'The Next Wave'. Interview with Neil Datta on his new report.

'The Next Wave'

Interview with Neil Datta on his new report

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, recently published, reveals that the amount spent per year has more the doubled in just five years, reaching $1.18 billion over all, while the movement has grown into a coordinated, transnational network.

Beyond religious rhetoric, Datta identifies an increasingly professionalized infrastructure encompassing church-affiliated NGOs, far-right political alliances, well-financed think tanks, and targeted media strategies.

Germany emerges as a notable case – not for the volume of disclosed funding, which remains obscured by what Datta describes in this interview as a “black hole of financial transparency” – but for the prominence of its actors. Ultra-conservative groups such as Tradition, Familie, Privateigentum (TFP), networks linked to AfD figures including Beatrix von Storch, and aristocratic foundations such as Ja zum Leben form part of a wider European movement.

Datta points out that recent AfD strategy documents explicitly call for appealing to Christian voters, echoing a broader pattern in which far-right parties across Europe seek to mobilize religious constituencies.

The implications, Datta warns, are tangible: from legislative restrictions on reproductive rights in Poland to growing pressure on EU institutions. While the scale of German funding remains unclear, its organizational reach and political connections place the country firmly within this “next wave” reshaping Europe’s social and political landscape.

Following a short piece of the interview that is published completely at npla.de.

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?

Neil Datta: 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?
Neil Datta: 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.

The interview is published completely at npla.de.