EWL Manifesto for the EU Elections 2024: Europe at a Crossroads

June 7, 2023

[Brussels, 9 June 2023] The European Women’s Lobby (EWL) is delighted to launch today its 2024 EU elections’ manifesto “Europe at a Crossroads – Equal Participation of Women at All Levels: Prerequisite for Peace, Prosperity and Societal Change”. The document results from close collaboration between EWL’s members and presents EWL’s vision for the 2024-2029 European mandate as well as necessary steps to reach significant improvements in Women’s Rights and equality between women and men in the EU.

“As feminists, we are happy to have the European Women’s Lobby as a strong voice for women’s rights in the EU. We want equal participation, equal representation, equal rights in all spheres of society. We need to join our forces, cross-party, transnationally, to achieve a more equal – which will be as well a more peaceful – community. The manifesto of the European Women’s Lobby can lead us there together.” – MEP Evelyn Regner, Vice-President of the European Parliament.

The Manifesto is available in English, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish, facilitating EU-wide campaigning. The Manifesto is also available in the Easy-To-Read format. As part of its 2024 EU Elections campaign the EWL will also be organising several activities focusing on the EU elections’ candidates, political actors, the media as well as the wider public. Despite significant wins for women’s and girls’ rights in Europe, the recent challenges and backlash have shown again that crises impact women, girls and women’s rights organisations disproportionately; and that women’s fundamental rights are won through hardship and yet easily threatened and revoked. In spite of the EU’s legal obligation to deliver on equality between women and men and gender mainstreaming, i.e. applying a gender perspective to all policies, women’s fundamental rights are yet to materialise in practice. That’s why it is essential to capitalise on the 2024 EU elections to firmly establish women’s rights and equality between women and men at the core of the EU! On the occasion of its manifesto launch, the EWL calls on:

Candidates – to address the diversity of women’s and girls’ real-life concerns in their campaigns and keep women’s rights high on the political agenda once elected!
European and national political parties and European political groups – to apply gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting to their programmes!
The media – to provide voters with unbiased, independent, complete information and a comprehensive view of their options, by giving an equal platform to both female and male candidates; to increase coverage of women’s rights topics and dismiss once and for all gender stereotypes and the objectification of women!
The electorate – to engage, assess candidates’ track records and commitment to women’s rights and to vote for feminist leaders!
EU Institutions – to enable and take responsibility for democratic fair and equal election processes for female and male candidates, where they are equally safe and welcome to use all public fora to communicate with the electorate, without the risk of facing gendered mis- or disinformation or online and offline harassment.

“We must ensure that all women have equal opportunities to enter governing bodies and that women’s interests and concerns are on the political agenda. Women are not a minority and should be better represented in decision-making positions, their under-representation is a serious democratic deficit and a threat to the legitimacy of our political systems; only when the interests and needs of the whole population are taken into account will we have true democracies.” – Reka Safrany, EWL’s President.

Find out more on how you can contribute to realising true equality between women and men in Europe and read our Manifesto: