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Understanding how ecosystems work is a crucial first step in protecting the things people value most: clean air, clean water, and a healthy, resilient environment for future generations. But the...

• Many transit agencies are unlikely to fully recover from the pandemic anytime soon, particularly since remote work appears here to stay, at least for white-collar workers who used to ride commuter rail to their downtown office. The long-term trend looks better, though, as long as young people keep flocking to cities. (Governing)
• Amtrak is an exception, with ridership up almost 6% between October and April, and smaller operating losses than projected. (Trains)
• Speeding kills 12,000 a people a year in the U.S., leading some states to mandate devices on repeat offenders’ cars that limit how fast they can go. (Jalopnik)
• After testing cargo e-bikes for deliveries in New York, Amazon is expanding their use to other cities. (NY Times)
• The Texas Supreme Court sent a lawsuit challenging Austin transit expansion Project Connect back to a lower court to rule on a jurisdictional issue. (KVUE)
• Texas transportation officials are negotiating potential routes for high-speed rail between Dallas and Fort Worth and Dallas and Houston (Fort Worth Report). The attorney general’s lawsuit is one reason why costs keep rising and Project Connect’s centerpiece, a downtown light rail line, keeps shrinking (Texas Tribune).
• Transit ridership in Atlanta almost doubled in March to 4 million, after MARTA changed how it collects ridership data (11 Alive). GoTriangle ridership in the Raleigh area was up by a third in April, which officials attributed to high gas prices (ABC 11).
• The chairman of Atlanta Journal-Constitution owner Cox Enterprises, who comes from generational wealth and has probably never ridden transit in his life, came out against Beltline light rail, even though it’s been part of the plan going back to the Beltline’s inception in the late 1990s.
• Seattle Bike Blog challenged a nonsensical op-ed in the Seattle Times that claimed bike lanes make drivers “fatigued” and blamed safety projects for sending drivers into road rage.
• It wasn’t a surprise that Oregon Democrats’ proposal for small hikes to the gas tax and payroll tax to fund transportation failed, but the fact that 83% of voters rejected it was a shock. What does that mean for November elections? (KGW 8)
• Downtown Phoenix has hundreds of broken parking meters. (AZ Family)
• San Diego residents took advantage of Amtrak to avoid crowded roads over Memorial Day weekend. (KSBY)
• Toronto’s frequent bus service, even in relatively low-density neighborhoods, made it the only North American transit system where ridership rose in the decades following World War II, showing that suburbanites will ride the bus if it’s convenient. (Infrastory)
• A European human rights court ruled that a food courier’s viral TikTok rant against bus-only lanes in Tbilisi, Georgia crossed the line between free speech and personal abuse. (Courthouse News Service)

At a time when other public officials and the media are talking less about climate change, Sheldon Whitehouse remains fiercely outspoken. He delivered his 307th climate speech on the Senate floor this month and is pushing back against the recent trend of “climate hushing.”

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The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) recently published a special report warning that rising food prices will persist alongside global geopolitical instability. They call for nations to build “resilient self-reliance” across global food and agriculture systems to ensure greater food security and economic sovereignty.

In an increasingly interconnected global market, food commodities are exposed to supply chain volatility risk caused by geopolitical instability, the report says. Retaliatory tariffs, military conflict, and the recent reduction in foreign food aid packages have exacerbated economic issues facing farmers today. The report notes that attacks in the Gulf region threaten global food security due to volatile energy markets: “Over one-third of global urea and sulfur exports—key ingredients for nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, respectively—pass through the Strait of Hormuz.” Such disruptions “will likely have global consequences due to rising oil prices that could spill over into food and fertilizer prices,” the report asserts.

“The impact of high energy prices will likely drive up the cost of food more than fertilizer alone because our food systems are so fossil fuel-dependent,” says Jennifer Clapp, a member of the IPES-Food panel and lead author of the special report. In places like the United States, these additional costs come as farmers are projected to experience an approximate 2.6 percent loss in real income (inflation-adjusted dollars) relative to last year.

The report discusses the efficacy of supply management policies—market intervention strategies including quotas and importation limits—in high-income nations like Canada. “The food system has become so volatile, and we are so vulnerable to food price inflation that we feel like we need to do something,” says Clapp. In Canada, for example, public management of dairy products helps to insulate local farmers from global market volatility by allowing them to sell their commodities at profit-generating prices.

