In recent years, Europe has found itself in an alarming position. The pandemic, the climate emergency, the austerity that left key European economies so vulnerable, the illegal invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s carnage in the Middle East each pose major challenges. The dilemma of how to handle the polycrisis is growing. In May 2024, the Economist 1 argued that three female leaders in Europe are rising to the moment and represent the future of European politics: Ursula von der Leyen, Giorgia Meloni, and Marine Le Pen. When Meloni was elected Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022, the headlines reflected the key role that white womanhood plays in normalising fascism. Hillary Clinton, von der Leyen, and other influential women celebrated Mel- oni’s election as a victory for women and gender justice — carefully ignoring the reality that her Fratelli d’Italia is the most extreme right-wing party to take power in Italy since Benito Mussolini.
Female leaders across Europe have not only celebrated Meloni taking power but made it clear that they will also work with her, despite legitimate concerns over her party’s fascist legacy. In early 2024, von der Leyen was criticised for delaying the European Commission’s rule of law report criticising Italy’s crackdown on press freedom. By turning a blind eye to Italy’s growing authoritarianism, von der Leyen hoped that she could win over Meloni to vote for her for another term as European Commission president. Far from being a potential women-empower-women story, this event only outlined how supposed centre-right moderates like von der Leyen enable fascism for their own gain.
Meanwhile the female takeover over the EU is getting stronger with former Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, taking the bloc’s top diplomatic role — signalling the change in the EU’s foreign policy. Kallas had seized the international spotlight following the criminal invasion of Ukraine with her reckless warmongering rhetoric (suggesting that Russia should be Balkanised and advocating for direct NATO intervention) and her rabid xenophobic statements pushing to ban ethnic Russian minorities in Estonia from voting. Kallas’s nomination as one of the Commission Vice-Presidents is a clear message that the EU rules out any normalisation effort with Russia, such as could push for a diplomatic solution to the war in Eastern Europe. While Kallas is hailed as a fierce critic of Russia who advocates for stronger sanctions, she certainly does not take the same approach to Israel. Right-wing Israeli newspapers celebrated Kallas’s nomination because she is significantly more pro-Israel than her predecessor, Josep Borrell. Accountability for Israel’s war crimes and genocide will be even more unlikely under Kallas’s leadership, even though European citizens are putting mounting pressure on the EU to take action against Israel’s uncontrolled terror and violence. Again, what is sold as a victory for women and breaking the glass ceiling will only bring more suffering to girls and women in the Middle East and delay justice.
In the meantime, the frustration is also growing over European Commission President von der Leyen for her shameful record on human rights, undermining the EU’s standing on the global stage. She came under scrutiny from EU member states and representatives for providing diplomatic cover and full support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine without securing any kind of collec- tive, European mandate. In October 2023, the EU’s ‘strongwomen’ Roberta Metsola (who is President of the EU’s Parliament) and von der Leyen rushed to Tel Aviv to guarantee carte blanche to Benjamin Netanyahu to do whatever he wants under the guise of ‘self-defence’ — apparently without ever mention- ing obligations to respect international law and protect civilian lives. The EU’s ‘nothing should be off-limits to Israel’ approach only encouraged the genocide against the Palestinian people.
It took tens of thousands of Palestinians killed before the EU considered calling for a ceasefire. Von der Leyen is still avoiding naming Israeli authorities as the perpetrators of the genocide in Palestine despite the recent rulings by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants. In the past year, thousands of protests took place in hundreds of European cities mobilising millions of people across the continent, but this persistent mass pressure had no impact on the EU’s policy regarding Palestine and Lebanon. The concomitant crackdown on dissent —ignoring popular demands and dismissing brave activists and humanitarian workers on the ground — highlights the limits of Europe’s democratic values. The EU’s double-standards on Russia and Israel effectively destroyed any credibility for the claim that respecting human rights is a key consideration for the EU in its action abroad.
In 2022, tempted by access to Caspian oil and gas, von der Leyen signed a strategic partnership with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev despite the country’s genocidal campaign against Armenians. Again, von der Leyen refused to use her powerful role in the EU to uphold its purported liberal values and condemn violations of these principles wherever they occur. This may further highlight the EU’s weak spots, embolden oppressive leaders across the globe, and alienate EU citizens who are demoralised and exhausted by forever wars and live-streamed genocides.
