Europe’s far right is on the rise. Right-wing populist movements have recently undergone an exponential growth in public support and a systematic rise to power within mainstream political platforms, securing about 25 percent of seats in the European parliament in 2024 (European Parliament, 2024). Despite their promotion of traditionalist views of gender and active opposition of feminism and “gender ideology,” right-wing conservative parties across Europe have been relying on a paradoxical weaponization of feminist ideas to defend the supposed superiority of Western values and target migrant communities (Vieten, 2025). This selective invocation of women’s rights, used to ostracize and alienate ethnic and religious minorities, was conceptualized by British sociologist Sara Farris as “femonationalism” (Farris, 2017). Farris argues that femonationalism reinforces negative stereotypes about Muslim immigrants and informs policies and laws, leading to systematic discrimination and hostility towards these communities that become a target for a hate campaign.
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a political party founded in 2013, has become one of the most influential forces in contemporary German politics, despite being officially categorized as “right-wing extremist” in a report issued by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Notably, the AfD has one of the lowest proportions of female membership compared to its opponents, yet women still hold positions of power where they enjoy a certain degree of visibility and renown in its public image and political communication. This paradox raises a central question: How does the AfD actively shape the boundaries of women’s political representation while advancing anti-feminist and anti-immigrant agendas? More specifically, how does gender function as an integral element of the party’s nationalist project rather than a contradiction to it? The concept of femonationalism illuminates how the selective invocation of women’s rights becomes a mechanism for legitimizing xenophobic and exclusionary policies.
The stakes here are high. Populist far-right groups in Western Europe have been able to attain an enormous amount of power and political capital in recent years. Germany’s AfD has gained immense public support during the 2025 national elections, becoming the second-largest political force in the country. This marks a significant shift that suggests a resurging normalization of right-wing populism within the country’s parliamentary politics (Arzheimer, 2015). According to a 2025 report, the share of women among political party members in Germany as of December 2021 varied by party, with the Green Party having the highest number of female members at roughly 42 percent, followed by 37 percent in the Left party and 33 percent in the SPD (Statista, 2025). The AfD share of female members was the lowest at only 18.7 percent. Despite this severe gender imbalance, women continue to be strongly featured at the forefront of the AfD’s public image, embroidering a perceived sense of progress that sharply contradicts the party’s conservative agenda. Porzycki (2025) argues that radical-right parties often use their female members and leaders to portray themselves as modern and moderate in the public eye, a method that is commonly referred to as strategic image management. Yet at the heart of this strategy, there lies a clear irony: While women in the AfD are enabled and encouraged to acquire positions of power within the public political sphere, their presence in these spaces is leveraged to advance anti-feminist agendas. These women typically target female voters by appealing to their concerns about issues of safety and protection. As showcased by the concept of “the heartland” in populist German politics, radical-right parties equally appeal to nationalist fervor through a carefully curated vision of Germany that is partially fueled by a chronic idealization of the country’s problematic past (Porzycki et al., 2025), dismissing the inflammatory nature of such an ideal in the context of a “post-nazi” Germany.
As a language that makes it easy to create compound words, German has a surplus of derogatory terms used to refer to migrants and asylum seekers of ethnic descent. Terms like Überfremdung (Over-foreignization), Asylkriminalität (Asylum Criminality), Schuldkult (Cult of Guilt), and Parallelgesellschaften (Parallel Societies) are often used in political and online discourse to dehumanize migrants, criticize the nation’s culture of memory/remembrance, and generate panic within German society, thus creating further polarization in both official and unofficial public opinion. In fact, this misleading and offensive manipulation of language occurs so often that there is a German linguistic initiative that annually selects a word or a phrase deemed inappropriate and commonly misused, in order to raise awareness about inflammatory language posing a threat to democracy and human dignity. Unwort des Jahres (Non-word of the year) dates back to 1991, the year it was launched to draw attention to questionable use of loaded vernacular. In response to the resurgence of Germany’s far right, numerous “Unwörter” selected by the Unwort des Jahres’s independent panel have been linked to political actors such as the AfD, whose frequent use of populist neo-nazi lingo has left its permanent trace on contemporary trends in German slang. In 2024, Biodeutsch (Bio-German) was named “non-word” of the year, referring to people with German citizenship who do not have an ethnic German background. This further illustrates the importance of language in political discourse, particularly in the context of political mobilization. As exemplified by the German far right, language possesses a transformative capacity, enabling the establishment of a normalization of narratives previously considered extremist (Zajak et al., 2025).
