The Next Wave: Interview with the author Neil Datta

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Für das Forum für Sexuelle & Reproduktive Rechte beim EU-Parlament (EPF) hat Neill Datta den Bericht The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Regaining Power über antifeministische Aktivitäten in der EU und ihre Finanzierung erstellt. Im Vergleich zu dem vorhergehenden, ebefalls von Neil Datta erstellten und 2021 veröffentlichten Bericht Tip of the Iceberg hat sich die jährliche Summe der finanziellen Unterstützung für Anti-Gender Aktivismus in Europa verdoppelt, die Bewegung ist zu einem koordinierten transnationalen Netzwerk gewachsen.

Die brasilianische Investigativjournalistin Andrea Dip hat das folgende Interview mit Neil Datta auf Englisch geführt. Wir freuen uns, dieses in einer Langversion veröffentlichen zu können und tun dies daher ausnahmsweise auf Englisch. Das Interview entstand im Kontext des Projekts „Linea B – Researching authoritarian politics between Latin America and Europe“, der ReGA-Newsletter ist zu abonnieren unter: http://tinyurl.com/3c6h83ny

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In 2021, the report Tip of the Iceberg, conducted by Neil Datta for the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual & Reproductive Rights exposed a decade (2009-2018) of $700 million in funding for anti-gender activism in Europe. His new report, The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Regaining Power, recently published, reveals that the amount spent per year has more then doubled, reaching in just five years $1.18 billion, while the movement has grown into a coordinated, transnational network.

The brasilian investigative journalist Andrea Dip interviewed Neil Datta about his new report The Next Wave and his work. This interview was done in the context of the Project „Linea B – Researching authoritarian politics between Latin America and Europe“, you can subscribe to the ReGA Newsletter here: http://tinyurl.com/3c6h83ny – We are happy to publish the interview here, therefore it’s exceptionally in English and in a long version.

Who are the main anti-gender funders in Europe today?

There are three main geographic origins. We have the United States, mainly actors with the US Christian rights. Some of the big funders are Christian right organizations who have established offices in Europe such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), also World Youth Alliance (WYA). The way that they get their money is through US private foundations, which are themselves set up by US billionaires who are usually close to them like part of the Republican party. This source is not the biggest source in Europe. It accounts for less than 10% according to our most recent figures. But it’s concentrated in litigation, So it’s really bringing US legal expertise to Europe.

The next source would be the Russian Federation: Private money coming from Russian oligarchs and public money. Over the past ten years or so, because of the sanctions, while there has been a growth in anti-gender funding from the Russian Federation, it has stayed within Russia. That’s one lesson to learn. Depending on how things go between the U.S.-Russia dynamic, a possible lifting of sanctions could mean then unleashing a torrent of Russian rubles for anti-gender far-right activism around Europe and the world.

Perhaps the biggest source of funding and the one that’s grown the most has been European proper funding for anti-gender activism in Europe. Where does this come from? There’s private money in this and we see a professionalization of private sector actors in their philanthropy for anti-gender far-right activism through the creation of large new foundations. One example of that is the Fonds du Bien Commun in France, related to a French far-right billionaire. A communist paper, L’Humanité, revealed about a year ago that there’s a 150 million euro plan funded by this billionaire in order to help the far right win the 2027 elections and also to fund litigation against “gender ideology”, “wokeism” and immigration.

Another example of funding comes from public sources. We found some elements of EU public funding going to anti-gender actors, usually by accident. It’s not huge amounts, but the biggest source of new public funding has really been from Hungary. Those countries who are sliding into illiberal authoritarianism are doing so consciously and then the people in power are funding an echo chamber of organizations which are nominally private, but they will echo the same illiberal authoritarian regime thinking. We see this in the development of think tanks, universities, etc. that all support mainly the Hungarian Orbán regime and previously in Poland also from the outgoing PiS government.

And what has changed since your other report, Tip of the Iceberg you published in 2021, in terms of figures, organizations, but also in terms of the actions of these groups, since we are at a very specific moment in Europe, with the rise of the far-right?