Still, the Economist is quite correct that these female leaders may well shape the future of European politics. Marine Le Pen and Georgia Meloni would today be well-defined as post-fascists, as per G.M. Tamás,2 since the old fascism is no longer an acceptable political brand in Europe. But they are certainly fol- lowing its legacy. Their advance is not an alternative to patriarchy, but instead gives fascism a new and distinctively female face.
Influential female politicians have been joining the ranks of the far right across Europe: Siv Jensen in Norway, Beata Szydło in Poland, Frauke Petry in Germany, Diana Sosoaca in Romania, Katalin Novák in Hungary, etc. They embrace the ideal of the post-fascist imagination: one that is nationalist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and Islamophobic. In many ways, this isn’t a novel phenomenon, since white women’s role in contributing to supremacist movements in the past and present is well documented. Through social reproduction and the family, women played a key role in upholding social hierarchy and hegemonic white femininity. Newer is the fact of them taking the leading role.
Experts have coined several terms to grasp the female face of reactionary politics: white feminism, femonationalism, gender critics, lipstick fascism, Zionist feminism, and more. As this alarming trend of feminised far-right power takes over Europe, its Atlantic partners salute these developments — and they are more than open to working with such figures. They surely do not take the same approach to Mexico, after it elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish woman with a progressive platform. US ruling-class outlets like the Atlantic3 and the Washington Post4 quickly announced that ‘autocracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ had triumphed in Mexico, expressing outright alarm at Sheinbaum’s left-wing policies. Western white feminists’ silence over Sheinbaum’s election victory highlights that female leaders are only welcome and celebrated if they are on the right.
The explanation of far-right women rising to power across Europe is surely complicated. It is shaped by the history of white femininity and white supremacy, colonialism and colonial feminism, and a traditionalist attitude towards the mid-century nuclear family. It can also be understood as an attempt to rebrand fascism for the twenty-first century and appease female voters who want greater stakes in politics and political representation. The appeal of femonationalism has also become incredibly strong with growing Islamophobia and anti-immigration sentiments across Europe. In fact, cultivating fascistic women as the ‘white saviors’ of European nations is an irresistible attraction for the far-right — echoing the continent’s colonial legacies.
Femonationalism
The term ‘femonationalism’ was popularised by feminist scholar Sara Farris5 to describe the reactionary co-optation of feminist language and themes to advocate for wars, social exclusion, Islamophobic campaigns, anti-immigration measures, and various racist domestic policies. The femonationalist discourse peaked at the height of the ‘War on Terror’ but I would argue that it was — and is — pivotal in the rise of ‘women fascists’ across Europe and the West in the 2020s. Female leaders of the far right, like Le Pen, characterise Muslim men as backwards — oppressors of women who have no place in modern, secular societies such as France — in order to justify persecution and discrimination. On the other hand, the rhetoric of gender equality is also abused to humiliate and subjugate Muslim women and deny their bodily autonomy by banning veils and other self expressions of modesty.
The infamous burkini affair in France (police officers barring women in burkinis from entering the beach) showed that this country’s laïcité (state-enforced secularism in public spaces) is inseparable from Orientalism and neocolonialism. If secularism is the basis of any democratic and equal society, across Western European states it has become the pretext for anti-Muslim exclusion and discrimination. In recent years, this has contributed to the rise of a specifically intolerant, Islamophobic feminism. In this sense, femonationalism is instrumentalised to create colonial dichotomies: civilised versus primitive. As Enzo Traverso put it in The New Faces of Fascism:
At the end of the nineteenth century, Cesare Lambroso — founder of criminal anthropology, a leading positivist scholar, and a fervent herald of Progress — saw the European origins of Enlightenment philosophy as incontrovertible proof of the white man’s superiority over the ’coloured races.’ A certain feminism presupposes the superiority of Western civilization and thus identifies with a similar conception of Enlightenment values. In this view, the very existence of veiled women is nothing but the proof that European colonialism left its civilising mission incomplete.6
This type of feminism offers a false choice to Muslim women: you are either a feminist or Muslim. This not only erases the rich history of Islamic feminism but makes dehumanisation possible because religion is closely tied to identity — and especially to socially marginalised identities.
