The European Union has committed €11.1 million to four research projects that examine how right-wing movements use ideas about gender to attract young men, according to the European Commission’s own grants database.
Three of the four were awarded under a single 2024 call, titled “Gender-roles in extremist movements and their impact on democracy”, which sat inside the Horizon Europe cluster on culture, creativity and inclusive society.
The work programme set an indicative budget of €9 million for the topic, with the Commission estimating a contribution of €2 million to €3 million per project and expecting to fund three. Three were funded, drawing €8.63 million between them.
The biggest award, €3.01 million, went to MEN4DEM, coordinated by the University of Amsterdam. Its published objective states that European liberal democracy is “at stake” because of the electoral success of parties it calls extreme-right.
The project said it would work with young men, civil society partners and a European network of gender justice organisations to develop interventions promoting models of democratic masculinity.
Planned outputs include tools for policymakers, practitioners, campaign groups and political parties in Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Fresh survey data is being gathered in the same six countries covering democratic values, nationalism, gender role attitudes, male toughness and views of women in political roles.
The consortium is not purely academic. It brings in the Dutch theatre company Via Berlin and Emancipator, an organisation working on men and masculinity, with the project describing its method as a triangle of society, art and science.
A second project, YOU-DARE, received €3 million and is coordinated by the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg, eastern France. It runs from February 1, 2025 to January 31, 2028 and covers Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
Its objective states that the project will “study and intervene on” the gender constructions of right-wing youth groups and their leaders, including online influencers.
It also plans a policy lab and the funding of local pilot schemes intended to reduce the appeal of those ideas among young people. Among its 11 partners are Goldsmiths, Stockholm University, the University of Glasgow, the Hungarian think-tank Political Capital and ALDA, a local democracy network.
The consortium’s scientific coordinator, Susi Meret of Aalborg University in Denmark, has said that much of the support for right-wing parties across Europe comes from young people, and from young men in particular.
The third project, EMMELO, received €2.62 million and is coordinated by the University of Galway, western Ireland. It began on May 1, 2025 and focuses on Ireland, Sweden, France, Hungary, Germany and Slovakia.
Its partners include the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism organisation, alongside the Central European University in Vienna and universities in Bordeaux, Göttingen, Uppsala and Banská Bystrica, central Slovakia.
EMMELO examines how extremist leaders perform masculinity online and how the men who follow them respond, with the stated aim of producing gender-sensitive tools and policy recommendations.
The fourth, FIERCE, was awarded €2.49 million under an earlier call titled “Feminisms for a new age of democracy” and closed on August 31, 2025. Coordinated by the Greek company ViLabs, it studied feminist and what it termed anti-gender movements in eight countries across five policy areas, among them migration and the labour market.
It ended with a final conference at the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels on June 20, 2025 and a charter setting out demands for MEPs elected that year.
The money has already drawn political fire. In January, Hungarian MEP Tamás Deutsch tabled an amendment to a European Parliament interim report on the next long-term budget calling for “the immediate discontinuation of programmes” that he said served neither technological sovereignty nor scientific leadership.
Deutsch, who sits with the right-wing Patriots for Europe group and serves on the assembly’s budget and budgetary control committees, named YOU-DARE among the projects that should be abandoned.
University bodies pushed back. The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities and the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities both called for the amendment to be rejected, warning that stripping funding from research areas for ideological reasons would damage the reputation of Horizon Europe, Science|Business reported.
The grants land amid continuing scrutiny of how the EU institutions channel money to advocacy groups, an area Brussels Signal has previously reported on.
The European Court of Auditors said in a special report published on April 7, 2025 that more than 12,000 NGOs were awarded €7.4 billion under the bloc’s internal policies between 2021 and 2023, €4.8 billion of it directly from the Commission and the rest through member states.
Auditors found the overview of that spending was neither reliable nor transparent, that compliance with EU values was not checked proactively and that more than 40 per cent of direct EU funding went to just 30 organisations. The Commission accepted all the recommendations, two of them only in part.
Defenders of the sector dispute the framing. Transparency International EU argued that most of the report’s criticisms would apply equally to companies and consultancies, while the Socialists and Democrats group said the audit confirmed that EU funding for NGO advocacy is lawful.
