Desk

Patriarchy Speaks Greek

11 June 2026

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Greece ranks 105th in the world for women’s parliamentary representation. Just 23.3%. 70 women in 300 seats.

Above us, among 104 other countries, sit:

  • Rwanda 63.8%
  • United Arab Emirates 50%
  • Senegal 41.2%, with a 96% Muslim majority
  • Iraq 28.9%
  • Morocco 24.3%

Read it again. Iraq, the country the West “liberated” to save its women, today has a share of women in its parliament nearly six points higher than Greece.

In the European Union, only four countries sit below us: Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus (Eurostat). Every country in Western Europe, without exception, is above us.

The story we are fed

For twenty years the European Right, from Le Pen to Mitsotakis, has repeated the same line: “Muslims oppress women, we are advanced, so fear the migrants.”

The IPU numbers show exactly what that story is. It is a lie that uses women as a pretext.

It also has a name in the international literature: femonationalism. The sociologist Sara Farris shows how the far right invokes women’s rights only when it is about to stigmatise Muslims. Never to change anything in its own house.

Who benefits

Not the women of Greece. Not Palestinian, Syrian or Afghan women. The beneficiaries are:

  • The arms industries that have sold weapons to every “liberation” war of the past thirty years, from Afghanistan to Libya
  • The governments of the United States and Israel, which need moral cover for military interventions and occupations
  • Europe’s traditionally patriarchal parties, which turn feminist only when they talk about Muslims

As long as we believe the problem is “over there”, we never have to look our own inequality in the eye.

Our own patriarchy

Greece has a law imposing a 40% quota on women’s candidacies (Law 4604/2019). Parliament ended up at 23.3%. Why?

Because the quota applies to candidacies, not to seats. Parties place women in positions that do not get elected. Preference voting favours the already famous, who are mostly men. The quota becomes a sign on the door of a house that was never built.

Look at what those who took it seriously are doing. Rwanda constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of 24 seats exclusively for women, out of 80. The system worked so well that today women hold 51 of the 80 seats, 63.8%, the highest share in the world. Senegal passed a seat parity law. Sweden and Spain alternate genders on their ballots (zipper lists), reaching 44 to 45%.

That is not a miracle. That is institutional design. Greece picked the weakest tool in existence and celebrates having it.

What AURIO proposes

  1. A constitutional 50% quota on seats, not candidacies, with a zipper list model of gender alternation in all elections.
  2. Double preference voting: one cross for a man, one for a woman.
  3. Sanctions: a party that does not comply loses its state funding.
  4. Open confrontation with the machinery of Islamophobia, not as moralising but as a democratic obligation. We will not let careers be built on the fear of migrants while Greek women remain at 23.3%.

Rwanda, after the genocide, decided that equality is not a gift, it is an institution. All these countries the European gaze treats with condescension are overtaking us because they changed the rules, while we decorated ours.

Greece owes that decision to its women. And it owes itself an end to wagging its finger at the whole world while its own parliament sits 105th.

AURIO. For a Greece that looks in the mirror before handing out lessons.

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