But rising food insecurity rates in Canada indicate that diversifying the range of supply-managed commodities can help improve local resilience. Clapp, who serves as a Professor and Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, Canada, tells Food Tank that “as one in four [Canadians] face food insecurity, diversification is a really important policy for us to ensure access to more fresh fruits and vegetables.”

The report highlights public food stockholding programs as pragmatic policy options for nations at risk of food insecurity. By pooling agronomic resources from primarily small producers, West African nations are able to collaboratively store food to quickly disseminate based on the needs of municipalities within the region.

To decouple local food production systems from global markets, nations must reconcile the demand of consumers with systemic policy transitions. “Thinking about diversity of diets is important because it can change those demand patterns. If people were eating more beans, tofu [etc.], there’s a way in which we can envision dietary change helping to facilitate more diverse production systems,” Clapp tells Food Tank.

For example, U.S. livestock production depends on corn and soybeans as inputs, two crops that currently serve as the largest users of nitrogen fertilizers and herbicides. Because of this structural reliance, Clapp argues that a diverse, plant-based diet puts eaters “already way ahead” in terms of both ecological impact and resilience to energy shocks.

This need for resilient self-reliance is even more urgent in the global South. As the special report notes, “The impacts of rising food prices are highly uneven. Net food-importing countries in the Global South have been hit the hardest, with inflation peaks reaching up to 30% in May 2023.”

While these nations have a massive opportunity to insulate themselves from global market turmoil by pioneering localized, self-reliant food strategies, doing so effectively requires international debt relief. Ultimately, as the report emphasizes, “the most vulnerable countries have the most to lose from the way the current system is organized, they also have the most to gain from leading the transition towards self-reliance and protection from dependency.”

Central to this transition is a food sovereignty approach that prioritizes equity, diversity, and local agency. By using market management tools to protect smallholders, nations can transition away from cash-crop dependence and cultivate traditional crops. The report highlights that these mechanisms “act as stabilizing buffers, support smaller-scale and more diverse producers, and improve access to food for marginalized and vulnerable people,” building deep ecological and economic resilience against future global shocks.

Meanwhile, recent U.S. dietary guidelines recommend increased protein intake for healthy adults, which many interpret as a push for greater meat and animal product consumption. This focus on animal protein runs counter to calls for the diverse, plant-based systems needed to build global food resilience.

While geopolitics remain complicated and uncertain, structural shifts in consumption patterns could redefine agricultural dependency. As Clapp emphasizes to Food Tank, modifying these foundational demand patterns is essential: “If it’s going to be protein, it needs to be more plant-based protein.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Jim Niakaris, Unsplash

The post A New World Order: How Nations Can Tackle the New Geopolitics of Food appeared first on Food Tank.

More than half of the projects are driven by forecasted load growth, marking an evolution in transmission planning from an emphasis on accessing low-cost renewables to “now also reliably meeting growing customer demand,” CAISO said.

The approved portfolio includes about 3.8 GW of new capacity, anchored by 2,088 MW of gas generation, along with 1,100 MW of wind, 189 MW of solar and 472 MW/1.9 GWh of battery storage.

A baby whale doesn’t stand a chance against a speeding ship.

By betting on efficiency, storage, long-term energy planning and grid flexibility, the Illinois’ Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act offers a blueprint for the state’s energy future, Vote Solar’s John Delurey writes.

Open, transparent debate is essential for the cooperative movement. Yet in many co-ops, criticism stays private, and praise goes public, leaving members in the dark, weakening collective decision-making, and enabling bad ideas and bad actors to proliferate.

Study shows that deforestation destroys important natural sinks that filter out deadly air pollution

Source

Residential sales fell 0.1% year over year while residential prices soared 10.2% in the same period, to 18.8 cents/kWh, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

Completed competitive transmission projects are also about 30% less expensive than comparable incumbent utility projects, according to a report from the think tank. 

No matter where you live in the United States or what your driving habits are, a battery electric vehicle is likely to have a smaller carbon footprint and cost less overall than a comparable gasoline-powered vehicle, according to a new analysis.

The study calls into question some persistent myths about EVs – and gives policymakers and individual drivers tools to evaluate the benefits for their specific situation.

It’s well known that the emissions savings from EVs vary due to a number of factors, such as the greenness of the local electricity grid, climate, and a person’s driving habits. EVs also tend to cost more upfront than gasoline cars, but have lower fuel and maintenance costs. How all these tradeoffs pencil out can be hard to figure.

