For progressives in Europe, 2013 was a year of hope.
France adopted historic legislation legalising same-sex marriage. Only a few months later, the UK extended similar rights through the Marriage Act. Portugal implemented a new law to protect transgender rights. And even Ireland — long a Catholic stronghold — introduced new measures to shield queer youth from bullying.
But 2013 also marked a turning point for a group of religious conservatives. Alarmed by what they saw as an erosion of traditional values, they began to mobilise. A decade later, activism once confined to the political fringe has evolved into a billion-euro operation seeking to defeat “gender ideology.”
The term — initially rooted in the idea that gender is a social construct — has become a catch-all for right-wing groups targeting what they see as a progressive agenda that includes everything from access to abortion to sex education to LGBTQ+ rights.
This is “something broader than anti-abortion,” explained Neil Datta, the executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), a pro-choice parliamentary network working to keep sexual and reproductive rights high on lawmakers’ agenda.
“The fact that they go for abortion rather than LGBT rights is simply a question of opportunity at one time or another,” Datta said of the anti-gender ideology movement, arguing that ultra-conservatives have made a habit of "taking religious ideas, wiping away the religious element, and framing them in a secular-sounding way."
A report by the published by the EPF on Thursday found that hundreds of organisations targeting gender ideology — including advocacy groups, media, political parties and think tanks — raised roughly $1.18 billion between 2019 and 2023, up from $81.3 million from the 2009 to 2018 period.
A splurge of cash has been pivotal to beefing up lobbying in Brussels, strengthening social media outreach, providing trainings for young conservative leaders, and, in some cases, directly financing political groups. The results have varied, but the effort has had some victories, including a clampdown on LGBTQ+ families in Italy and restrictions on abortion in Poland.
“While the anti-gay rights and gender movement in Europe is diverse, we are seeing an alignment around shared narratives and agendas,” Katrine Thomasen, associate director at the European branch of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an NGO, told The Parliament.
For many in the progressive camp, their surge in popularity came as a cold shower.
“A few years ago, we didn’t realise how big this anti-gender movement was,” Lina Gálvez, a Spanish lawmaker from the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group and chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, told The Parliament.
“We probably did not pay enough attention because, at the same time, feminism was growing,” she added, referring to the global “MeToo” movement that propelled feminism to the forefront of the public debate starting in 2017.
Who’s funding the anti-gender backlash?
Total annual anti-gender funding in Europe increased steadily to $271 million in 2022, up from $220 million in 2019, according to the EPF report.
“From Moscow to Washington, Brussels to Budapest, money is doing the heavy lifting in reshaping laws, policies, and public norms around gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights,” it notes.
The sources of that funding, however, have shifted over time.
Wealthy American conservatives and Russian oligarchs previously spent the bulk of the money on anti-gender advocacy in Europe. Today, 73% of the overall cash pot comes from EU donors, with Hungary, France, and Poland standing out as the countries with the largest funders.
Hungary — a country whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has styled himself as a defender of Western Christian civilisation — has been at the forefront of that effort.
“If you dig enough, you can find that they [conservative entities] are all funded by some Hungarian state entity of some sort,” Datta, the author of the EPF report, said.
Overall, the European donor base spans a heterogenous alliance of moneyed aristocrats, ultra-conservative tech entrepreneurs, and ideologically aligned businesses. Alongside private donors, the report uncovered that a critical amount of money — at least $171 million or 14% of the total amount — stems from EU public funding.
When it comes to public funding, the political patronage model outlined by Datta showed that not only governments, but also the EU itself has systematically channelled cash to anti-gender groups disguised as youth organisations via its Erasmus programme — including the World Youth Alliance (WYA), a Catholic NGO that lobbies against abortion in family planning, since 2009.
At the same time, Datta and his team found out that some anti-gender groups were, in turn, funnelling money into like-minded European political parties — notably the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the far-right Patriots for Europe parliamentary groups. A recurrent sponsor of the ECR is the French Fonds de dotation GT Editions, an endowment fund that supports a constellation of conservative Catholic news outlets.