Things have changed at almost every level. If we take just the basic level of funding, in Tip of the Iceberg we had identified 700 million US dollars over a decade from 2009 to 2018, going into this anti-gender activism. Now in The Next Wave, we’re only taking a look at five years and we have already found 1.18 billion US dollars going into this movement, thats’s more than the double [per year]. So this movement has financially grown exponentially over the past five years.

If we break it down into what is this money paid for, what is it doing? We can break it down into five main dimensions. there is a religious dimension, where anti-gender activism comes from. We see that the main religious hierarchies in Europe that are involved in anti-gender activism, have a position to influence power. The second point is important because Muslims are present in Europe, but they’re not in any position to influence power or politics in any country in Europe except maybe Turkey and Albania. Aside from that, Muslims are not a real political player. So if we take a look at who is able to influence power, these are the main Christian denominations: Catholicism, traditionalist Protestants, and Orthodox churches. All of them have become equally more socially conservative in documents, doctrine over the past few years, and they have equally called on the faithful of their religion to be more socially active and more politically active. In a few countries, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, far-right parties are increasingly targeting Christian voters. So we have a threefold dynamic here: Increasing doctrinal conservatism, a greater call for the faithful for political engagement, and far-right political parties actively targeting the Christian faithful. Related to this, we’ve discovered a certain category of NGOs, which when we scratch beneath the surface of it, we see that it is linked to church hierarchies, financed by them, staffed by these people, and in some cases even in the statutes, a formal coordination with church hierarchy is obligatory. We’ve categorized these non-governmental organizations as church-organized NGOs, “CHONGOS”. So that’s a new thing that we’ve discovered.

Then we move to the world of civil society we have new categories of civil society. CHONGOS is one of them, another one is what we’re calling anti-gender services. We’re used to taking a look at anti-gender-funders from the perspective of what they don’t like and their contestation. So we know that the pro-life people don’t like abortion, contraception, LGBT, etc. So they fight against these politically, organize marches and whatever. What we had underestimated is the fact that they actually have an alternative, ready to be rolled out at a programmatic level to offer as an alternative to sexual reproductive health and directives. If you don’t like contraception, there’s natural family planning. If you don’t like abortion, there’s crisis pregnancy centers. So there’s an alternative for everything, and in some cases these are benefiting from public funding. It is a whole alternative world and framework that is ready to be rolled out as soon as the political will is there, which will then accompany this with financing. Other things that we’ve seen with civil society is that they’ve expanded to new territories, Nordic countries, Western Balkans, whereas they were not there five years ago.

Then we move on to the world of politics, which I would say is now the epicenter of this movement, whereas maybe 15 or 20 years ago it was really within the world of religious hierarchies, which then created their own civil society organizations or found allies within civil society, these in turn have infiltrated or become integrated political parties. So we see a migration of actors from the world of pro-life, anti-gender civil society into the VOX political party, the AfD, Chega etc. Those are now leading the battle.

Previous allies of the anti-gender movement, which used to be the center-right Christian Democrats, that were integrated within the bigger European People’s Party family, were loyal allies because they uphold the social doctrine of the church, usually Catholic church, but in some cases Protestant churches as well they were loyal allies, but they are essentially mainstream center-right political parties,. they usually can enter the government. I think the best example of that is the CDU of Chancellor Angela Merkel. We may not agree with the CDU, but it is a mainstream, normal political party. The same with the Republicains, social democrats in Portugal, the PP in Spain, etc. They were allies but not very ambitious. So the anti-gender had to find a better ally, which are the rising far-right political parties, you see them really picking this up. For example, at the Political Network for Values meeting in Madrid, there was Margarita Pizacarrión from the VOX political party, she’s emblematic of this.

A new category of actors which I would say has developed over the past five years, is the world of knowledge production in the form of think tanks. There are two types of think tanks possible, one is associated with far-right political parties. So VOX created Fundación Disenso, Rassemblement National with Marion Maréchal Le Pen [Marine Le Pen’s niece] in France created ISSEP in Lyon, and so on. So we see a domestic knowledge production capacity coming from political parties.