Doerr (2021) empirically investigates the construction of migrant Muslim communities as a “threat” to German society and to the supposed homogeneity of its native culture. The study emphasizes the role of the AfD in propagating a stereotypical image about these communities through physical street advertisements, digital platforms, mobile displays, and both national parliament elections and state-level campaigns. Doerr essentially argues that the AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society. A primary example of this is the 2017 AfD campaign poster which exhibited an image of three white women in bikinis, accompanied by a slogan that reads: “Burkas? Wir steh’n auf Bikinis (Burkas? We prefer bikinis)” (Doerr, 2021). While the bikini is meant to symbolize freedom of choice and self-determination, Doerr (2021) argues that the AfD deploys a sexualizing chauvinistic male gaze that partially targets young male voters, portraying German women as governable subjects in need of protection from the likely dangers of Muslim invasion. Similar patterns emerge when we analyze speeches and press releases from the party, as its members consistently claim exclusive ownership of women’s rights and leverage gendered issues of public safety to amass voters and public supporters.
Women as victims of migration
One of the most assertively direct iterations of femonationalist ways of arguing is evident in Alice Weidel’s October 2025 press release titled: “More and more women live in fear—The AfD is ready to restore security” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). The title itself claims a causal chain before presenting any empirical data to support such a fallacious assertion: German women are unsafe in the public sphere and only the AfD is capable of reimposing order and security. Weidel states, “More than half of all women in Germany no longer feel safe in public spaces. This alarming figure from the representative Civey survey is further proof of the government’s failure in migration and security policy.” This statement proceeds without delay to pin the blame of a security issue on a particular ethnic minority: Syrians. She continues, “As the Federal Ministry of the Interior had to admit, between 2015 and 2024, according to official data, 135,668 Germans were victims of crimes committed by Syrian suspects.” The juxtaposition of women’s nocturnal fear with failure in border policy lacks empirical support from scholarly research. The primary objective of such a statement, however, is to evoke emotional responses rather than logical reasoning. According to Farris’s framework, this is a classic femonationalist move, as it reduces women to a quantifiable populace of nationalist subjects whose survival ostensibly counts on the AfD’s electoral victory. Weidel specifies that “the ones who suffer most are especially young women and children, who are often defenselessly exposed to violent assaults” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). Such word choices perform a crucial role, as they highlight the vulnerability of German women in the face of a persistent influx of migrants who are, in the eyes of Weidel and her fellow party members, the sole perpetrators and aggressors against such a precarious demographic. At the same time, these outlandish claims carry out the ideological work of concealing migrant and racialized women from the AfD’s ostensibly feminist narrative on women’s public safety issues. In a manner that can only be described as dehumanizing, these women are deemed unworthy of protection or dignity. The only presence that the ethnic/racialised woman is allowed in the AfD’s official pseudo-feminist discourse is one where she is depicted as a rhetorical device or an object with no agency, used only to advance the party’s xenophobic and racist agenda.
The AfD’s selective protective paternalistic narrative is deeply rooted in Samuel Huntington’s post-cold war “clash of civilizations” theory, which was subsequently adopted by contemporary political figures like Thilo Sarrazin whose essentialist views on migration and social integration have consistently contributed to the normalization of such exclusionary discourse within mainstream politics (Sprengholz, 2021). This view promotes a rigid concept of cultural identity, which is ultimately weaponized to exclude migrant communities deemed ‘incompatible’ with the host culture. Within this theoretical structure, gender is once again weaponized under the assumption that German society has already achieved absolute gender equality, thus instrumentalizing this flawed premise to draw racialized boundaries of citizenship and belonging that exclude all non-white Germans. The paradox herein is clear as day: Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.
This sentiment is reverberated in one of Alice Weidel’s most controversial press statements as she states: “The alarming scale and the high proportion of foreign suspects in sexual offenses against women are a warning signal. Since the Union opened the gates in 2015, especially to men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms, women have become fair game” (Weidel, 2024). The language used in this context is extremely offensive and dehumanizing, as the term Freiwild in German implies that women have been left unprotected and “available” for harassment and sexual violence due to the absence of stringent border measures. This kind of alarmist and sensitive language aligns with the AfD’s broader strategy of appropriating feminist rhetoric in the Bundestag —the federal parliament of Germany—to conceal its anti-feminist position and divert the public’s attention from its own conservative and traditionalist views of gender (Sprengholz, 2021). Analogously, internal conflicts within the AfD regarding the party’s stance on homosexuality are omitted from official statements (Arzheimer, 2015).