Femonationalism integrates overt colonialist themes and a ‘white saviour’ complex by reinforcing Orientalist tropes and xenophobic narratives that non-Western cultures (especially Muslims) are inherently hostile to gender equality and social progress. Thus, white feminists in the West push the idea that Muslim women need to be rescued while pushing them into racially and ethnically segregated exploitative industries — all in the name of emancipation. In this sense, it is becoming increasingly difficult to balance social conservativism and the pretence of progressivism. While socially conservative parties in Hungary and Poland prefer more straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’ female politicians, somewhat more liberal Western European polities seek a selectively progressive (white) woman in power like von der Leyen or German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. While von der Leyen and Baerbock claim to advocate for girls and women in Afghanistan and Iran, they materially and diplomatically cover for the mass slaughter of girls and women in Palestine and Lebanon. Even far-right politicians like Le Pen must adopt faux-progressive rhetoric to some extent, in order to claim moral superiority over ‘barbaric’ non-Western immigrants and justify hardline anti-immigration policies.
As might have been expected, femonationalist and homonationalist narratives have also made it to culturally more conservative countries like Hungary. In October 2024, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a speech at the European Parliament decrying illegal immigration as ‘the cause of rising antisemitism, violence against women, and homophobia across Europe’. Orbán, whose party constitutionally banned marriage equality, launched antisemitic national campaigns featuring conspiracies about George Soros, and rejected the Istanbul Convention to combat violence against women, was quickly accused of hypocrisy after he pinned the different forms of bigotry on foreigners. A Hungarian LGBTQ organisation (Háttér Society) released a statement condemning Orbán’s xenophobic speech— singling out the ‘homonationalist’ narratives exploited by the European far right to paint homophobia as a Muslim threat.
Orbán and others on the far right rely on racist stereotypes and scapegoating by claiming that innocent European white women are victims of imaginary crimes committed by inferior ‘subhumans.’ This narrative, which frames bigotry (like misogyny, antisemitism, and homophobia) as alien to European culture, is not only ahistorical but actively undermines efforts to eradicate these ills. German officials pinning antisemitism onto Muslims and immigrants is a prime example of this effort, considering that antisemitism is as much part of German tradition as Goethe or Oktoberfest. The fact that Orbán and the Alternative für Deutschland have also been able to take up femonationalist rhetoric proves that fascist women do not only embolden other women but also fascist men.
Woman-washing genocide: Zionist feminism
As argued above, the post-fascists mimic progressivism to some extent to appear more modernised compared to the Othered people whom they seek to exclude. This is the most prominent in the case of Israel, which has spent decades building a brand as a relatively liberal, gay-friendly, feminist haven in the Middle East in order to attract tourism and gain legitimacy for the violent occupation. The term ‘pinkwashing’ was first used in 2010 by Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), and in 2011 by Sarah Schulman in the New York Times where she described pinkwashing as a form of homonationalism. In 2020, Palestinian pro-LGBT group Al-Qaws released Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence, a study explaining how the Israeli state and its advocates use the language of LGBTQ movements to divert international attention away from the occupation and the violent oppression of Palestinians.
Pinkwashing, of course, quickly spread beyond Israel and to the likes of the European far-right. In fact, Zionist narratives of homonationalism and femonationalism have themselves fuelled the anti-immigration rhetoric of Europe’s far right. Following the devastating shootings at Orlando’s Pulse gay nightclub in 2016, which killed 49 people, Le Pen commented that ‘homosexuality is attacked in countries that live under the Islamist jackboot.’ Indeed, she also started to poll higher among LGBTQ voters despite her party’s long history of stigmatising sexual minorities. In this sense, homonationalism and pinkwashing serve the purpose of affirming the superiority of the dominant group and the subhumanity of the Othered people (Muslims, immigrants, etc.)— presenting the issue as a civilisational discourse. Cultural studies scholar Nada Elia defined pinkwashing as ‘the twenty-first century manifestation of the Zionist colonialist narrative of bringing civilisation to an otherwise backwards land’.7
Both homonationalism and femonationalism emerged as an expression of a nationalist modernity across Europe. In this regard, Zionist feminism fits into the long history of colonial/imperial feminism prevalent across Europe to this day. In 1918, Polish Zionist activist Puah Rakovsky proclaimed: ‘It is not possible that we Jews, who were the first bearers of democratic principles, should in this regard lag behind all civilised peoples and close the way for women to achievement of equal rights.’8 Later, a certain gender egalitarianism emerged in the newly formed Zionist state – men and women were building settlements and uprooting the natives hand-in-hand after all. Equally sharing the fruits of colonisation had become the basis of a distinct Zionist feminism.