Another source of think tanks is the Hungarian government, which has set up two, three, four different offshoots, which then produce knowledge and content. These then have allied themselves at European level to form loose confederations, and in a number of cases they have signed partnership agreements with their US counterparts, such as the Heritage Foundation. So you have this whole production capacity now that is well funded, usually by public money, either Hungarian public money or taxpayers‘ money, because it’s a coefficient of the electoral success of the far-right political parties.

And then finally you have the geopolitical dimension, where some of these parties gain power as they have in Hungary or Italy and they may in other countries, then they’re able to engage in anti-gender politics. So we see this playing out at a diplomatic level where there’s a difficulty in getting agreement within the EU on gender, sexual reproductive health and rights, and then also a type of cold war geopolitical game about being played out in Africa and other parts of the world using gender as a geopolitical litmus test. If you are in favor of gender, you are in favor of the degenerate West, you will allow LGBT marriage to be imposed upon your traditional country, whereas if you reject it, then you are with us, you are a proud supporter of traditional values, and you don’t have to deal with this neo-colonial imposition that is being pushed on you by donor countries.

So we’ve seen changes both in terms of the overall level of funding, more than a doubling, and then fundamental changes at the religious, civil society, political, knowledge production and geopolitical levels.

Have the resources invested in political and activist training increased? I get the impression that these groups are increasingly investing in political and activist training, especially for young people. Does that make sense?

What we’ve noticed is a deliberate investment in capacity building of younger people and equally in communications and media infrastructure. The two of them have to be seen together. Out of the 275 organizations we found funding for, it’s like 100 or so that all claim to have training programs or capacity building programs for younger people or young professionals. So there’s a deliberate push in this area. And one anecdote that I usually make is when I started looking at this movement 20 years ago, when I looked around Europe, the average pro-life anti-gender advocate was an elderly man, usually white, and I thought, well, we just need to be patient and the problem will resolve itself. But I had underestimated the capacity for them to invest in capacity building for new generations, so that now the average anti-gender advocate will tend to be young and could equally be a young woman who is very well educated, speaks several languages, has a diploma in law or politics or economics, and would fit in very well, would have a CV that would be completely acceptable.

Equally, at the level of media and communications, at the top level, there’s been a concentration of traditional media into the hands of mainly right-wing billionaires, this trend is happening in many different linguistic markets. At the same time, the far-right populist and anti-gender crowd, for a long time, did not have access to traditional media. Unfortunately traditional media has been going down recently, social media has been going up. They were forced to invest in social media because it was the only platforms available to them. So they have a skillset, which is five years advanced to that of traditional, mainstream human rights progressive actors. So they’re able to invest in this and they have developed many different capacity building opportunities for the young people that they’ve trained to be active in social media, whereas it looks like we’re not there yet.

Sometimes people find it difficult to understand the concrete impacts of these anti-gender groups. Could you provide some examples?

The most dramatic impact I’m aware of is the situation in Poland where at least six Polish women have died because they were not given access to abortion when they needed this. This is a direct result of the change in law that came about as a result of a ruling from the Constitutional Tribunal which reflects the anti-gender ideology behind prohibiting abortion. In a wealthy country that has all of the modern medical apparatus you can imagine, six women died unnecessarily because of ideological beliefs to not allow them to access abortion.

Then you have the many women in Italy who as a result of recent changes in law, these lesbian couples have a difficult situation with the children that they’ve adopted. So this is an unnecessary administrative burden that is being imposed upon hundreds if not thousands of people in Italy. In Italy the government is sending pro-life people into family planning centres to dissuade women from going ahead with an abortion if that’s their choice. So I think we can see here concrete examples of what is happening once these people do get into power.

