EU gender equality policy and the progressive dismantling of feminist governance?

The European Union (EU) is often considered a progressive political arena with regard to the promotion of gender equality. Since the 1970s, the EU has promoted a series of norms and values higher than those in effect in most member states, and gender equality is one of the rare policy domains in which the EU has gone beyond the mere fluidification of the market. This has been made possible by the existence of a specific system of governance which fits the criteria for feminist governance stated in Chapter 1 of this Handbook: feminist institutions and institution-building, feminist networks, public policy explicitly aimed at achieving gender equality through hard and soft regulation, and transversal integration of gender equality within public action from elaboration to implementation. This de facto system of feminist governance was originally established in a non-feminist environment and nevertheless managed to over- come various political, legal and institutional barriers in order to create an alternative space of re-regulation favourable to gender equality at the European level. This complex and inter- twined system of feminist governance enabled the promotion of gender equality as a legitimate goal and autonomous field of competence of the European Economic Community (EEC) and later the EU. Today, the evolution of this system brings into question the nature of the EU gender regime and its ‘gender equality project’ (Walby, 2018). Conflicting trends are at play, including populist opposition to gender equality (Siim and Fiig, 2021), but also an ambitious discourse and positioning of the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission which came into power in 2019, advocating for a ‘Union of equality’