The racialization of sexism and male violence
The phrase “men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms” (Weidel, 2024) betrays a form of cultural essentialism that homogenizes entire societies and depicts them as inherently regressive and backwards, thus establishing a civilization hierarchy placing German culture and people above racialized migrant men and their cultures. In 2018, Alice Weidel used the term Messermänner auf Sozialhilfe or “Knife-wielding men on welfare” in reference to high-profile knife crimes that the country has witnessed, calling for waves of mass deportations of asylum seekers and refugees. In media coverage of stabbing crimes in Germany, systematic regularities seem to be permanently present across different outlets as reporting often emphasizes the ethnic background/origin of the perpetrators, thus constructing alarmist narratives that villainize and alienate migrant communities.
Similarly, AfD board member Dennis Hohloch claimed that “multiculturalism means a loss of traditions, a loss of identity, a loss of home, murder, killing, robbery and gang rape” (Baumgärtner et al., 2025). Scrinzi (2023) refers to a political and social process called “the racialization of sexism” through which misogyny is ascribed to racialized migrant communities and is therefore externalized and treated as an issue of foreign origins. While predominantly employed by right-wing political actors, racialized gender-based framings have also been passively endorsed by left-wing movements and secular groups. In France, for instance, the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Subaltern), dubbed progressive, played a crucial role in detaching gender-based violence from “middle-class white masculinity” (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 48). Despite it being spearheaded by French women of North African origins, the movement’s framing of sexual violence against women as a problem associated with Islam and the nation’s immigrant population greatly helped construct a narrative positioning racialized men as the hypersexualized aggressors of white women and the inherent oppressors of racialized women (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 49). Such accounts revive the ideological frameworks that colonial powers once used to rationalize territorial conquest and economic extraction of goods from the Global South. By failing to address gendered suburban violence as a multifaceted systemic issue and choosing to pathologize Islam instead, the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement engages in a form of “carceral feminism” used by the republic to justify state racism and fortify the racist apparatus of the prison-industrial complex. The NPNS’s call for banning the veil is a prominent example of how femonationalist movements, emerging from Western feminisms, often reproduce racist and neoliberal narratives that either victimize or pathologize Muslim women (Farris, 2017, p. 62).
Far-right pro-natalism and women as “breeding machines”
The racialization of sexism constitutes a key element of the AfD’s populist mobilization strategy, which allows it to adopt a feminism that claims to protect German women while actively supporting policies that undermine their basic rights, such as access to abortion. This dynamic is closely intertwined with far-right pro-natalist rhetoric, which treats women’s bodies as reproductive tools tasked with “resisting” demographic change that is seen as a direct consequence of migration, thereby reducing women to agents of national preservation rather than autonomous rights-bearing individuals.
A 2017 campaign poster for the AfD made a huge commotion nationwide due to its disturbing message; The poster features the image of a pregnant white woman lying in a field of flowers with a bold-fonted caption that reads: “Neue Deutsche? Machen wir selber (More Germans? We’ll make them ourselves).” Critics have argued that this slogan was entrenched in the xenophobic nativist rhetoric, which deliberately excludes racialized communities from Germany’s national fabric. However, few were able to point out the misogynistic undertones hidden in plain sight. Such language and imagery exposes a pattern within populist right-wing politics that reveals a strong commitment to a pro-natalism that treats women as “breeding machines” for the “right” kind of citizens.
AfD politician Mariana Harder-Kühnel shared an official statement as a response to the German government’s 2024 family report, criticizing its failure to address “a long-known demographic crisis” and its reverberations on the skilled-labor market which has been witnessing a severe shortage of domestic workers (Alternative für Deutschland, 2024). Harder-Kühnel argues in favor of kontrollierten Bevölkerungsentwicklung liegen (controlled population development), presenting it as a more potent cure for the country’s economic and demographic woes than immigration ever was. Within this particular statement, Mariana Harder-Kühnel strategically deploys a language of pseudo-feminist “choice” that conveniently and suspiciously aligns with her imperative. Despite her insistence on the implementation of pro-choice-in-parenting policies, she fails to admit the coercive nature of her proposed measures she is suggesting (for example, the ban on abortion, promotion of the traditional family, and opposition to children’s rights in the constitution).
