Women now lead populist parties across Europe and beyond, an empirical reality that seemed implausible only a few decades ago. Yet populist leadership research remains predominantly male-centered and unevenly attentive to gender; studies of women populist leaders are growing but remain fragmented, while gender-and-leadership scholarship focuses largely on mainstream and gender-progressive contexts. This editorial reviews the state of research on women populist leaders along four axes—pathways and party context, the gendered demand side, the gendered performance of leadership, and agendas in office—and introduces the ten contributions to this thematic issue. It closes by identifying avenues for further research, among them ideological and geographical breadth, intersectionality, and the reception of gendered populist performance.
How do women leaders shape the agendas of populist radical right (PRR) parties, and how does this in turn impact nativist parties’ electoral appeal? Historically male-dominated PRR parties are now increasingly led by women. Yet, research has not systematically examined how women-led PRR parties recalibrate priorities, or what influence this has on perceptions of the party. To shed light on these questions, we combine observational and experimental evidence. In the first stage, we describe key differences between men- and women-led PRR parties using manifesto data from 15 Western European countries (1988 to 2025). We find that women-led PRR parties broaden issue agendas, increasing attention to areas such as environmental protection, labour policy, and cultural policy. In the second stage, we test the effects of these appeals through a survey experiment manipulating leader gender, agenda breadth, and rhetorical framing. We draw on role congruity theory, which distinguishes between (masculine) agentic political communication, emphasising strength and authority, and (feminine) communal communication, emphasising care and collective wellbeing. Our results show that simply broadening the issue agenda does not consistently reduce perceived extremism or increase support. Instead, responses depend on how the expanded platform is communicated. Agentic framing increases perceptions of ideological radicalism, whereas communal framing improves leader favourability and increases vote likelihood. These effects do not vary systematically by leader gender or respondent gender. The findings offer new insights into how women leaders reshape party agendas, and the conditions under which such issue expansion influences perceptions of nativist parties.
The increasing prominence of women leaders of populist radical right (PRR) parties raises important questions about the relationship between gender, leadership, and ideological discourse. This article examines how three PRR women leaders—Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and Alice Weidel—articulate LGBTQI+ issues in their public communication. Drawing on framing theory, the study analyses a selection of leaders’ speeches, complemented by media interviews given by the three leaders, to identify how LGBTQI+ themes are constructed and integrated into broader party-political narratives. Our findings show that LGBTQI+ issues vary in salience and framing across leaders. Le Pen largely avoids the issue, invoking LGBTQI+ rights only within a homonationalist narrative opposing Islamic communitarianism. Meloni adopts a more traditionally conservative frame, grounding her framing in the protection of children and of the “natural family,” while Weidel selectively combines homonationalist and anti-gender discourses. Despite these differences, all three oppose the expansion of LGBTQI+ rights against their own country’s status quo, selectively accepting sexual orientation while marginalising gender identity and transgender rights.
As the horizon for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development draws nearer in an increasingly urbanised world, questions remain about how urban governance can promote a more just and resilient food system. Municipalities are often tasked with the local implementation of national policies, a form of top-down governance. However, municipalities can also engage in bottom-up governance by cooperating with alternative food networks (AFNs) to influence, for example, the city’s political agenda. Thus, investigating the dynamics of municipalities and AFNs in bottom-up governance is crucial to explaining and supporting urban food system transformation. This article explores how municipalities can act as agents of “prefigurative politics”—enacting the values and practices of ideal, contested food futures. Drawing on interviews and participant observations in Malmö, Sweden, we show how the municipality supports local AFNs and actively participates in their development. These practices reveal how municipalities negotiate power, cultivate diverse relationships, and embed alternative temporalities of change within urban food governance. By examining the municipality’s role in the establishment of the Malmö Food Council, this article advances debates on how municipalities can contribute to post-2030 urban food agendas. Using prefiguration as an analytical lens to understand how power operates across scales of governance, our analysis reveals how municipalities can become sites where future food systems are not merely planned and governed but also imagined, enacted, and negotiated in the present. It also reveals the challenges and limitations facing municipalities in working towards a just and resilient food system.
Transforming urban and peri-urban (UPU) food systems towards sustainability requires not only new, more inclusive governance approaches, but also a deeper understanding of the linguistic and cultural dimensions of diverse food practices, including food sharing initiatives (FSIs). In transnational governance contexts such as the EU, where multilingualism is foundational, linguistic diversity profoundly influences how UPU foodscapes and food-related practices are conceptualised and governed. Language both reveals and conceals—rendering certain practices visible while obscuring others. This (in)visibilisation has significant policy and governance implications for recognising, protecting, and supporting diverse UPU food sharing practices. In this article, we reflect on the negotiated process of creating the first European Food Sharing Dictionary, a collaborative, co-creative, and cross-sectoral effort to translate the terms used to describe FSIs and their activities in 25 EU languages. This highlights the challenges and opportunities of negotiating meanings across cultural and geographic boundaries. We argue that understanding the socio-linguistic dimensions of food sharing not only deepens insights into UPU food sharing practices and food systems, but also creates the foundations for FSIs to build horizontal networks and coalitions across Europe. In the context of moving towards a more just post-2030 sustainability agenda, we find that such a shared, translated lexicon serves as a practical and political tool to foster visibility, solidarity, and collective action among diverse FSIs, while enabling more effective UPU food system governance.
