Funding the Illiberal Backlash
New EPF report tracks the money and organizations fueling illiberal movements in Europe and beyond
Americans are naturally focused on America. Americans are also pretty interested in money. So informed Americans have been alert to the message that a domestic oligarchy has plowed billions of dollars into a deep network of hard-right think tanks, Christian nationalist legal advocacy and policy groups, leadership training initiatives, media and messaging platforms, et cetera. That network and its various modes of operation is the subject of my last three books.
But what starts in America doesn’t stay in America, and what happens in America didn’t necessarily start there. This is the reality detailed in an important report from the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), titled The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism is Reclaiming Power, which launched in Brussels on June 26.
The report, the third in a series, follows the money in meticulous detail as it moves from private wealth and public sources into reactionary groups. It covers the impact in 27 European countries as well as funding sources in Europe, Russia and the U.S. Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, US$1.18 billion flowed into frontline groups in the attack, an increase from the 2009 to 2018 period, when the amount was US$81.3 million.
The money-trail shows that America’s hard-right and Christian nationalist oligarchs have a soft spot for religion-based denial of rights and freedoms in Europe. A handful of hyper-wealthy families and individuals—among them the Walters family, the Uihlein family, the Green family, the Eldred family, the Koch brothers, and the DeVos and Prince families—are sending significant sums to Europe to lay the foundations for rightwing nationalist movements.
But “we can’t just blame Americans,” in the words of Neil Datta, founder and Executive Director of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), a network of European lawmakers committed to advancing gender equality and sexual and reproductive health. “A lot of money is coming from European sources.”
Every oligarchy wants to entrench itself, and as this report shows, quite a few representatives of plutocratic wealth are eager to do so by appealing to and enforcing “traditional values.” In earlier times this led to powerful alliances between fabulously wealthy royal houses and the priestly hierarchies tasked with keeping the less fortunate in line. These types of alliances have also been, and remain, popular around the world. While the contours vary according to region, the equation often remains the same.
In our day, the alliance takes the form of a well-funded network of reactionary and often religiously based advocacy groups, along with think-tanks, strategic litigators, service providers masquerading as philanthropies, and media firms, many of them pretending to advance “grass-roots” agendas. They claim to be strengthening “family values” even as they work to consolidate the power of an oligarchy.
The countries supplying the largest amounts are Russia ($211 million) Hungary ($172 million), France ($165 million), the UK ($156 million), and the U.S. ($104 million). “From Moscow to Washington, Brussels to Budapest, money is doing the heavy lifting in reshaping laws, policies, and public norms around gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights,” the report notes.
About half of the money went into advocacy and messaging organizations, including lobbying in Brussels and social media outreach. The rest went into so-called crisis pregnancy centers, leadership development programming for young conservative leaders, grant-making groups, think-tanks, and related efforts. While outcomes have varied, on balance their collective efforts have yielded influence, coordination among different groups, alignment on messaging, and political as well as legal gains.
“We’re observing a backlash against gender balance everywhere—whether we’re talking about the notion of consent in sexual relations, or about reproductive health and rights, or about abortion,” Hadja Lahbib, the European Commissioner for equality, told France24 earlier this year
Much of the money, according to the report, came from a cadre of titled aristocrats. “Dozens of archdukes, countesses, princes, and princesses appear as avid supporters of religious extremist causes which may at first appear exotic until one understands that this involvement demonstrates a continuity going back to a past almost forgotten in 21st century Europe,” Datta writes.
This is a group, according to Datta, with “a generalized disdain for democracy and liberal values, a worldview based on religious legitimation for inherited social, political, and economic inequality; and being part of a vast, transnational and endogamous network,” which Datta describes as an “Aristo-clerical network.”
