme right independent candidate Călin Georgescu frequently referred to issues of family values and reproductive health, for example, espousing physiological i.e., natural birth as “divine,” in interviews.

A similar pattern appeared in the campaign of the far-right presidential candidate, running for AUR in Romania, George Simion, who often spoke about Romanian families being under attack by ominous, unnamed forces. In both of these candidates’ cases, the racist, anti-minority, anti-European, and anti-gender rhetoric was usually not addressed directly, but commented upon afterward, online, on social media, or in blog posts.

As self-proclaimed defenders of the European traditional family, far-right parties are thus working to create a long list of others as enemies, merging anti-immigrant and anti-gender rhetoric, intending to legitimize the discrimination and marginalization of these groups. As researchers, we need to stay alert to the conflation of these topics and begin to systematically unpack the gender dimensions of anti-immigrant rhetoric and the racist, anti-immigrant dimensions of anti-gender politics.

Irina Radu is a research associate at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Institute of  Midwifery and Reproductive Health and the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies (SFM).

References:

–Graff, Agnieszka, and Elżbieta Korolczuk. 2022. Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Taylor & Francis.
–Heinemann, Isabel. 2022. “Volk and Family: National Socialist Legacies and Gender Concepts in the Rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany.” Journal of Modern European History 20(3):371–88.
–Indelicato, Maria Elena, and Maíra Magalhães Lopes. 2024. “Understanding Populist Far-Right Anti-Immigration and Anti-Gender Stances beyond the Paradigm of Gender as ‘a Symbolic Glue’: Giorgia Meloni’s Modern Motherhood, Neo-Catholicism, and Reproductive Racism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 31(1):6–20.
–Kalkstein, Fiona, Gert Pickel, and Johanna Niendorf. 2024. “5. Antifeminismus und Antisemitismus – eine autoritär motivierte Verbindung?” Pp. 161–80 in Vereint im Ressentiment, edited by O. Decker, J. Kiess, A. Heller, and E. Brähler. Psychosozial-Verlag.
–Kalkstein, Fiona, Gert Pickel, Johanna Niendorf, Charlotte Höcker, and Oliver Decker. 2022. “8. Antifeminismus Und Geschlechterdemokratie.” Pp. 245–70 in Autoritäre Dynamiken in unsicheren Zeiten, edited by O. Decker, J. Kiess, A. Heller, and E. Brähler. Psychosozial-Verlag.
–Kovats, Eszter and Poim, Maari. 2015. “Gender as symbolic glue. The position and role of conservative and far right parties in the anti-gender mobilizations in Europe”, FEPS – Foundation for European Progressive Studies.