Right-leaning lawmakers retort that the surge in funding is a necessary response to years of marginalisation. “If we’re talking about money, what we know is that Bill Gates and Mr. [George] Soros are giving a lot of money to pro-choice organisations,” Dutch MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen, a pro-life Christian from ECR, told The Parliament, citing philanthropic organisations that have often backed more socially progressive agendas.
The Parliament reached out to French ECR MEPs Marion Maréchal and Laurence Trochu, who are staunchly pro-life, but both declined to comment.
.png)
Abortion as a symbolic battleground
On the continent where legal abortion is most accessible globally, European conservative groups — often with strong ties to churches — have long viewed pro-life activism as a key pillar of their political fight.
“We defend true women’s rights and children’s rights to life against eugenic and population-control organisations that promote abortion worldwide,” Grégor Puppinck, the director of the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ), told The Parliament.
Since its foundation in 1998, the ECLJ, a subsidiary of the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), has become a prominent institution — and something of a household name — in the continent’s anti-abortion movement. Based in Strasbourg, the ECLJ takes on hot-button issues like religious freedom, euthanasia and pornography, pushing back against rulings from the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations that it views at odds with a Christian worldview.
Last year, the ECLJ targeted the EPF itself, accusing Datta’s organisation of “feeding a conspiracy dialectic against pro-lifers” and secretly attempting to “control the demography of poor countries.”
When asked about the rise of conservative views like those he champions, Puppinck — who insists his positions are not shaped by any political affiliation to the far right, but only by his faith — dismissed the idea that there have been any notable shifts. He pointed to France, which enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution in 2024, following the US Supreme Court’s repeal of the federal right to abortion earlier in 2022.
In reality, the past decade has seen a share of both wins and losses for Europe’s pro-life activists. While conservative movements had little success in shaping the reproductive policies of major Western countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands, their messaging found significant traction in Central and Eastern Europe.
In Poland, a 2020 constitutional ruling de facto banned abortion in cases of “foetal abnormality,” resulting in a near-total prohibition on access to abortion. In 2011 — just a year after Orbán came to power — Hungary enshrined the right to life of the foetus in its constitution. It later introduced mandatory ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, requiring them to listen to the foetal heartbeat. Moldova, for its part, issued an executive order earlier this year banning abortion via telemedicine, reversing a right won by Moldovan women in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Back in Brussels, a previous attempt to enshrine the right to abortion in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights failed after Hungary, Slovakia, and Malta used their veto power to kill the proposal.
Beyond abortion
If abortion plays a symbolic role in the struggle led by anti-gender groups, it would be a mistake to assume that simply restricting abortion is the be-all-end-all.
With Europe’s birth rate sharply below the replacement rate of 2.1 and an aging population fuelling fears over the sustainability of the bloc’s welfare system, far-right movements have been quick to integrate calls for natalist policies into their ideological arsenal — underscoring a deep alignment with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
In 2023, prominent figures from the international populist right — including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić — travelled to Budapest to attend a summit focused squarely on how to persuade European women to make more babies.
“What I see is that this [progressive and liberal] elite – instead of dealing with important issues for Europe, such as the demographic future of the continent – is preoccupied with all kinds of hashtags and nonsense,” Orbán told participants at the event. Two years later, he delivered on those promises, introducing sweeping tax breaks to women with two or more children.
In the meantime, the anti-gender pushback hasn’t gone unnoticed in Brussels.
“We are observing a backlash against gender balance everywhere — whether we're talking about the notion of consent in sexual relations, or about reproductive health and rights, or about abortion,” Hadja Lahbib, the European Commissioner for equality, said in an interview with France24 earlier this year.
Nonetheless, the bloc’s hands largely remain tied, as key competences over women’s health and reproductive rights fall firmly in the remit of national governments.
To advocates like Datta, only strengthening protections for the rights under threat and vigorously pushing back against what he sees as harmful narratives could counter the backlash, especially now that the anti-gender movement has gained a better grip on mainstream politics.
“The epicentre of this movement is no longer within religion or civil society — but firmly in the political dimension,” the researcher said.
Sign up to The Parliament's weekly newsletter
Every Friday our editorial team goes behind the headlines to offer insight and analysis on the key stories driving the EU agenda. Subscribe for free here.