In France, Hungary, Austria, Spain, and other countries, private foundations controlled by religious families with generational wealth invest heavily in anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Some names are widely known, such as Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who married Johannes, 11th Prince of Thurn und Taxis, when she was 20 and he was 54. Johannes was reportedly bisexual, and Gloria played the role of outrageous and “explosive” party girl. Johannes died ten years later, making her one of the largest landowners in Germany. Today, Princess Gloria has close connections with Leonard Leo, a moneyman of America’s right-wing legal ecosphere; American Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito; and Steve Bannon, one of Donald Trump’s closest allies who also reportedly served as an advisor for child rapist and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Other oligarchic funders include beneficiaries of European tech fortunes such as Frederik Wester in Sweden and Marek Spanel in the Czech Republic. In Hungary, funders with ties to Victor Orban include Orban’s childhood friend Lorinc Mezaros; Orban awarded him billions in public contracts and he presently owns Hungary’s MHB bank. In France, key funders include the billionaire Pierre-Edouard Sterin and Guillaume de Thieulloy, whose organization Fonds de Dotation GT Edition finances digital infrastructure for ultra-conservative Catholic media.
Alongside private donors, the report shows that at least 14 per cent of the total—$171 million—stems from EU funding. In some instances, reactionary groups rely on sympathetic illiberal governments at both national and regional levels, who funnel state money to favored think-tanks, advocacy groups, and service providers that in turn bolster their own political legitimacy. Hungary and Poland under Ordo Juris were leaders in this sector, but regional governments in Spain and elsewhere have developed the same patronage model.
However, the EU has also channeled money to reactionary groups disguised as youth organizations, including the World Youth Alliance, a Catholic NGO that advocates against abortion and many forms of contraception. Some reactionary groups in turn funnel money back to European political parties that align with their agenda, including European Conservatives and Reformists and the far-right Patriots for Europe parliamentary groups.
Facilitating this fusion of reactionary political parties with reactionary religion has been the rise of what Datta calls “ChONGOs,”—church-based non-governmental organizations. Some of these groups pretend to offer scientific or fact-based information and services while promoting a theologically based agenda.
Money from non-EU sources also forms a substantial part of the funding. As the EPF report notes, Russia’s principal strategic goal in supporting these causes is to bolster and influence right-wing political parties and movements in Europe and then to steer their activism in ways favorable to Russian state interests.
The EPF report cites a document, identified as a Mandate, that emerged from an influential March 2024 gathering of the XXV World Russian People’s Council (WRPC) titled “The Present and Future of the Russian World.” Overseen by Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church’s leader, the gathering aims to guide Russia’s political class as well as the Russian Orthodox Church on policy issues. The new Mandate “referred to Russia’s international role as ‘the ‘Restrainer,’ protecting the world from evil and from the ‘onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism,’” the EPF report said.
The Mandate also “refers to the Russian aggression against Ukraine as a ‘Holy War,’’ and states that the borders of the ‘Russian world’ are ‘much wider than the state borders of both the present-day Russian federation,’” according to the report.
According to the EPF report, the Mandate also declared that “the fight against abortion should be placed at the center of all state policy” along with the “cleans(ing) of the destructive ideological concepts and attitudes, primarily Western ones.”
Unsurprisingly, some of the American groups the report flags for their engagement in Europe area also pushing the culture wars in the U.S. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which promotes legislation intended to undermine the constitutional principle of church-state separation in the U.S., has sought to adapt its tactics to a European context while exporting similar strategies and legal theories. Other U.S. groups active in Europe include 40 Days for Life, which stages anti-abortion harassment activities; The Heritage Foundation, which forges partnerships with conservative European think tanks; and Heartbeat International, which seeks to dissuade pregnant women from seeking abortions.
As Datta points out in his conclusion, European efforts are now being mobilized in a new scramble for Africa as reactionary groups seek to disseminate their ideology around the world. In this respect they mirror the process that has been playing out in Europe itself. Christian nationalist ideas have been honed to a sharp edge in the U.S. and Russia above all, and those two former Cold War enemies are now exporting their counterrevolution. The EFP for Sexual and Reproductive Rights is launching a podcast on the topic in September, and it is sure to reveal new developments on this front in the coming year.