Most previous studies have looked at just one or a few of these factors at a time. In the new study, the researchers gathered data from every U.S. zip code and systematically analyzed a host of factors that might affect emissions or costs: local climate, electricity sources, congestion, urban versus rural driving and traffic patterns, electricity and gasoline prices, and individual variations in driving habits.

They used the results of the analysis to update a freely available website that compares the life-cycle emissions and total ownership costs of almost any type of EV and gasoline vehicle. “We provide quantitative answers to common questions asked by prospective EV owners,” the researchers write.

EVs reduce emissions the most in areas with a green electric grid, heavier traffic, greater annual travel distances, and mild climate, the researchers found.

 

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In any given area, EVs reduce emissions more for those drivers who drive more often, drive bigger vehicles, and spend more time stuck in traffic.

In most parts of the country, an EV reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 40-60% compared to a gasoline car. Not surprisingly, the greenness of the local grid is the biggest factor in driving differences in emission savings from place to place.

Many members of the public assume that EVs are no better than gasoline cars if the electricity that powers them comes from fossil fuels. But grids have gotten greener, and even in areas with the most carbon-intensive electricity, EVs almost always come out ahead, the researchers found.

Moreover, because grids everywhere are getting even greener yet, this will become less of a source of variation in the future, and individual driving patterns will matter more and more. Already, in some instances individual differences in driving patterns can matter as much as all regional factors combined, the analysis shows.

EVs also reduce emissions even in the most unfavorable climate conditions, upending assumptions that they have little environmental benefit in cold climates. It’s true that battery function takes a hit in the cold, but considered over the course of a whole year the effect on emissions savings is pretty small.

The cost of electricity is the largest factor in determining the relative costs of the different types of vehicles. In most areas of the United States, EVs are cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles, even without tax credits for clean vehicles. In areas where electricity is relatively cheap, EVs tend to have a lower lifetime ownership cost than gasoline cars.

Source: Miotti M. and J.E. Trancik. “Determinants of electric vehicle emissions savings and costs across locations and individuals.” Environmental Research Letters 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

 

Mill Industries and Amazon are partnering to keep grocery store food waste out of landfills. Mill’s recycling systems will roll out in Whole Foods Market stores in 2027, turning discarded food scraps into chicken feed for the retailer’s private-label egg suppliers.

The Mill grounds will make up 5 to 10 percent of suppliers’ total feed, and Whole Foods hopes to offer it at a lower cost than traditional feed, says Caitlin Leibert, Vice President of Sustainability at Whole Foods Market. The pilot will begin in the produce department, but Leibert notes the opportunity for expansion to other food waste streams. Whole Foods is working closely with farmers and cross-functional teams to validate the model and prepare for launch.

According to ReFED, food retailers in the United States generated an estimated 4.63 million tons of surplus food, worth US$30.3 billion. Despite donation and composting pathways, nearly 30 percent of that food ended up in landfills or incinerators.

Mill Co-Founder & President Harry Tannenbaum sees both an economic and environmental opportunity in reducing retail-level food waste. He tells Food Tank, “When we waste food, we’re wasting the water, energy, labor, land, and time it took to grow it, along with the opportunity to put those resources to better use. Tackling this issue head-on is a massive opportunity for impact.”

ReFED estimates that only 11.4 percent of surplus food was repurposed for animal feed. Adoption has been constrained by food safety concerns, logistical complexity, and limited infrastructure. But with proper processing, food waste can be converted into safe, nutritious, and cost-effective animal feed.

In South Korea, government-supported operations help divert more than 90 percent of the country’s food waste and turn over 42 percent into animal feed. “That really shows that with the right infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, monitoring systems, and government investment, you can manage some of the risks,” Sharyn Murray, Director of Impact Capital Programs at ReFED, tells Food Tank.

There is a common misconception that waste-feeding reduces production or compromises quality, says Ryan Martens, Livestock Director at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York. But the Center has operated a waste-feeding program for over a decade, and Martens reports they have not seen any decline in lay-rate or hen health. “We do blind tastings with the chefs and farmers and consistently the waste-fed eggs score higher on flavor compared to premium supermarket options,” he tells Food Tank.

