As a newly minted member of the European parliament in 2019, Alice Kuhnke swiftly learned to keep her ID badge handy. Sometimes the request to see it would come just moments after she had swiped it to enter a building, other times she would be stopped hours later as she made her way to meetings.
Six months into the job, she mentioned the stringent security measures over coffee with a few colleagues. “They said ‘Are you serious? I’ve never been stopped.’”
Kuhnke, a Black MEP from Sweden, put the same question to her Black colleagues. The answer confirmed what she had suspected: “Some of them had been stopped.”
It was one of her first hints of what it meant to work in a European parliament that is profoundly out of step with the demographic reality of Europe. While racialised minorities make up an estimated 10% of the EU’s population, MEPs from these groups accounted for just 4.3% of the total lawmakers in the last mandate, according to analysis by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).
With less than a week to go before EU citizens elect the more than 700 members of the European parliament, the anti-racism group has warned that the institution is failing to reflect diversity in the EU – and they fear this could get worse if a wave of new far-right MEPs are elected to the parliament.
“This disparity poses fundamental questions about the democratic legitimacy of the institutions, particularly the European parliament,” said Nourhene Mahmoudi, an advocacy and policy adviser with ENAR.
That view is echoed by MEPs on the ground. “It’s very much pale and male, in all honesty,” said Magid Magid, a former MEP from the UK. The lack of diversity was exacerbated by Brexit, which resulted in nine MEPs of colour, including Magid, leaving in 2020.
The consequences of this dissonance are far-reaching, from potentially undermining the parliament’s ability to address issues such as inequality to diluting its ability to craft inclusive policies that meet the needs of all EU residents.
What is probably happening, according to a recent study based on interviews with 140 MEPs and staffers, is “normalised whiteness” in the parliament is helping perpetuate racism, leaving those who seek to confront discrimination feeling as though they are “shouting to a brick wall”, in the words of one interviewee.
Several interviewees described the parliament as a place where European whiteness operates as an unchecked privilege, underpinning power relations, said Johanna Kantola, a professor at the University of Helsinki. “It’s an unquestioned norm. And when it is so normative, it is difficult to see or difficult to question.”
For Magid, the lack of diversity negatively affected his daily interactions as an MEP. “There were times when my presence was met with surprise and scepticism,” he said. “It really reflected the underlying bias that minorities and people of colour don’t belong in these spaces.”
Magid made headlines in 2019 after he was asked to leave the parliament on his first day as an MEP. Several other MEPs shared similar experiences. “Sometimes people ask me to use another door, or they explicitly told me: ‘Sorry, this is only for MEPs’ without asking if I was an MEP,” said Mohammed Chahim, from the Netherlands.
While he described his overall experience as an MEP as positive, Chahim was left rattled last year as suspicions swirled over allegations that Morocco and Qatar had bribed EU politicians and staffers to promote their interests.
Despite never having intervened on any matter related to Morocco, word reached Chahim that some had wondered whether he had been involved. “And that felt really humiliating,” he said. “To reduce me to this ethnic background, based on the place where my parents were born, and not on my behaviour or debates that I took part in.”
In 2020, as protests sprang up around the world over the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minnesota, Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana found herself in the spotlight after what she described as a “traumatising and humiliating” encounter with police in Brussels.
Herzberger-Fofana, Germany’s first MEP of African origin, said she was brutally pushed against a wall by four officers, who ordered the septuagenarian to stand with her hands up and legs spread as they searched her bag. Throughout it all, police refused to believe she was an MEP. “They didn’t know that there are Black MEPs, that’s why they didn’t believe I was an MEP,” said Herzberger-Fofana.
The European parliament’s press service said it was unable to provide detailed comment on the discrepancy between racialised MEPs and the reality of Europe. “The European parliament does not collect nor keep any statistics based on ethnicity or race of MEPs,” it said in an email.
Patricia Caro Maya, one of four Roma MEPs in parliament, said the failure of the EU’s institutions to reflect the racial reality of Europe eroded and delegitimised the EU project.
“To draw a parallel, would we talk about a feminist agenda or women’s rights in parliament if there were no women in parliament pushing this agenda?” she asked. “It would be impossible. And if those talks happened without any women, they would be contradictory. It’s exactly the same.”
Kuhnke said the lack of diversity would take on even greater importance as EU lawmakers turned their attention to crucial issues such as the regulation of artificial intelligence, pointing to the growing body of work that has laid bare the biases and racism that exist within AI tools. “If we are not aware of this racism, then this can develop into a nightmare.”
In recent years, as the presence of the far right in EU institutions has grown, several MEPs said they had been forced on to the offensive. Caro Maya pointed to an incident in April, when a far-right MEP from Italy’s Lega party seized on International Roma Day to rehash the harmful anti-Roma tropes long used by her party to gain votes.
“It was extremely violent, it felt as though I had been punched,” said Caro Maya. “But the difference between verbal and physical violence is that verbal violence is allowed in the parliament, and I had to suffer through that.”
Özlem Demirel, an MEP from Germany who was born in Turkey, said she had also found herself at times facing off against those who seek to spread stereotypes about migrants for electoral gain. “The far right, in particular, always says that migrants and asylum seekers are criminals or so on,” she said. “And I could always answer: ‘You’re talking about people like me as criminals. Stop agitating and stirring up prejudices.’”
Amid polling that suggests far-right and hardline conservative parties are poised to made gains in the next EU parliament, few were optimistic that the EU would be able to effectively tackle the deficit of racialised MEPs in the coming years.
Instead, they highlighted tepid gains being made as some political parties, particularly those on the left, increasingly recognise the importance of representation in their candidate lists. “The fact that people can get used to an MEP called Mohammed or Samira or Magid is a first step,” said Chahim.
Caro Maya cited the “serious risk” political parties were taking if they refused to include communities such as Roma – Europe’s largest ethnic minority – on their electoral lists. “It cannot be that, at a time when the European Union is more at risk than ever of returning to the totalitarianisms that it was created to prevent, that it fails to reflect what Europe actually looks like,” she said. “People need to feel represented, that’s how you get them to vote. If not, they’ll just stay at home.”