The AfD’s documented efforts of promoting familialism – a state-driven ideology that treats the nuclear family as the foundation of the national community and the main mechanism for social cohesion and welfare – and mobilizing post-feminist common sense narratives (Sprengholz, 2021) suggest that its pro-natalist agenda is inherently ideological and ethnonationalist in nature. This problematic language has been linked to the party’s electoral success, particularly in East Germany which has experienced a dramatic long-term population decline since the 1990 reunification (Höhne et al., 2025). The party has been relentless in its efforts to advance traditionalism, fueled by a commitment to preventing demographic collapse and ensuring the dominance of the so called “Aryan” race, a term so commonly misused that it has become synonymous with Nordic racial grouping, despite historically referring to ancient Indo-Iranian peoples. The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice. While online discourse around reproductive health seems to be primarily focused on the United States, pro-natalist ideas in Germany stem from the party’s proper ideological evolution and the country’s homegrown völkisch (folkish/ethnic) nationalism (Heinemann, 2022). Pro-natalism comprises political, religious, and socioeconomic pressures that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy and freedom of choice, often culminating in legislative restrictions on contraception and abortion access (Bajaj & Stade, 2022). It is no surprise therefore that right-wing factions often adopt the infamous alarmist “fertility crisis” narrative to push for more control on women’s bodies.
Conclusion
The AfD’s rhetoric and actions push the boundaries of Western democracy and free speech and confirm the significance of language in politics, yet femonationalism extends far beyond German populist politics. Radical-right populism heavily relies on antagonistic framing and the strategic invocation of gender, which allows politicians to align themselves ideologically with their target audience, or at the very least to shift public discourse, normalize racist rhetoric, and strongly dominate the media landscape.
Works Cited
Alternative für Deutschland. (2025, October 28). Alice Weidel: Immer mehr Frauen leben in Angst – Die AfD ist bereit Sicherheit wieder herzustellen. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/alice-weidel-immer-mehr-frauen-leben-in-angst-die-afd-ist-bereit-sicherheit-wieder-herzustellen/
Alternative für Deutschland. (2024, May 15). Mariana Harder-Kühnel: Familienreport 2024 enthält kein Konzept zur Lösung des Geburtenmangels und der Demografie-Katastrophe. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/mariana-harder-kuehnel-familienreport-2024-enthaelt-kein-konzept-zur-loesung-des-geburtenmangels-und-der-demografie-katastrophe/
Arzheimer, K. (2015). The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany? West European Politics, 38(3), 535–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1004230
Bajaj, N., & Stade, K. (2022). Challenging pronatalism is key to advancing reproductive rights and a sustainable population. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 7(1), 39–70. https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.63799953906861
Baumgärtner, M., Müller, A., Siemens, A., & Wiedmann-Schmidt, W. (2025, May 14). Compendium of Extremism: A Look inside the Report Documenting the AfD’s Right-Wing Radicalism. DER SPIEGEL, Hamburg, Germany. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/compendium-of-extremism-a-look-inside-the-report-documenting-the-afds-right-wing-radicalism-a-de2ab5b5-623e-4100-addb-d1e44c298305 b
Doerr, N. (2021). The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti-Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images. Social Sciences, 10(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10010020
European Parliament. (2024, September 13). 2024 European elections: 15 additional seats divided between 12 countries | News | European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230911IPR04910/2024-european-elections-15-additional-seats-divided-between-12-countries
Fangen, K., & Lichtenberg, L. (2021). Gender and family rhetoric on the German far right. Patterns of Prejudice, 55(1), 71–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.1898815
Farris, S. R. (2017). In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press.
Heinemann, I. (2022). Volk and Family: National Socialist legacies and gender concepts in the rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany. Journal of Modern European History, 20(3), 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221110713
Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of Shrinkage: Local Population Decline and Electoral Support for the Anti-establishment Parties AfD and BSW in East German State Elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2025.2489409
Porzycki, V., Oshri, O., & Shenhav, S. R. (2025). What you see is not what you get: The incorporation of women in radical right parties. European Union Politics, 26(3), 477–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165251340336
Scrinzi, F. (2023). The Racialization of Sexism. Routledge. https://www.perlego.com/book/4270023
Sprengholz, M. (2021). Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 28(4), 486-501. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068211007509 (Original work published 2021)
Statista. (2025, November 29). Share of women among political party members in Germany 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/955972/women-share-political-party-members-germany/?srsltid=AfmBOooYDhCC25ugDxGodJBVoMKgVeAutFUSDA4IqRS4lnwnpqRK5Bd7
Törnberg, P., & Chueri, J. (2025). When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612241311886
Vieten, U. M. (2025). The Far-Right, Gender In/Equalities and Liberal Feminism: Scrutinising EU Narratives of Gender Equality in Italy, France and Germany. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2025.2592306
Weidel, A. (2024, November 20). Alice Weidel: Migrationskrise macht Frauen zu Freiwild. presseportal.de. https://www.presseportal.de/pm/110332/5913293
Zajak, S., Meuth, A., & Best, F. (2025). The Dynamics of (De-)Normalization of the far Right: perceptions in the German population. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-025-09532-6
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Olaf Kosinsky; modified by Tempest.