Martens says that many farmers in the U.S. practice waste-feeding, but they must individually source, process, and formulate the feed. “In order for the U.S. to implement waste-feeding projects on a larger scale, we need to start formalizing and creating efficient processes for collecting, processing, and balancing waste-feeds,” he says.

Processing waste directly in stores could ease some of the logistical constraints that have limited waste-to-feed programs. Tannenbaum notes frequent collection and downstream management at centralized processing facilities as challenges Mill could help address. “By embedding decentralized infrastructure within stores, we can enable new recycling pathways that would have otherwise been economically or logistically inconceivable,” he says.

While preventing waste and donating food remain the best options for reducing hunger, converting unavoidable scraps into feed may become an increasingly important option for retailers.

Mill’s recycling systems are designed to turn discarded scraps into feed while helping stores identify and prevent waste upstream. The technology uses AI and computer vision to track waste types and volumes in real-time, offering retailers insights into inventory losses and waste drivers. “It’s not about simply processing food waste—it’s to prevent it from happening in the first place,” says Tannenbaum.

Murray emphasizes that retailers like Whole Foods occupy a unique position in the food value chain. “They are an important intersection point,” she says. “They’re connected to their suppliers, consumers, and ultimately to the farmers.”

If waste-feeding expands, it could reshape feed supply chains and improve margins for farmers. And the environmental upside may be substantial. In the U.S., decomposing food waste in landfills contributes greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the annual emissions of 15 coal-fired power plants. “Even something as small as a 5 percent substitution of conventional feeds with waste-feed would take the burden off of millions of acres of corn and soy production while removing millions of pounds of food waste from our landfills in returning that food waste back to the soil,” Martens tells Food Tank.

“The reality is, this really isn’t waste at all,” Leibert tells Food Tank. “It’s a super valuable, nutrient-rich commodity.”

The project’s results may serve as an example for the industry’s potential to make waste-to-feed systems viable at scale, and to reframe the narrative around food waste.

“It’s an exciting opportunity to put a circular model on display,” Leibert says. “Nature and climate don’t work in a silo, and neither should we.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

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The post A Circular Solution for Retail Food Waste Takes Shape in U.S. Grocery Stores appeared first on Food Tank.

The risk of snakebites is increasing across the world as reptiles shift their habitats to cope with rising temperatures and growing human pressures, a study of venomous snakes has found.

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Europe’s far right is on the rise. Right-wing populist movements have recently undergone an exponential growth in public support and a systematic rise to power within mainstream political platforms, securing about 25 percent of seats in the European parliament in 2024 (European Parliament, 2024). Despite their promotion of traditionalist views of gender and active opposition of feminism and “gender ideology,” right-wing conservative parties across Europe have been relying on a paradoxical weaponization of feminist ideas to defend the supposed superiority of Western values and target migrant communities (Vieten, 2025). This selective invocation of women’s rights, used to ostracize and alienate ethnic and religious minorities, was conceptualized by British sociologist Sara Farris as “femonationalism” (Farris, 2017). Farris argues that femonationalism reinforces negative stereotypes about Muslim immigrants and informs policies and laws, leading to systematic discrimination and hostility towards these communities that become a target for a hate campaign.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a political party founded in 2013, has become one of the most influential forces in contemporary German politics, despite being officially categorized as “right-wing extremist” in a report issued by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Notably, the AfD has one of the lowest proportions of female membership compared to its opponents, yet women still hold positions of power where they enjoy a certain degree of visibility and renown in its public image and political communication. This paradox raises a central question: How does the AfD actively shape the boundaries of women’s political representation while advancing anti-feminist and anti-immigrant agendas? More specifically, how does gender function as an integral element of the party’s nationalist project rather than a contradiction to it? The concept of femonationalism illuminates how the selective invocation of women’s rights becomes a mechanism for legitimizing xenophobic and exclusionary policies.

