On the possibilities of democracy in Europe’s civil society ruins 

Civil society is collapsing. While across Europe, far-right groups are rising, taking parts in governing coalitions and spreading hate against human rights defenders, in the US, Donald Trump has demolished USAID and cancelled overnight major funding for human rights worldwide.  The NGO era, some say, is over. According to this analysis, the past decade has been marked by their slow but steady crisis of legitimacy, capacity, and funding. And yet from our “modest” point of view, lesbian groups and collectives look far from dead. EL*C was born eight years ago, with the explicit aim to rebuild the lesbian movement from the ground up. Since then, it has grown into a wide network of more than 220 NGOs that, in just two years, redistributed €3 million to grassroots groups across Europe.  

This funding was a lifeline for many lesbian CSOs in Europe still operating on less than €5,000 a year, proving that community-rooted intermediaries can channel resources where public systems and large NGOs fail. This funding has empowered lesbian CSOs, who are now engaging in advocacy activities, providing indispensable community services, building their visibility and relevance at national level and contributing to the democratic processes in their Member State. 

So, while the last decade has brought crisis and decline for mainstream NGOs, it has also witnessed the unprecedented rise of the lesbian movement. Is this a coincidence? Is it possible that lesbian organizations were among the first to suffer from shrinking civic space and hostile funding environments (long before larger mainstream NGOs sounded the alarm) and are now re-emerging before others? It is clear that they were the among the firsts to adapt, to build resilience, and to develop survival strategies that now can be used as a blueprint for the wider civil society sector. 

This resilience, unfortunately, comes at a brutal cost. From its first editions in 2021, EL*C’s Observatory on Lesbophobia shows how lesbian activists face daily harassment, smear campaigns, and physical violence simply for being visible. If they are not visible and loud, they are dismissed as “too irrelevant” to be part of the consultations and therefore sidelined from policymaking and locked out of funding schemes designed for big NGOs.  

In recent years, EL*C and its members have documented the barriers faced by lesbian organisations and the strategies they have developed to survive. Through community-based research and extensive capacity assessments we have gathered the evidence needed to demand change. Together we have defined a set of concrete recommendations, presented in our recent report, aimed directly at the EU and its forthcoming Civil Society Strategy. 

At a time when Ursula Von der Leyen is proclaiming from the State of the European Union address that democracy and rule of law are at the center of Europe project, our demand is simple: lesbian organizations must not be treated as an afterthought.  

Even more, it must be recognized that their added value lies in the strength to tackle multiple issues at once, forged through being forced to “invisibility” while advocating on some of the most visible and contested debates of our time: family structures, reproductive rights and abortion, gender nonconformity, etc…. Additionally, because lesbians CSOs have to focus both on gender-related oppressions and LGBTI issues, providing resources to lesbian civil society is always a smart investment in democracy: it means advancing gender equality and LGBTIQ rights together and ultimately pushing forward equality for all. 

If the EU is serious about defending democracy, advancing gender equality or LGBTIQ rights it must explicitly recognize lesbian CSOs as actors in their own right, protect the activists most under attack, and ensure that funding rules actually deliver resources to grassroots communities. 

Because here’s the truth: if civil society is dying, lesbian organizations are its rebirth. They are radical, resilient, and indispensable. We have been here before: the lesbian movement has been declared dead many times and yet it always re-emerges 

Civil society organizations are dead, long live lesbian CSOs.