Life as a Legislator: Karen Melchior MEP on Europe's fragile democracy

Karen Melchior is a legislator from Denmark, serving as a Member of the European Parliament for the 2019-2024 term. She has been a visible champion for LGBT+ freedoms across Europe as a member of the EP’s Intergroup on LGBTI Rights, and has campaigned on issues including gender equality and digital regulation.

A European liberal to her core with a maverick approach to politics, Karen was a major supporter of the Interparliamentary Assembly at Copenhagen WorldPride 2021 and continues to be a vocal advocate for the LGBT+ community at a time when equal rights in Europe are facing a growing backlash.

Ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections, GEC’s Head of Operations Andrew Slinn sat down with Karen in Brussels to reflect on her time as a legislator and the political shifts that will impact the European Union for years to come.

Hi Karen, it’s great to be with you here in the European Parliament. First, a bit about you - what motivated you to get into politics? Why the European Parliament specifically?

I used to be a Danish diplomat and wanted to be on the other side of the table, the one having opinions rather than promoting the opinions of others. As a diplomat I also saw that when Denmark wanted to have influence in the world, 90% of the time that was through the European Union and that’s where you can decide the big lines of where the EU and therefore each Member State goes.

I’ve been interested in how to regulate technology and the internet in a way that promotes individual rights. Prior to and during the Arab Spring I saw the important role of the internet and social media in uniting people via networks and how this changed societies in Tunisia and Egypt. But it’s also the case that a lot of politicians want to regulate digital platforms and the internet in a way that shows they don’t understand how it works. I wanted to change that and make sure our legislation was adapted to the digital world. Everything is digital now, you can’t really have a democratic discussion or dialogue without it also being digital, every traditional media is dependent on being shared online, so regulating this has been important to me.

I’ve been very focused on having an EU that is free and open to all, that you as an EU citizen are allowed to be who you are and love who you love no matter what country you live in. I saw the undermining of individual rights in countries like Poland and Hungary as an undermining of other fundamental rights and therefore an undermining of our democracies, so I felt I had to speak up.

You entered Parliament in 2019, and over the past five years there has been a noticeable increase in anti-LGBT+ sentiment across Europe. From your position as a legislator, what trends have you witnessed during your five-year term?

At the beginning of the five years there was a lot of discussion about the growing situation where municipalities in Poland were declaring ‘LGBT-free zones’. The Parliament took a strong stand against this. Thanks to my French colleague Pierre Karleskind, we declared Europe as an ‘LGBT freedom zone’ which was adopted with a large majority. So I think across the board there was support for LGBTI rights.

But since then we seem to have regressed. For example, in Denmark some members of one of the right-wing parties created a counter organisation to the Danish LGBTI organisation called the ‘Rainbow Council’ - basically an anti-trans grouping. This is also something I’ve seen developing within the European Parliament. We’ve seen a representative from Alternative for Germany stand up on International Women’s Day and make a speech demonising trans people, saying how trans women are not women and that they’re endangering womanhood.

To have the spokesperson for the Identity & Democracy far-right parliamentary group dedicate that time to a transphobic speech, it says a lot about where the debate for equal rights has gone during the last five years and it’s not been a good direction.

So as we come to the end of the term, rather than having the overwhelming majority of the Parliament supporting equal rights for all, you have right-wing populist parties being transphobic and undermining equal rights. This is part of the anti-woke, anti-diversity, anti-inclusion trend we’re also seeing elsewhere, most prominently in the United States.

We’ve had for the last five years a silent majority for sexual & reproductive health rights, for LGBT+ equality, because it’s been seen as a given to be supportive of this and wasn’t really subject to debate. Then a loud minority has reacted against these rights and I fear the loudness in the debate that they’ve had - and the platforms the media has given them - has shifted the scope of the debate in European politics to actually be withdrawing rights from people.

Where is this anti-LGBT+ sentiment coming from? Why has there been an anti-progressive, “rightward” shift in Europe over the past five years and what is driving it?

Good question. It’s a global phenomenon, a lot of it is inspired by how the trans debate has been playing out in the US and UK, for example the backlash against the gender self-determination bill in Scotland, the toxicity of social media - the debate has become very hateful and polarised, and I think this is infecting politics on the European continent as well.

The far-right political parties have networks and they exchange ideas and campaigns. Also, if you are a fringe party and you want to get attention, then you say the opposite of what everyone else is saying. So if most other parties are saying everybody has the right to love who they love and be who they are, the fringe parties will say “it’s unnatural, it disrespects traditional families, it’s against the church, it’s gone too far, they shouldn’t flaunt it, keep it at home”. As many have said, it’s a repeat of the homophobia we saw in the 1970s and 1980s. At the moment it’s mostly targeted at trans people but this hatred will not stop there.

Exactly that - the LGBT+ community has been warning for some time that this isn’t just about trans rights. First our opponents will strip those rights away, but then it will be gay rights, then women’s reproductive rights, until there are no minority protections left. Pick the easy target first - they’ve chosen that to be trans people - then continue to chip away at our hard-won freedoms. The goal is to roll back things like marriage equality and abortion rights and impose traditional values - it’s all linked and it’s everybody’s fight to stop it.

If you look at the investigations that there have been on what content you get fed if you go and look at certain things on the internet - for example if you search traditional family content, algorithms are directing you onward to alt-right conspiracies, anti-abortion campaigns, anti-democratic campaigns, posts calling for armed revolution against democratic institutions - it’s reinforcing people’s prejudices and connecting them at a scale we’ve not seen before.