The stakes here are high. Populist far-right groups in Western Europe have been able to attain an enormous amount of power and political capital in recent years. Germany’s AfD has gained immense public support during the 2025 national elections, becoming the second-largest political force in the country. This marks a significant shift that suggests a resurging normalization of right-wing populism within the country’s parliamentary politics (Arzheimer, 2015). According to a 2025 report, the share of women among political party members in Germany as of December 2021 varied by party, with the Green Party having the highest number of female members at roughly 42 percent, followed by 37 percent in the Left party and 33 percent in the SPD (Statista, 2025). The AfD share of female members was the lowest at only 18.7 percent. Despite this severe gender imbalance, women continue to be strongly featured at the forefront of the AfD’s public image, embroidering a perceived sense of progress that sharply contradicts the party’s conservative agenda. Porzycki (2025) argues that radical-right parties often use their female members and leaders to portray themselves as modern and moderate in the public eye, a method that is commonly referred to as strategic image management. Yet at the heart of this strategy, there lies a clear irony: While women in the AfD are enabled and encouraged to acquire positions of power within the public political sphere, their presence in these spaces is leveraged to advance anti-feminist agendas. These women typically target female voters by appealing to their concerns about issues of safety and protection. As showcased by the concept of “the heartland” in populist German politics, radical-right parties equally appeal to nationalist fervor through a carefully curated vision of Germany that is partially fueled by a chronic idealization of the country’s problematic past (Porzycki et al., 2025), dismissing the inflammatory nature of such an ideal in the context of a “post-nazi” Germany.

As a language that makes it easy to create compound words, German has a surplus of derogatory terms used to refer to migrants and asylum seekers of ethnic descent. Terms like Überfremdung (Over-foreignization), Asylkriminalität (Asylum Criminality), Schuldkult (Cult of Guilt), and Parallelgesellschaften (Parallel Societies) are often used in political and online discourse to dehumanize migrants, criticize the nation’s culture of memory/remembrance, and generate panic within German society, thus creating further polarization in both official and unofficial public opinion. In fact, this misleading and offensive manipulation of language occurs so often that there is a German linguistic initiative that annually selects a word or a phrase deemed inappropriate and commonly misused, in order to raise awareness about inflammatory language posing a threat to democracy and human dignity. Unwort des Jahres (Non-word of the year) dates back to 1991, the year it was launched to draw attention to questionable use of loaded vernacular. In response to the resurgence of Germany’s far right, numerous “Unwörter” selected by the Unwort des Jahres’s independent panel have been linked to political actors such as the AfD, whose frequent use of populist neo-nazi lingo has left its permanent trace on contemporary trends in German slang. In 2024, Biodeutsch (Bio-German) was named “non-word” of the year, referring to people with German citizenship who do not have an ethnic German background. This further illustrates the importance of language in political discourse, particularly in the context of political mobilization. As exemplified by the German far right, language possesses a transformative capacity, enabling the establishment of a normalization of narratives previously considered extremist (Zajak et al., 2025).

The AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society.

Doerr (2021) empirically investigates the construction of migrant Muslim communities as a “threat” to German society and to the supposed homogeneity of its native culture. The study emphasizes the role of the AfD in propagating a stereotypical image about these communities through physical street advertisements, digital platforms, mobile displays, and both national parliament elections and state-level campaigns. Doerr essentially argues that the AfD utilizes a racialized ideal image of the “emancipated white woman” to frame Muslim women as inherently oppressed, unfree, and therefore incompatible with German society. A primary example of this is the 2017 AfD campaign poster which exhibited an image of three white women in bikinis, accompanied by a slogan that reads: “Burkas? Wir steh’n auf Bikinis (Burkas? We prefer bikinis)” (Doerr, 2021). While the bikini is meant to symbolize freedom of choice and self-determination, Doerr (2021) argues that the AfD deploys a sexualizing chauvinistic male gaze that partially targets young male voters, portraying German women as governable subjects in need of protection from the likely dangers of Muslim invasion. Similar patterns emerge when we analyze speeches and press releases from the party, as its members consistently claim exclusive ownership of women’s rights and leverage gendered issues of public safety to amass voters and public supporters.

