The double (In-)Visibility of European female far-right politicians

Traditionally, the far right is strongly associated with masculinity and male actors. Besides few historical inquiries, analyzing mostly the first half of the 20th century (Jeansonne 1996; Durham 1998; Gottlieb 2001), there is a growing corpus of literature focusing on the contemporary role of women and femininity in the far right (Lehnert/Radvan 2016; Gutsche 2018; Ebner/Davey 2019; Leidig 2023). We add to this growing literature by addressing the role of transnational networks of far-right women and their instrumental use of feminist talking points and perceived gender differences while also historicizing these phenomena. Since parties are not required to disclose basic numbers on members, acquiring reliable gender data is difficult. However, a striking mismatch exists between the number of female politicians in leading positions and the share of female party members or members of parliaments in far-right parties. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, sent 24 members to the European Parliament in the 2024 election, of which 5 (20.8%) are women; in her cabinet, 7 out of 27 (26%) members are female. Alice Weidel was the AfD candidate for chancellor, yet the only female member on the AfD’s 15-person federal board, and only 2 of 16 regional chairpersons are women. This trend results in more women in far-right leadership while they are simultaneously “pigeonholed into ‘feminized’ areas in local and party politics,” leading them to “hold fewer positions of local power and occupy more marginal seats” (Murray/Sénac 2018: 329). The overrepresentation of women in leadership stems from strategies of self-trivialization and double invisibility (Lehnert/Radvan 2016). This serves multiple purposes and is facilitated by family ties and transnational political networks. An illustrative example is Reinhild Boßdorf, active in Lukreta, a so-called ‘Vorfeldorganisation’ of the German far right, which claims to defend women’s rights but is central to a femonationalist (Farris 2021) network recruiting women for the AfD while spreading anti-feminist ideas as ‘right-wing feminism.’ Simultaneously, her mother is an AfD member of the European Parliament, and her grandfather was an editor of Nouvelle École, a key publication of the ‘New Right.’ However, far-right female organizations and politicians are not a new 21st-century phenomenon. They have long been integral to the far-right movement, both in political and pre-political spheres. We aim to explore these continuities, particularly regarding their appropriation of Western feminist narratives.