Cologne, Germany. New Year’s Eve 2015. Several dozen women are sexually assaulted, robbed and intimidated by a crowd of men of Arab and North African origin. Investigations reveal that among the accused are several refugees who entered the country through Angela Merkel’s open-door policy. The episode caused a wave of anger and forced the government to tighten its asylum rules, an action on which extreme right-wing parties across Europe capitalized to justify their rejection of immigrants, who had become the scapegoats of sexism and violence against women on the continent.
A decade later, the consequences of that event are still reverberating in European politics. Now that extremist formations are gaining more support and, therefore, more power (they already make up six governments in the EU), the strategy of instrumentalizing feminism to promote their xenophobic policies is already spreading in countries such as France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. This phenomenon is known as femonationalism, a term developed by Italian sociologist Sara R. Farris in the book In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (2017). The concept has since evolved, Farris explains, as far-right parties are “getting smarter and smarter.”
“[The far-right] understands very well that women’s empowerment is an issue that is there to stay and that from that battle there is no turning back from this battle. And by accepting this, they are trying to present themselves as more modern and moderate parties that defend our rights,” said the professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, via video call.
There are many examples. In Spain, Vox says it will not be “complicit in the robberies, the machete attacks, or the rapes” that the distribution of unaccompanied minors arriving in the Canary Islands would, in the formation’s view, entail. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni came to power in 2022 with a campaign focused on the rejection of immigrants, during which she shared a video of the rape of a woman by an asylum seeker. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) spread the Great Replacement theory and proposed encouraging higher birth rates among German women.