Women as victims of migration

One of the most assertively direct iterations of femonationalist ways of arguing is evident in Alice Weidel’s October 2025 press release titled: “More and more women live in fear—The AfD is ready to restore security” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). The title itself claims a causal chain before presenting any empirical data to support such a fallacious assertion: German women are unsafe in the public sphere and only the AfD is capable of reimposing order and security. Weidel states, “More than half of all women in Germany no longer feel safe in public spaces. This alarming figure from the representative Civey survey is further proof of the government’s failure in migration and security policy.” This statement proceeds without delay to pin the blame of a security issue on a particular ethnic minority: Syrians. She continues, “As the Federal Ministry of the Interior had to admit, between 2015 and 2024, according to official data, 135,668 Germans were victims of crimes committed by Syrian suspects.” The juxtaposition of women’s nocturnal fear with failure in border policy lacks empirical support from scholarly research. The primary objective of such a statement, however, is to evoke emotional responses rather than logical reasoning. According to Farris’s framework, this is a classic femonationalist move, as it reduces women to a quantifiable populace of nationalist subjects whose survival ostensibly counts on the AfD’s electoral victory. Weidel specifies that “the ones who suffer most are especially young women and children, who are often defenselessly exposed to violent assaults” (Alternative für Deutschland, 2025). Such word choices perform a crucial role, as they highlight the vulnerability of German women in the face of a persistent influx of migrants who are, in the eyes of Weidel and her fellow party members, the sole perpetrators and aggressors against such a precarious demographic. At the same time, these outlandish claims carry out the ideological work of concealing migrant and racialized women from the AfD’s ostensibly feminist narrative on women’s public safety issues. In a manner that can only be described as dehumanizing, these women are deemed unworthy of protection or dignity. The only presence that the ethnic/racialised woman is allowed in the AfD’s official pseudo-feminist discourse is one where she is depicted as a rhetorical device or an object with no agency, used only to advance the party’s xenophobic and racist agenda.

The AfD’s selective protective paternalistic narrative is deeply rooted in Samuel Huntington’s post-cold war “clash of civilizations” theory, which was subsequently adopted by contemporary political figures like Thilo Sarrazin whose essentialist views on migration and social integration have consistently contributed to the normalization of such exclusionary discourse within mainstream politics (Sprengholz, 2021). This view promotes a rigid concept of cultural identity, which is ultimately weaponized to exclude migrant communities deemed ‘incompatible’ with the host culture. Within this theoretical structure, gender is once again weaponized under the assumption that German society has already achieved absolute gender equality, thus instrumentalizing this flawed premise to draw racialized boundaries of citizenship and belonging that exclude all non-white Germans. The paradox herein is clear as day: Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.

Whereas anti-migration policies are presented as effective solutions to a gender-related issue, they often exacerbate gender inequalities by aggravating socioeconomic vulnerabilities among migrant women, with little regard to the consequences of such laws against non-constituent, non-white, non-Western —mostly Muslim—women.

This sentiment is reverberated in one of Alice Weidel’s most controversial press statements as she states: “The alarming scale and the high proportion of foreign suspects in sexual offenses against women are a warning signal. Since the Union opened the gates in 2015, especially to men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms, women have become fair game” (Weidel, 2024). The language used in this context is extremely offensive and dehumanizing, as the term Freiwild in German implies that women have been left unprotected and “available” for harassment and sexual violence due to the absence of stringent border measures. This kind of alarmist and sensitive language aligns with the AfD’s broader strategy of appropriating feminist rhetoric in the Bundestag —the federal parliament of Germany—to conceal its anti-feminist position and divert the public’s attention from its own conservative and traditionalist views of gender (Sprengholz, 2021). Analogously, internal conflicts within the AfD regarding the party’s stance on homosexuality are omitted from official statements (Arzheimer, 2015).

The racialization of sexism and male violence

The phrase “men from societies shaped by archaic and misogynistic norms” (Weidel, 2024) betrays a form of cultural essentialism that homogenizes entire societies and depicts them as inherently regressive and backwards, thus establishing a civilization hierarchy placing German culture and people above racialized migrant men and their cultures. In 2018, Alice Weidel used the term Messermänner auf Sozialhilfe or “Knife-wielding men on welfare” in reference to high-profile knife crimes that the country has witnessed, calling for waves of mass deportations of asylum seekers and refugees. In media coverage of stabbing crimes in Germany, systematic regularities seem to be permanently present across different outlets as reporting often emphasizes the ethnic background/origin of the perpetrators, thus constructing alarmist narratives that villainize and alienate migrant communities.

