It was a chastening lesson for any woman tempted to join the cut and thrust of right-wing populism. After Corinna Miazga was elected to the German parliament in 2017 for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a male colleague suggested she would be better suited to being a pole dancer than a member of parliament.
Miazga did not let it rest, getting her own back by telling a party conference of the lewd intervention by fellow lawmaker Petr Bystron.
“An ‘Argh’ went up in the audience,” she said. “No one could quite believe I’d dared to reveal this. Many people in the AfD were subsequently angry at me. They said: ‘We know you’re cross, but by bringing this into the public arena, you’ll encourage people to say we have a male-female problem in the party.’”
Illustration: Lance Liu
A surge in right-wing populism in Europe over the past 20 years has been largely male-dominated — sometimes characterized as angry white men voting for angry white men, but this is changing.
Angry white women are also emerging as an important constituency. At least half a dozen women lead right-wing, populist European parties, such as Alice Weidel of the AfD and Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy.
They follow the leads set by Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally and, before her, Pia Kjaersgaard, cofounder of the rampantly anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, and Norwegian Minister of Finance Siv Jensen, leader of the country’s similarly anti-immigration Progress Party.
A new generation of women aged 20 to 50 are in parliament or local government in countries such as Germany, France and Italy following electoral breakthroughs by right-wing populists.
Women are also taking to the streets. Far-right protests in the UK still tend to be overwhelmingly male, but in continental Europe this is changing.
At protest marches in the eastern German city of Chemnitz last year — following gatherings prompted by the stabbing of a local man, allegedly by two immigrants — the neo-Nazi Pegida group had plenty of women in the rank and file. It was similar at a rally last year of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
In France, large numbers of women have taken to the streets as part of the yellow vest anti-government movement, which has attracted people from across the political spectrum from left to far right, some of whom vote Le Pen, and whose slogans often echo the disillusioned anti-elitism of populism.
“There is evidence the gender gap is shrinking in some countries, although it clearly hasn’t disappeared everywhere,” said Eelco Harteveld of the University of Amsterdam.
This raises the question: What do women see in nationalist populism that was once so dominated by patriarchal ideology? What motivates women to elect, support and even stand for parties and movements that shrink away from modern-day feminism?
Conversations with dozens of European women — voters, lawmakers and academics — suggest several elements at play.
Many working-class women feel just as “left behind” as their male counterparts.
The key predictor of a radical-right vote is the level of a person’s education. Although the precarious manual jobs often associated with far-right voters are still largely male preserves, there is also precarious work in the service sector, where women are more numerous, Harteveld said.
Political scientists in France have pointed to the disillusionment of retail staff and supermarket cashiers as a case in point.
“The elite in power hasn’t got a clue what life is like for real people, they’re totally cut off,” said Catherine, a cashier at a budget supermarket northeast of Paris, who has demonstrated with the yellow vests.
Now in her mid-30s, she has been working at supermarket registers since she left school and has voted for Le Pen.
“We can’t make ends meet on low salaries. I’m overdrawn before the end of each month, living on credit, barely able to afford the petrol to get to work or drive my three children where they need to go. We’ve never tried Le Pen in power, so why not give her a chance?” she said.
In Italy, the far right has been particularly adept at winning over women who used to vote left.
“The left represented by the Democratic Party in recent years betrayed left-wing voters and left-wing ideals,” said Gianna Gambaccini, a neurologist who in June last year became a council member for Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right Northern League in Pisa.
However, not every female populist sympathizer is from marginalized corners of society. Probably the most important factor in right-wing populism among women is the same as it is for men: attitudes to immigration and Islam.
“Top of the list is always a person’s view of immigration,” Harteveld said.
Right-wing populist parties are specifically targeting women with a controversial and contested message that immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, brings with it misogynistic cultures that threaten women’s freedom in Europe — from catcalling women in short skirts to sexual assault.
As Le Pen put it: “I am scared that the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights.”
A spate of sexual assaults blamed on groups of immigrant men in Cologne and Hamburg on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2015 provided ammunition for the far right to argue that immigrants were a physical threat, even though government studies have found that the vast majority of attacks on German women — including domestic violence — are perpetrated by German men.
“I believe we are the only party in Germany who is really fighting for women’s rights, because we point out we’re in danger of losing the freedoms and rights of women for which we’ve fought for centuries,” AfD lawmaker Nicole Hochst said.
Hochst said that she is equally concerned for Muslim women living in Germany, many of whom strive to be educated and find a place in society, “only to find that in the summer holidays they’re going to be married off to a husband they’ve never met in the country their families originated from.”
Ebba Hermansson, 22, the youngest lawmaker in the Swedish parliament, is the gender-equality spokeswoman for the anti-immigration, nationalist Sweden Democrats.