While Zionist feminists won Western white feminists over with the idea of feminised ethnonationalism, pushback against this phenomenon started to become stronger in the 1980s. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and massacred tens of thousands of people, many Jewish feminists in the diaspora rose up against the instrumentalisation of their identity and women’s rights to justify massacres and war crimes. The idea that Zionism and feminism are fundamentally incompatible made it into mainstream feminist discourse: simply put, the wanton murder of women and children are antithetical to the idea of feminism and women’s emancipation.
Today, the language of feminism is abused by Israeli officials and its European backers alike to whitewash and justify the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Pink-coloured Canva creatives flooded social media across Western states demanding that we ‘believe Israeli women’, in the name of replicating the ‘Me Too’ movement. Israeli officials pressured women’s rights organisation to condemn alleged sexual violence against Israeli women while repressing the same organisations for covering the carefully documented colonial violence against Palestinian girls and women.
At the meantime, the Western press built up fascistic female icons by presenting the female combatants of the Israeli armed forces (IDF) as a huge victory for women and gender justice. The New York Times published a frontpage story — called ‘Israeli Women Fighting on Front Line in Gaza, a First’—attempting to woman-wash war crimes and genocide. The IDF itself created
The toxic exploitation of the rhetoric of women’s rights in the pursuit of repressive policies must be countered with a real coalition of feminist opposition.
extensive content for TikTok sexualising its female soldiers and exploiting the culturally attached innocence to white womanhood: ‘How could this pretty white girl commit war crimes in Gaza?’ With the launch of blockbuster superhero movie Wonder Woman, feminised imperialism hit the cultural mainstream — starring IDF veteran Gal Gadot. The pink marketing and the faux-feminist franchise itself were heavily criticised by intersectional femi- nists for woman-washing and culture-washing the IDF.
In February 2024, the Intercept published a thoroughly researched exposé9 of how allegations of sexual violence became the pretext for the genocide in Palestine and boosted the genocide-justifying propaganda effort. The authors of the exposé attempted to push back against the construction of femonationalist mythology around the sexual brutality and barbarity of Arab men. These femonationalist narratives are still repeated by the women leaders of Europe: von der Leyen, Baerbock, Le Pen, etc. resort to debunked claims and overt lies to rationalise their unconditional support for the Israeli genocide. This also falls in line with colonial feminism: the weaponisation of white femininity in support of an imperial cause, and fabrications aimed at Western white feminists to divert sympathy from the colonised to the coloniser. As feminist scholar Sophie Lewis put it in a recent essay for Salvage magazine:
Femonationalism more or less defines, as such, the ‘civilizational’ affect whipped up among denizens of the imperial core during military campaigns of collective punishment that require Islamophobic dehumanisation of the ‘barbarians’ in question; campaigns which actively benefit from the sowing of doubt and hesitation among the allies of the colonised.10
Islamophobic myths of ’Arab rape cults’ are not only consistently used by Zionist feminists for genocide apologia but also by the far-right across Europe to justify anti-immigration policies, police violence, and repression.
The revival of femonationalism in the 2020s
As mentioned earlier, femonationalism peaked in the early 2000s with the ‘War on Terror’ to create consent for the catastrophic invasions and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades to come. At the time, this phenomenon was mostly widespread in the United States. In 2001, First Lady Laura Bush said in a radio interview that ‘Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’
When the Taliban eventually defeated the American military occupation in 2021, the West’s profound humiliation revived femonationalist narratives to advocate for a more sustained invasion. The Taliban takeover has rightfully sparked global outcry — and raised legitimate concerns over the fate of girls and women in the country. The Taliban almost entirely dismantled women’s access to education and institutionalised other oppressive gender norms, restricting women’s mobility, participation in public life, bodily autonomy, etc.
In September 2024, female representatives of Canada, Australia, and Germany announced that they will take the Taliban to the International Court of Justice over gender discrimination. Powerful and influential women across the West surely have been rallying for Afghan women — but their intentions seem questionable when they don’t do the same for women in Palestine and Lebanon. To echo the critics: selective feminism is not feminism. Selective feminism has always been used to legitimise occupations. Femonationalists (like colonial feminists) advocate for the liberation of Muslim women from the tyranny of Oriental patriarchy while barely ever advancing feminist causes at home. Baerbock poses as the ‘saviour’ of Muslim women abroad as we watch gruesome footages of German policemen beating Muslim women in Berlin for wearing Palestinian scarves.