Similarly, AfD board member Dennis Hohloch claimed that “multiculturalism means a loss of traditions, a loss of identity, a loss of home, murder, killing, robbery and gang rape” (Baumgärtner et al., 2025). Scrinzi (2023) refers to a political and social process called “the racialization of sexism” through which misogyny is ascribed to racialized migrant communities and is therefore externalized and treated as an issue of foreign origins. While predominantly employed by right-wing political actors, racialized gender-based framings have also been passively endorsed by left-wing movements and secular groups. In France, for instance, the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Subaltern), dubbed progressive, played a crucial role in detaching gender-based violence from “middle-class white masculinity” (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 48). Despite it being spearheaded by French women of North African origins, the movement’s framing of sexual violence against women as a problem associated with Islam and the nation’s immigrant population greatly helped construct a narrative positioning racialized men as the hypersexualized aggressors of white women and the inherent oppressors of racialized women (Scrinzi, 2023, p. 49). Such accounts revive the ideological frameworks that colonial powers once used to rationalize territorial conquest and economic extraction of goods from the Global South. By failing to address gendered suburban violence as a multifaceted systemic issue and choosing to pathologize Islam instead, the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement engages in a form of “carceral feminism” used by the republic to justify state racism and fortify the racist apparatus of the prison-industrial complex. The NPNS’s call for banning the veil is a prominent example of how femonationalist movements, emerging from Western feminisms, often reproduce racist and neoliberal narratives that either victimize or pathologize Muslim women (Farris, 2017, p. 62).

Far-right pro-natalism and women as “breeding machines”

The racialization of sexism constitutes a key element of the AfD’s populist mobilization strategy, which allows it to adopt a feminism that claims to protect German women while actively supporting policies that undermine their basic rights, such as access to abortion. This dynamic is closely intertwined with far-right pro-natalist rhetoric, which treats women’s bodies as reproductive tools tasked with “resisting” demographic change that is seen as a direct consequence of migration, thereby reducing women to agents of national preservation rather than autonomous rights-bearing individuals.

A 2017 campaign poster for the AfD made a huge commotion nationwide due to its disturbing message; The poster features the image of a pregnant white woman lying in a field of flowers with a bold-fonted caption that reads: “Neue Deutsche? Machen wir selber (More Germans? We’ll make them ourselves).” Critics have argued that this slogan was entrenched in the xenophobic nativist rhetoric, which deliberately excludes racialized communities from Germany’s national fabric. However, few were able to point out the misogynistic undertones hidden in plain sight. Such language and imagery exposes a pattern within populist right-wing politics that reveals a strong commitment to a pro-natalism that treats women as “breeding machines” for the “right” kind of citizens.

AfD politician Mariana Harder-Kühnel shared an official statement as a response to the German government’s 2024 family report, criticizing its failure to address “a long-known demographic crisis” and its reverberations on the skilled-labor market which has been witnessing a severe shortage of domestic workers (Alternative für Deutschland, 2024). Harder-Kühnel argues in favor of kontrollierten Bevölkerungsentwicklung liegen (controlled population development), presenting it as a more potent cure for the country’s economic and demographic woes than immigration ever was. Within this particular statement, Mariana Harder-Kühnel strategically deploys a language of pseudo-feminist “choice” that conveniently and suspiciously aligns with her imperative. Despite her insistence on the implementation of pro-choice-in-parenting policies, she fails to admit the coercive nature of her proposed measures she is suggesting (for example, the ban on abortion, promotion of the traditional family, and opposition to children’s rights in the constitution).

The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice.

The AfD’s documented efforts of promoting familialism – a state-driven ideology that treats the nuclear family as the foundation of the national community and the main mechanism for social cohesion and welfare – and mobilizing post-feminist common sense narratives (Sprengholz, 2021) suggest that its pro-natalist agenda is inherently ideological and ethnonationalist in nature. This problematic language has been linked to the party’s electoral success, particularly in East Germany which has experienced a dramatic long-term population decline since the 1990 reunification (Höhne et al., 2025). The party has been relentless in its efforts to advance traditionalism, fueled by a commitment to preventing demographic collapse and ensuring the dominance of the so called “Aryan” race, a term so commonly misused that it has become synonymous with Nordic racial grouping, despite historically referring to ancient Indo-Iranian peoples. The leveraging of traditionalist domestic ideals to nurture white supremacist and nativist agendas is inseparable from the gendered pro-natalist language that blames women for social decline, therefore coercing them into abandoning their natural right to reproductive choice. While online discourse around reproductive health seems to be primarily focused on the United States, pro-natalist ideas in Germany stem from the party’s proper ideological evolution and the country’s homegrown völkisch (folkish/ethnic) nationalism (Heinemann, 2022). Pro-natalism comprises political, religious, and socioeconomic pressures that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy and freedom of choice, often culminating in legislative restrictions on contraception and abortion access (Bajaj & Stade, 2022). It is no surprise therefore that right-wing factions often adopt the infamous alarmist “fertility crisis” narrative to push for more control on women’s bodies.