She said that the issue of keeping women “safe from sexual violence” is one of her main concerns.
“If you come from a country where women are not worth as much as men, or women don’t have the right to live their lives as they want, when you come [to Sweden] there’s a shock,” she said.
The party’s political opponents have criticized any conflation of crime statistics with immigration.
Leaders such as Le Pen are playing a double game. They reject the term “feminism” because they see it as an instrument of the left and recoil from equality issues such as gender quotas in politics, but they co-opt the notion of “women’s rights” when it suits them, chiefly as a pretext to attack what they claim is mass immigration by socially conservative men.
Every woman must be protected in their right “to wear shorts or a miniskirt,” Le Pen has said.
“These are strong women leaders, but they step back from feminism,” said Susi Meret of Denmark’s Aalborg University.
Cascina Mayor Susanna Ceccardi of the male-dominated Northern League in Italy even insists on being called sindaco, the masculine word for “mayor,” as opposed to sindaca.
These parties believe that “left-wing feminism turns a blind eye to the consequences of immigration,” said Ann-Cathrine Jungar from Sweden’s Sodertorn University.
However, radical-right politicians in Europe know that the stigma and toxic image of a party affects whether female voters choose it. Some have sought to modernize or soften their image in response.
Le Pen, who promotes herself as a twice-divorced single mother, has sought to tone down her party’s anti-abortion stance, move away from the traditional view of women as child bearers and homemakers, and appeal to gay voters.
Jensen, who has warned about the “sneaking Islamization” of Norwegian society, last year controversially won a “gay best friend” award given out by LGBT activists.
The AfD likes to popularize an idealized vision of the nuclear family, with father at work and mother raising children. Miazga speaks of a nostalgia for the deutsche mark, for economic stability, social order and the “traditional family.”
“I value the traditional family, a sensible time when children were cared for,” she said. “I wish — and maybe this is a funny, romantic feeling — that we could get back to the Germany of the 1990s.”
However, the party’s promotion of the nuclear family is often at odds with the reality of leading women in the AfD. Weidel, for example, is a gay woman bringing up two children with her partner.
With just four months to go until European elections that are to pick a parliament to sit until 2024, the female vote is to be crucial to the success of right-wing populists seeking to build on the 50-odd members of the European parliament they have in the 751-seat chamber.
Le Pen’s party, polling level with French President Emmanuel Macron’s La Republique En Marche, hopes to harness the fury unleashed by the yellow vest movement — and court the high number of working-class women who have taken to the streets, including single mothers and working mothers on low incomes.
In Italy, Meloni has already been savvier at appealing to other women.
“She attracts more women as she seems to be the only one making the battle for women,” said Letizia Giorgianni, who voted for the party last year.
In Germany, the AfD — which has one of the biggest gender gaps on the European far right — appears to only just be waking up to the fact that it might have to do things differently to attract female voters.
Only about 13 percent of the AfD’s 30,000 party members are women. In parliament it has 10 female members — and 82 male.
Esther Lehnert, a right-wing populism expert from Berlin’s Alice Salomon University, said that the party remains “steeped in chauvinism and sexism. It revels in this sort of leery sexist blokeism.”
She recalled some of the AfD’s more controversial election posters, including one showing five naked female behinds, accompanied by the slogan: “For diversity.”
Hochst is trying to change things.
“People are repeatedly asking me why the AfD wants women to go back to the hearth,” the single mother of four said. “It’s simply not true. What we do advocate is that women should have the choice to stay at home if they want to, or to work.”
The group Women in the AfD, formed in early November last year, is Hochst’s answer to the charge that the party has not so far done enough to make itself welcoming to female newcomers.
“Before I joined the party, there were countless times I was shopping at the market in my hometown and I didn’t approach the AfD information point, because there were only men there. As soon as there were women, I approached them instinctively,” she said.
The future of the party might depend on whether it increases female support, Lehnert said.
“On a certain level, many people in the AfD recognize that they have to change and attract more women if they’re to have a chance to become an established ‘people’s party.’ At the same time, I believe that these chauvinistic habits are so deep-set that I can’t see them arranging themselves differently. Typically, when women start to take up too much space in right-wing populist parties, they will at some point be put back in their place,” Lehnert said.
Miazga and Hochst see themselves as tough-skinned lone warriors who regularly work 18-hour days. Both have received threats, with Hochst saying that her house is often smeared with offensive graffiti.
Both were once top sportswomen and say that this has helped them succeed in the AfD.
“I could kill every man in the party,” said Hochst, who practices karate.
“Of course, I don’t want to,” she quickly added.
Miazga’s favorite phrase when talking about the male-female divide in the party is to joke: “It takes just 10 of us to keep the 82 men in check.”
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