In September 2022, massive protests erupted across Iran in response to the murder of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, by the ‘morality police’ which inspired the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. People in Iran took the streets to not only protest the subjugation of women but to express frustration over an intersection of issues including repression against minorities, workers’ rights, police brutality, and more. With students, teachers, and workers joining the protests, the Iranian theocratic government faced its worse crisis of legitimacy in decades. Undeniably, the uprising had a strong feminist appeal as thousands of Iranian girls and women were cutting their hair and burning their headscarves in protest.
The coverage of these events in Afghanistan and more particularly Iran was habitually filtered through Western imperialist interests — in turn sparking fears that popular struggles would be exploited and tainted by warmongers. Critics feared that the legitimate feminist uprising would be exploited by American neoconservatives and their allies to create consent for a potential future war with Iran that would have catastrophic consequences and even trigger a World War III scenario. However, it must also be admitted that there is also a counter-productive discourse in a certain kind of anti-imperialist political theology, which in its refusal to criticise such states undermines important work for gender justice by local feminists on the ground. This is what Terman calls the ‘double-bind’: presenting women’s rights activism in Arab and Musim countries as complicit in Western imperialism by default.11
White feminists across the West were heavily criticised for their performative allyship. While Iranian women were facing punishment for their courage and dissent, famous celebrity women posted videos on social media cutting less than an inch of their hair as a sign of ‘solidarity.’ White feminists ignored the radical nature of these protests and saw the burning of headscarves as a triumph of Western cultural norms. Yet things are perhaps a bit more complicated. In France, after all, hijabs are banned in public spaces while in Iran hijabs represent a tool of state oppression: both of these nations’ female populations are policed for what they wear, even if in different ways. The imperialist and colonial roots of European white feminism have led to institutionalised discrimination against Muslim women, policing of their bodies, and a denial of their agency.
Conclusion
Post-fascists and the far-right invoke gender injustice to demonise Arab and African immigrants and Muslims but they do not advance women’s rights struggles at home. Given this Orientalist focus, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the uprising in Iran, and the genocide in Palestine were sure to revive femonationalist discourse across Europe. This created an atmosphere of fear and division that contributes to the already alarming scale of Islamophobia and dehumanisation of Muslims on the continent. Ultimately, these racist and xenophobic projects represent a field where fascism can truly flourish. Similarly to Eurocentric patriarchy, femonationalism also contributes to the discrimination and exploitation of Muslim women across Europe. Islamophobia, prejudice, and the so-called ‘doublebind’ makes it even more difficult for Muslim women to resist oppression and advocate for women’s rights. The worsening conditions of Muslim women, immigrants, etc. also undermine efforts to build intersectional, inclusive feminist movements that could challenge ‘lipstick fascism’ and the far-right.
The toxic exploitation of the rhetoric of women’s rights in the pursuit of repressive policies must be countered with a real coalition of feminist opposition. From France to Greece, women are saying ‘not in my name’ — and leading the charge against the far-right. A real feminist opposition must be organised across borders regardless of citizenship status, religion, and other factors. Pushing for a greater representation of women in politics, from poli- cymaking to diplomacy is surely important, but this only raises the question of which women and for what agenda. Femonationalism and ‘lipstick’ fascism are surely not the answers, emboldening as they do not women in general but patriarchy and far-right men.
Endnotes
1 ‘The Three Women Who Will Shape Europe’, The Economist, 30 May 2024.
2 G.M. Tamás, ‘On Post-Fascism’, Boston Review, 1 June 2000.
3 David Frum, ‘Women Can Be Autocrats, Too’, The Atlantic, 8 October 2024.
4 Léon Krauze, ‘Can Mexico move past its authoritarian streak’,
Washington Post, 28 February 2024.
5 Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights – The Rise of Femonationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017
6 Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism – Populism and the Far Right, London: Verso Books, 2019, p. 48.
7 Nada Elia, ‘Gay Rights with a Side of Apartheid’, Settler Colo- nial Studies, 2 (2), 2012, pp. 49–68.
8 Puah Rakovsky, My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, translated by Barbara Harshav and Paula Hyman, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002, p.14.
9 Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, Intercept, 28 February 2024.
10 Sophie Lewis, ‘Some of My Best Enemies are feminists: on Zionist Feminism’, Salvage, 8 March, 2024
11 Rochelle Terman, ‘Islamophobia, Feminism and the Politics of Critique’, Theory, Culture & Society, 33(2), 2016: pp. 77-102.