Conclusion

The AfD’s rhetoric and actions push the boundaries of Western democracy and free speech and confirm the significance of language in politics, yet femonationalism extends far beyond German populist politics. Radical-right populism heavily relies on antagonistic framing and the strategic invocation of gender, which allows politicians to align themselves ideologically with their target audience, or at the very least to shift public discourse, normalize racist rhetoric, and strongly dominate the media landscape.

Works Cited

Alternative für Deutschland. (2025, October 28). Alice Weidel: Immer mehr Frauen leben in Angst – Die AfD ist bereit Sicherheit wieder herzustellen. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/alice-weidel-immer-mehr-frauen-leben-in-angst-die-afd-ist-bereit-sicherheit-wieder-herzustellen/

Alternative für Deutschland. (2024, May 15). Mariana Harder-Kühnel: Familienreport 2024 enthält kein Konzept zur Lösung des Geburtenmangels und der Demografie-Katastrophe. Alternative Für Deutschland. https://www.afd.de/mariana-harder-kuehnel-familienreport-2024-enthaelt-kein-konzept-zur-loesung-des-geburtenmangels-und-der-demografie-katastrophe/

Arzheimer, K. (2015). The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany? West European Politics, 38(3), 535–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1004230

Bajaj, N., & Stade, K. (2022). Challenging pronatalism is key to advancing reproductive rights and a sustainable population. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 7(1), 39–70. https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.63799953906861

Baumgärtner, M., Müller, A., Siemens, A., & Wiedmann-Schmidt, W. (2025, May 14). Compendium of Extremism: A Look inside the Report Documenting the AfD’s Right-Wing Radicalism. DER SPIEGEL, Hamburg, Germany. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/compendium-of-extremism-a-look-inside-the-report-documenting-the-afds-right-wing-radicalism-a-de2ab5b5-623e-4100-addb-d1e44c298305 b

Doerr, N. (2021). The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti-Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images. Social Sciences, 10(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10010020

European Parliament. (2024, September 13). 2024 European elections: 15 additional seats divided between 12 countries | News | European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230911IPR04910/2024-european-elections-15-additional-seats-divided-between-12-countries

Fangen, K., & Lichtenberg, L. (2021). Gender and family rhetoric on the German far right. Patterns of Prejudice, 55(1), 71–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.1898815

Farris, S. R. (2017). In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press.

Heinemann, I. (2022). Volk and Family: National Socialist legacies and gender concepts in the rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany. Journal of Modern European History, 20(3), 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221110713

Höhne, B., Kölzer, J., & Träger, H. (2025). Geography of Shrinkage: Local Population Decline and Electoral Support for the Anti-establishment Parties AfD and BSW in East German State Elections. German Politics, 34(3), 449–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2025.2489409

Porzycki, V., Oshri, O., & Shenhav, S. R. (2025). What you see is not what you get: The incorporation of women in radical right parties. European Union Politics, 26(3), 477–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165251340336

Scrinzi, F. (2023). The Racialization of Sexism. Routledge. https://www.perlego.com/book/4270023

Sprengholz, M. (2021). Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 28(4), 486-501. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068211007509 (Original work published 2021)

Statista. (2025, November 29). Share of women among political party members in Germany 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/955972/women-share-political-party-members-germany/?srsltid=AfmBOooYDhCC25ugDxGodJBVoMKgVeAutFUSDA4IqRS4lnwnpqRK5Bd7

Törnberg, P., & Chueri, J. (2025). When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612241311886

Vieten, U. M. (2025). The Far-Right, Gender In/Equalities and Liberal Feminism: Scrutinising EU Narratives of Gender Equality in Italy, France and Germany. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2025.2592306

Weidel, A. (2024, November 20). Alice Weidel: Migrationskrise macht Frauen zu Freiwild. presseportal.de. https://www.presseportal.de/pm/110332/5913293

Zajak, S., Meuth, A., & Best, F. (2025). The Dynamics of (De-)Normalization of the far Right: perceptions in the German population. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-025-09532-6

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On Friday, May 22nd, a crowd of approximately 40 residents and community supporters gathered for a press conference and rally outside of Tahanan Homes, a...

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