I like to use the canary analogy, when miners used to take a canary into mine tunnels to detect poisonous gases and if the bird died it would be a warning to exit the tunnel immediately. For me, LGBTI rights and women’s rights are the canaries in the coal mine of democracy. So when you see these rights being attacked you need to respond and take it seriously as the same people attacking these rights are the ones that will be attacking free courts, free media, all of our democratic institutions if we let that sentiment continue to grow.

Would you say politicians in Europe have taken democracy for granted in that respect? Have we become a bit too complacent in our democratic institutions, thinking they are stronger than they actually are?

I think so because our democratic institutions are usually built by the ones who are in the democratic institutions so they don’t want to put too many limits on themselves. That’s the difference with the constitution of Germany, it was written by Allied forces after World War Two trying to avoid having democracy undermined by elected politicians. We don’t have anything like that in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, where the far-right can have views that undermine the fundamental human rights of individuals. Usually the target is Muslims, migrants and refugees, but that’s only the start. If you look at this new national conservative party in Denmark, their lead candidate for the European elections is anti-migration and many of their national MPs are against women’s rights and are anti-LGBT+. This is one of the parties that has the most resonance within the young population of Denmark, a worrying sign of disillusionment.

So if we turn specifically to Denmark, is Denmark following this European trend? Is there a noticeable public backlash against LGBT+ people or has your country been more immune to the polarised debate on equal rights?

No, Denmark is not immune to this. We’ve seen this discourse in the United States, about how companies shouldn’t be so ‘woke’, the whole row with Bud Light using a trans influencer to promote their beer, about how drag queens shouldn’t be reading books to children - and it’s being reported by Danish media and the same objections are being voiced here.

The protests in Denmark are still very small but are being given a disproportionate space in media, so these anti-rights people get to go on evening news shows and talk about how drag queen storytime is a sign of the end of the world. This is influencing the wider political landscape - right-wing MPs were going out and saying you shouldn’t give gender-affirming care to young trans people, attacking the Copenhagen health service for providing a make-up class for trans people even though it was sponsored by a private company. It’s definitely taken a turn for the worse.

A lot of big companies have withdrawn their sponsorship from Copenhagen Pride this summer under the premise that the Pride organisation had been too involved in global politics. I find it worrying that there is so little tolerance of mistake, or what’s seen as a mistake, from the companies for a volunteer-led organisation, that it takes so little for big Danish companies to withdraw their support for the Danish LGBTI community at Pride.

That is especially disheartening to hear after Copenhagen hosted WorldPride in 2021, against all the odds during the Covid-19 pandemic. We were both there with friends and colleagues - over 100 legislators attended Copenhagen 2021 to sustain political engagement and build a legacy beyond that week. It is worrying to hear how different the situation is just three years later.

Moving on to the upcoming elections - voters in the EU will elect a new Parliament on 6-9 June, and it is broadly anticipated that there will be a shift to the political right in terms of the composition of the parliament. That means the anti-rights movement you’ve described is growing. We’re aware of what’s happening, we’ve observed what’s happening, we’re talking about what’s happening, but it’s still happening. What can the European Parliament do in its new term to stand up for equal rights? Can it do anything?

We need to really focus on educating the general public on this debate, about why the rights of LGBTI people - to live and love freely - why this is a question of fundamental rights, of life or death for many people. Literally. Having to hide who you are can be detrimental to mental and physical health.

We need to show the positive stories of why gender-affirming healthcare is important and relevant for trans people. We need to show the positive stories of rainbow families and why it’s necessary to have the right for children to have their parents recognised across the EU.

The anti-rights groups and anti-gender people have been going out with these counter narratives, picking out rare cases of people who have regretted transitioning, picking out dubious clinicians who go against the majority consensus of medical opinion. We need to re-communicate everything we’ve built for the past 40 years - the facts, science and statistics are on our side - because people need to hear it again. We need to repeat why fundamental rights for all are important.

Some people would argue that LGBT+ rights in the present day have been ‘captured’ as an issue by the political left, that LGBT+ rights are owned by one part of the political spectrum, which plays into the divisive culture wars we’ve touched on. So in terms of re-communicating, how do we communicate the message of equality from a perspective that isn’t seen as belonging to one political family? As someone from the broad European Centre, what do you see as the argument for LGBT+ rights that isn’t necessarily a socialist argument or a left-wing argument - specifically how do we make the point to people on the centre-right that this is something they should be caring about as well?

For me as a social liberal it’s a question of giving the individual the right to be who they are, and not having their identity or personhood identified by structures such as family or class, but allowing each individual to decide who and what they are in our societies. It’s a basic foundation of liberalism that you start with the individual and not with families, church, class - it’s a question of individual freedoms and this should be a centrist, liberal, centre-right argument. I don’t believe all centre-right conservatives are church and family based, they are wanting to base their society on individual citizens and not on social classes. I think the far right have had an interest in painting LGBT+ rights as ‘left-wing’ and ‘Marxist’ and ‘weird’ in order to get more people to be against them, but the moderate centre-right should be reassured that this is about individual freedoms so as many people as possible can reach their full potential in life.

And finally - you’re leaving the European Parliament at the end of this term. What’s next for you?

I don’t know yet! I’d like to explore something in academia or at a think tank for a while. I don’t want to be a lobbyist for hire. I want to work for causes that I believe in, but I’m going to give myself some time to breathe and see where the future takes me.

The European elections will take place across all 27 EU Member States from 6 to 9 June 2024, and will return 720 legislators for the 2024-2029 parliamentary term.