And separately, this is a bit more diffuse, these groups also wish to cut funding for progressive groups. They dismantled USAID in the United States, stopping any money going to contraceptives. Right now the big story in Belgium and the EU is the possible incineration of ten million dollars worth of contraceptives by USAID. These are all products that would be beneficial for women in low-income countries and they’re there in a warehouse. And the US government wants to proactively incinerate these products rather than even donate them to an organization that would know how to use them. It has a real impact, mainly on women, but on everybody in society as well in their day to day lives. It’s not just theoretical.

Who are the most relevant financiers of specific religious anti-gender propaganda? And what is the importance of these church-organized NGOs?

The main funders behind each one of them would be institutions related to each religion. So the Catholics will fund the Catholic-related chongos, the traditionalist Protestants, the traditionalist Protestant Chongos, and there’s a lot of private money in Russia that will fund some of the Orthodox ones. The model for each one is a bit different. The traditionalist Protestant ones get money mainly from private backers in the so-called Dutch Bible Belt, a certain part of the Netherlands, which is very Calvinist in its orientation. They’re not billionaires, but the local millionaires.

Then for the Russian world, there would be a lot of the oligarchs. According to a very old model that we had in all societies and still exists in many of them, where the wealthy in society feel an obligation to give something back to the works of the church, and then you support these church-related activities. We have this in every country.

In the Catholic world, it’s more complex. There’s a lot of public money that goes into different institutions which are inspired by different Catholic entities. One thing that surprised us is that when we take a look at a certain number of the church organized NGOs, we can take a look at the individuals. And so we see that these Opus Dei universities provide a lot of the brains behind some of the chongos and some of the anti-gender services. So they’re not labeled Opus Dei, but what you find is a whole range of individuals who have a good, very strong academic background who come from Opus Dei-related universities who are involved in all of these anti-gender services, organizations and church organized NGOs.

And do you think that in a general way it’s possible to say that different religious Christians orientations like Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals, are getting closer or they are getting more competitive?

I would say that they’re probably getting closer. On the one hand, there’s some academics that talk about ecumenical conservatism, where you have these different groups in society, these different religious groups, being able to work together because they see that they have a common enemy, and that common enemy is “gender ideology”. Or it used to be, maybe now they’ve renamed the common enemy instead of “gender ideology” it’s “wokeism”. And maybe it will be something else in a couple of years. But they’re able to identify a common enemy, and when you have a common enemy, then that acts as an external federator upon the different disparate groups.

And then there’s another theoretical way of looking at this, which comes from the economics of religion. Where there, the idea is that the more religious freedom one allows, and a greater space for more different religions, the greater amount of total religious adherence you will have. It’s a bit the same principle that the more credit cards you as a consumer will have, the more money you will spend overall. And so like this, they increase the overall market in society for religious, practice or religious adhesion, like this, each one can grow a bit better. So that’s from the political economy of religious thinking.

And who are the main players in Germany? What are the main issues and how do they interact politically? Also, does the AfD play a role in this?

Some German journalists have been contacting me recently about this, because they were interested specifically if and how there was an impact on the election of a judge to the German Supreme Court, to the Bundesverfassungsgericht. And you know, there was a big case about this one candidate being too liberal and pro-abortion and wanting to ban AfD and things like this. And that her election was delayed was seen as a victory by the anti-gender side. And you can see this on the Agenda Europe blog. There’s a big self-congratulatory message about how they won this round.

In terms of the ones who are active in Germany, there’s Tradition, Familie, Privateigentum (TFP). This is the older generation. But you have a number of organizations centered around the personality of Mathias von Gersdorff. So you have the Deutsche Vereinigung für eine Christliche Kultur (DVCK). You have Kinder in Gefahr (KiG). And it’s all the same thing, just different logos. Related, then also connected to TFP, you have Paul von Oldenburg, who heads up several TFP organizations and he is the cousin of Beatrix von Storch, who is herself from the AfD. There’s a recent internal policy note from the AfD [editor’s annotation: it comes directly from the office of Beatrix von Storch] about how they should be targeting different types of voters. One of the things that they specifically say there is that they should target Christian voters.

