The EU’s Woke Financial Agenda

All the data in this article – which summarizes a text by the European Center for Law and Justice (ECJL) – are officially published by the European Commission.

Three activist causes in particular are supported by these funds.

Promotion of Abortion

In 2024, the EU paid subsidies to the IPPF European Network, the European branch of the International Planned Parenthood Federation: €919,000 out of a total budget of €1.1 million. It is an amount that is still increasing, since it received €875,987 in 2023 and €599,000 in 2022. In 2024, IPPF had an annual budget of $125 million, and Planned Parenthood had, under President Biden, a budget of around two billion dollars.

The EU funds other projects promoting abortion. €342,000 was given to the Abortion, Law and Nature (ALaN) project. Another project concerning abortion care in Europe project cost €1.4 million. It studied the impact of legal restrictions and practical obstacles to abortion in European countries and analyzed women’s strategies to deal with them.

Promoting Trans Wokeness

The EU also funds projects and organizations promoting transgender ideology. Thus, a project entitled “Women’s Invisible Ink: Transgender Writing and the Sexuation of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity” received €1.5 million in funding, with the notable objective of analyzing “textual misogyny.”

The Transgender Europe association, which lobbies the European Commission, was funded between 2019 and 2021 to the tune of 80% of its budget, or around €350,000 per year. This is a textbook case of a widespread practice: a public institution financing a private actor to artificially create an interlocutor “from civil society” and thus legitimize its action through this means.

The Fight Against Populism 

The €1.46 million project, “The Rise and Fall of Populism and Extremism,” is analyzing the “causes of populism” by studying the resumes of 40 million U.S. job seekers. It also analyzes UK archives to explain how corporal punishment affected educational attainment, anti-social behavior, and the Brexit vote.

The EU has funded a €193,000 project, “Populist Nationalism in ‘Global’ Western India, 1920-1939,” to explore the links between emerging Hindu nationalism and European fascism in the 1920s and 30s, in order to better understand the transnational nature of the radical far right. 

Another project for the modest sum of €172,000, “The Micro-Foundations of Macro-Institutions: An Empirical Investigation of the Co-Evolution of Populist Rhetoric and Organizations,” aims to analyze the microeconomic bases of populism by studying the evolution of populist discourse and its impact on multinational institutions and organizations.

Finally, to cite a last example, €257,000 was spent to study the evolution of the transatlantic liberal consensus between Europe and the United States through a literary and cultural analysis of populism and nationalism,. It is entitled, “Transatlantic Approaches to Contemporary Literature in the Age of Trump.”

Promoting Islam in Europe

The EU also funds the promotion of Islam in Europe. This is the case, for example, with the project that is both woke and Islamic: “Queer Muslim Asylum Spaces: Between Rightness and Injustice in the German Heteronormative and Homonormative Asylum System,” which costs €195,000. It focuses on “the study of queer asylum in Europe” concerning “people of Muslim origin.”

Another €345,000 project is aimed at designing theatrical tools for the prevention of Islamophobia. The EU also spent €271,000 donated to a project to study “how Islam provides a new framework of ethical norms and religious practices for a number of Europeans who are dissatisfied with the social role occupied by Christian churches.”

According to the European Commission, the funding of these projects should produce “a wide range of results.” There is reason to doubt it. The main and objective result of financing these projects is the increase in expenditure for services that would certainly not receive the majority of votes if European citizens were consulted.

At a time when French debt has never been so high and inflation is increasing, it is high time to question the interest for the European taxpayer in funding this research, concludes the ECJL. This conclusion can also be applied to a number of other European countries.