Learn how ILGA-Europe managed to align a large chunk of the new European Parliament with its goals and strategies, and how Arcigay in Italy convinced its community to go vote.
The past five years have been a bit of a mixed bag for LGBTQI+ communities in Europe. On the one hand, EU institutions – in particular the Commission and the Parliament – have seemed more committed than ever to protecting the rights of LGBTQI+ people. On the other hand, far-right parties that spread hateful narratives around LGBTQI+ issues are on the rise. What is civil society doing to counter this trend?
In 2020, at the beginning of the EU’s last legislative term, the European Commission adopted its first-ever EU LGBTIQ Equality Strategy. It also took steps to ensure the cross-country recognition of same-sex parents and proposed to include hate crime and hate speech against LGBTQI+ people within EU crimes. It took Hungary to court over its discriminatory 2021 law, importantly arguing that LGBTQI+ rights are fundamental EU values –– and garnering the full support of no less than fifteen member states.
However, the outcomes of these initiatives, in reality, have at times been disappointing. For example, while national authorities are required to recognise the parental bonds legally established in another member state, same-sex parents in practice are often faced with long and expensive proceedings before national authorities. Proposed regulation that would speed this process up requires the European Council to act unanimously –– but not all member states are aligned on this topic. The necessity for unanimity in the European Council has proven to be a stumbling block on the road to advancing the rights of LGBTQI+ people in the EU, with far-right parties on the rise in recent years. The far-right’s use of anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric and strategies poses another challenge: LGBTQI+ people are currently at the center of loaded political debates in a way they weren’t just five years ago.
“There has been a marked increase in what we call political homophobia or transphobia,” says Brian Finnegan, director of communications at ILGA Europe.
“There has been a marked increase in what we call political homophobia or transphobia,” says Brian Finnegan, director of communications at ILGA Europe, the European branch of an organization that aims to advance the rights of LGBTQI+ people in more than 155 countries. “This is distinct from personal homophobia or transphobia, in that it concerns people who might personally support LGBTQI+ rights but who are hesitant to commit to the cause politically because it has become such a divisive topic. Even five years ago, during the 2019 European Parliament election campaign, supporting LGBTQI+ rights was more of a given for many political actors. Now, it has become more difficult to bring people on board. This is a direct consequence of the spread, in Europe, of hateful far-right narratives that target us.”
Thankfully, this does not mean that EU politicians don’t stand up for LGBTQI+ people anymore: in the months leading up to this year’s European elections, a total of 1110 EP candidates across Europe signed a pledge to protect and advance the rights of LGBTQI+ people, should they be voted into parliament.
This happened at the initiative of ILGA Europe in the context of their Come Out 4 Europe campaign. “Creating pledges like this is a tactic used by many civil society organizations,” explains Finnegan.“We have done this for the last three European elections. The idea behind this strategy is that it’s a way to not just align candidates with our goals, but also with our strategies –– which are made explicit in the pledge document signed by these politicians. We launched the campaign with members of the LGBTQI+ Intergroup in Strasbourg, gaining signatures to kick-start candidate engagement.
Our policy team engaged directly with candidates and parties through various means, including personal contacts and at information sessions on how to deal with anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric during the campaign. We used ILGA-Europe’s social media channels to drive the campaign with our supporter base and with voters, and we provided member organizations with graphics, social media templates, translations of the pledge, videos, and various other ways to engage candidates and voters. We also sent out a newsletter sharing advice and resources, and we made a list of influencer activists and reached out to them directly, providing easy guidelines for people to record their own videos We then published these directly on our website and our social media channels.”
Of those 1110 pledged candidates, 164 were elected to the parliament in June. “That is not a bad number at all –– it’s more than we had hoped for,” says Finnegan. “It’s a bit down from 2019 when almost 30% of MEPS had signed our pledge, but the difference is not as significant as we had feared. We have already begun to engage with them, sharing our calls for the new EU mandate with them and meeting several of them at our annual fundraiser in July. In September, we will be inviting them to a meet and greet session at the parliament, and from there we will seek to work directly with them throughout the coming term. But let me add that even though the election outcome was not as bad as we feared, we’re not out of the woods–– not by a long shot.We have work to do.”
This work consists of several things: on the one hand, importance is given to the reframing of LGBTQI+ rights in less loaded terms, in order to neutralize the debate around them and deconstruct the harmful narratives that are being spread by far-right actors. “We try to use more terms like freedom and love –– concepts people can personally relate to,” says Finnegan. “We are seeing that this has more impact than using more abstract concepts, such as democracy.”
Another strategy that LGBTQI+ organizations are deploying to push back against the far-right parties who target them, is mobilizing their communities. Research shows that when LGBTQI+ rights are felt to be high on the political agenda, LGBTQI+ people are more likely than their heterosexual and cisgender peers to vote and further participate in forms of democracy.. This holds true in both Europe and North America. In closely fought elections, a mobilized minority can have a tangible impact on an election outcome, according to the Swedish political researcher Michal Grahn. A study that was focused on Sweden found that once LGBTQI+ communities have been mobilized around a specific topic – such as a threat to their own rights – they tend to stay politically engaged long after their rights have become established and politically normalized. LGBTQI+ voters in Europe tend to support liberal, green and left-leaning political parties.
According to Italian LGBTQI+ organization Arcigay, the successful mobilization of their community played an important role in stemming the impact of the far-right in their country. “The election outcome made us breathe a small sigh of relief,” says Gabriele Piazzoni, general secretary of Arcigay. “The European Parliament, despite the advance of the right in many countries, maintains a progressive character. In Italy Giorgia Meloni’s party still wins, and this is not a good thing, but some data describe a countertrend that has precisely to do with our community: the LGBTQI+ community strongly supports its representatives and progressive parties.” Politicians such as the openly lesbian and former athlete Carolina Morace, or the Democratic Party’s Alessandro Zan, who is a former president of Arcigay Padova, received an exceptionally high number of votes.
This seems to be a direct result of Arcigay’s GOTV campaign in the weeks before the elections, dubbed Io Voto. “At the end of 2023, working with the University of Verone and the PoliTesse study center, we discovered that the rate of abstention in the last political elections had been 6% higher in our community than in the general populace,” explains Piazzoni. “This fact alarmed us, but we decided to take responsibility. It is up to us, we said, to intervene –– starting with the people in our spaces and networks. Our Io Voto campaign, which we developed with the help of political consultants, set in motion a mechanism that has led to clear involvement.”
Arcigay used the pride parades, organized in ten different Italian cities in early summer, to kick-off and strengthen their campaign. They were able to reach a large slice of voters this way –– voters who almost uniformly vote for progressive parties if they can be convinced to vote. The activists used quirky, fun tactics, involving stickers depicting right-wing reactionaries as video game monsters to beat, and a deal with thirty LGBTQI+ friendly clubs: anyone showing up with a stamped voter card on election day, received a free drink. Arcigay also collaborated with popular influencers to create videos on the importance of voting, getting Italian stars like the actress Sabrina Ferilli on board. Each part of the community was reached through at least one influencer particularly connected to that group. The campaign’s website, meanwhile, included an overview of candidate’s profiles, which was linked to social media. People could vote candidates ‘up’ or ‘down’ based on attitudes and commitment to LGBTQI+ rights –– making it easy for voters to find out, at a glance, how each of the candidates relates to these issues.
“Our community needed to find itself in a simple, common challenge: that of going to vote,” says Piazzoni, looking back. ”And we did. It has been a great experience of empowering a community that, being the target of the government’s hostile policies, could have suffered this oppression –– but instead chose to react.”
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