‘People ask me to use another door’: MEPs on bias, whiteness and rise of far right

From being repeatedly asked for ID to feeling threatened by harmful rhetoric, politicians say lack of diversity is undermining work of EU

As a newly minted member of the European parliament in 2019, Alice Kuhnke swiftly learned to keep her ID badge handy. Sometimes the request to see it would come just moments after she had swiped it to enter a building, other times she would be stopped hours later as she made her way to meetings.

Six months into the job, she mentioned the stringent security measures over coffee with a few colleagues. “They said ‘Are you serious? I’ve never been stopped.’”

Kuhnke, a Black MEP from Sweden, put the same question to her Black colleagues. The answer confirmed what she had suspected: “Some of them had been stopped.”

It was one of her first hints of what it meant to work in a European parliament that is profoundly out of step with the demographic reality of Europe. While racialised minorities make up an estimated 10% of the EU’s population, MEPs from these groups accounted for just 4.3% of the total lawmakers in the last mandate, according to analysis by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).