Democratic backsliding in the European Union, connected to the rise of radical right populist and anti-gender opposition, challenges gender equality and intersectionality, calling for institutional responses to promote the quality of democracy and equality. The European Parliament (EP) has become the centre of political struggles around equality and democracy in the last decade, with a 30 percent rise in the representation of anti-gender actors in the EP’s 2019-2024 legislature(Zacharenko 2020) and challenges to the rule of law, gender and human rights occurring in several member states. The objective of this paper is to research what feminist responses are articulated in the European Parliament to counteract anti-democratic and anti-gender opposition. The paper draws on theories of democracy that consider democratic backsliding not only a question of challenges to the rule of law, but of the quality of deliberation (Gora and De Wilde 2020), and that stress the inclusion and participation of non-hegemonic subjectivities (Young 1990; Fraser 1990), and agonistic rather than antagonistic debates (Mouffe 1999; 2005) as crucial for the quality of democracy and equality. This leads us to focus the analysis on feminist institutional responses in the EP -both discourses and practices- that a) create links for cooperating with feminist and civil society organisations that actively promote gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity equality, and b) enact inclusive and participatory democratic practices in the debates, particularly in relation to women and underprivileged subjects. We argue that EP institutional responses that strengthen agonistic deliberation through inclusive gender and intersectionality practices and cooperation with civil society that is on the frontline of anti-gender and anti-democratic opposition is crucial for improving the quality of democracy and equality in the parliament. The analysis will be based on the last two legislatures of the European Parliament (2014-2019 and 2019-2024), in which the institution has experimented a rise of anti-gender radical right populist actors. Material will consist of content analysis of interviews with MEPs and staff and of EP plenary debates on the rule of law and on gender equality, sexuality, and race/ethnicity over the selected period.
