Far right against women workers’ rights in Europe

They will claim to stand up for ‘the people’ in the June elections. But the extreme right only stamps on women’s rights.

Against equal pay, against decent working and living conditions for women, even failing to endorse the struggle against violence and human trafficking—that has been the voting record of the extreme right in the European Parliament during this term.

In 2020 the European Trade Union Confederation calculated that, if European Union policies remained unchanged, the gender pay gap in Europe would disappear … in 2104. Luckily, some gender-equality policies have been proposed and adopted since then at European level. Yet when they were submitted to the European Parliament, some opposed them—not details with suggested amendments, but the texts as a whole.

Gender-specific policies

That is first of all the case on equal pay for equal work, where mainly nationalist and extreme-right MEPs from the European Conservatives and Reformists and Identity and Democracy groups opposed, or abstained on, a report which came before the parliament in 2022. (The directive under scrutiny went through last spring.)

The same has been true of gender aspects of the energy crisis. A report assessing the need for gender-specific policies was supported by the parliament in January, with a big majority, but again extreme-right MEPs were in opposition. Among them were representatives of the Belgian Vlaams Belang, a member of the ID group.

This voting behavior was blind to the social need all over Europe which the report addressed. The European Trade Union Institute recently showed that almost 80 per cent of the €432 billion allocated and earmarked to shield EU households (between Sep 2021 and January 2023) had not been targeted—with to a large extent the richest parts of society benefiting, while the poorest, among them many women, were left in the cold.

On women’s poverty, we have seen the same pattern. In 2022 a report was prepared and endorsed by the parliament, with strong support from MEPs. But again there was no support from the far right, which abstained or voted against.

Nor did this behaviour differ when it came to promoting women on company boards. When the parliament addressed this in 2022 there was once more no support from the extreme right—not just on this or that element but overall. (Again, the directive went ahead late that year.)

Violence and trafficking

It gets even worse. On combating violence and human trafficking, reports have also been drafted, debated and adopted during this term. On violence, the basis was earlier work by the International Labour Organization and its different groups—representatives of workers, employers and governments—on a 2019 convention (190) on tackling violence and harassment at work. When the issue of its adoption by EU member states recently came to the committees of the European Parliament, once again there was strong support but not from a substantial part of the far right. In May last year, the parliament had endorsed ratification by the EU of the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Vlaams Belang MEPs however abstained and some far right members of ID and the ECR from other countries even voted against.

On combating trafficking, one could have imagined there would be unanimity and in January the parliament and the Council of the EU provisionally approved revised rules to that effect. Yet not only did the MEP Tom Vandendriessche, lead candidate in June for Vlaams Belang, oppose the initiative in committee. He was also reprimanded for using the Dutch word omvolking—normally translated as the ‘great replacement’—in a debate that month in Strasbourg on migration. Its German counterpart, Umvolkung, deployed by Alternative für Deutschland, was chosen in 2019 by German linguists as the annual ‘un-word’ because of its inhumane content.

With fewer than 100 days to go to the elections to the parliament, we have to become much more aware of the risks the extreme right represents, for all of us—especially for women. To all those women and men who fought for their and our rights, we owe it to share and scale up the fight. No one should say, on June 10th, when all the votes are in: wir haben es nicht gewusst—we didn’t know.