Then you have another range of actors which are the civil society groups as 1000plus, the Bundesverband Lebensrecht (BVL), a few others from the anti-feminist side, a whole range of different ones like this. You have another category which are much more behind the scenes, but they seem to be the money behind a lot of this, which is the Foundation Ja zum Leben. When you take a look at who’s involved in this Foundation, it looks like you have some of the oldest money in Germany bankrolling this. It’s a number of countesses and princes and princesses, which at first I thought was exotic. But when you do some digging around, you find that 100 years ago, they may have lost their titles and privileges, but they were allowed to keep their castles and forests and money. Even today they remain some of the wealthiest families in Germany and they do have this private Foundation Ja zum Leben.

And when you take a look at what they are supporting, they say that they’re supporting Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in the United States, probably the global work they do in Europe. They’re funding a number of anti-gender services such as TeenStar [editor’s annotation: initiative working on „sex education“] and they’re funding advocacy on anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights. So I would say those would be some of the main categories of anti-gender activists that we find in Germany.

But looks like there is not as much German money in the report. Do you think that Germany is somehow not on the front line of this wave?

As we explained in our report, the numbers in terms of funding are based on publicly available information. In this respect, Germany is a black hole of financial transparency and I really emphasize a black hole, there’s no good way of saying this, and there’s no way of being polite about it. We have easier access getting financial data from Hungary, Poland, and even the Russian Federation than we do from Germany. So what there is in Germany is a huge underreporting.There is a suggestion that there’s a lot more money there, but it’s not transparently available.

How close is the cooperation with the far-right parties in the EP in your understanding? Are these networks within the parties or do they prefer to maintain their own structures outside of the parties, to stay independent and also more religious maybe? Does a figure like Bartulica have a real influence in Brussels or not?

I would say it depends on the different anti-gender actors. Some would remain independent, but we see a real coordination between anti-gender civil society actors and political actors. One is this Hungarian funded think tank called MCC, Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve come out with three or four reports, all critical of different fundamental aspects of liberal democracy, whether it’s environmental rights, civil society, human rights organizations, or even the free media, and how each one of them has been corrupted and perverted by receiving EU money.

These reports are highly dubious academic quality, but they produce them, and then they do their social media. Within 24 hours, you have MEPs, usually from the Patriots for Europe and a certain segment from the ECR, picking up on these reports and then launching a volley of parliamentary questions aimed at the European Commission. The European Commission does not know what’s happening. They are averse to drama. So all of a sudden, they’ve been doing what they thought was right and then they get a whole series of parliamentary questions which are really questioning a fundamental thing that they were doing. So then the Commission will act in a manner which is risk averse, they will start questioning what they have done and they will start thinking, this thing that we’re doing, it causes noise. We don’t like noise, so we’re going to stop doing it. This is how they aim to influence the EU institutions. This is taking place at a time when right now in the EU we’re discussing the next seven-year budget, the multi-annual financial framework, and the aim is clear: The Hungarian-funded think tanks want to stop EU funding towards entities which may question the democratic backsliding of the Hungarian government. If you’re able to stop the funding for this, then you can stop a lot of the problems that are being directed at Hungary, all these annoying NGOs criticizing them. So there’s clear coordination.

And about Bartulica, it’s clear he has influence within the ECR. He’s invested in sort of taking leadership in some core aspects of ECR thinking, on family and traditions and things like this. So for two, three years in a row, he’s organized ECR retreats with European Parliament money in Dubrovnik in order to discuss family and values and things like this. And he chooses the main speakers, it’s all people who have anti-gender thinking. So having a discussion in politics within a political party on the role of the family is absolutely fine. But then when he organizes this, and based on the speakers that he’s selecting, he’s aiming to push the whole ECR in a certain direction, which is that of a reductionist, traditional values, patriarchal family model.

This interview of Andrea Dip was done in the context of the Project „Linea B – Researching authoritarian politics between Latin America and Europe“, you can subscribe to the ReGA Newsletter here: http://tinyurl.com/3c6h83ny

The Next Wave: Interview with the author Neil Datta von Nachrichtenpool Lateinamerika ist lizenziert unter Creative Commons Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 international.