NEW REPORT: AT THE MERCY OF POLITICAL WILL

Plans against racism across the EU routinely coexist with racialised policies on migration, policing and welfare, and progress depends on whoever holds office

Brussels, Belgium – 23 October 2026 

Our new synthesis report, At the Mercy of Political will: NAPARs and structural racism in the EU asks what National Action Plans Against Racism (NAPARs) are doing about it. Drawing on 13 country reports produced by national researchers embedded in their own political, legal and civil society contexts, the report argues that the current generation of NAPARs, and the EU architecture that frames them, are failing the communities they claim to serve “in ways that are structural rather than incidental.”

SYNTHESIS

ENAR’s central finding is that EU and national anti-racism commitments have not been matched by the institutional conditions needed to make them real. The European Commission’s first ever EU Anti-Racism Action Plan 2020–2025, adopted on 18 September 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, named structural racism for the first time, appointed a Coordinator on combating racism and called on Member States to adopt NAPARs or integrated measures. In January 2026, following sustained civil-society advocacy, the Commission launched the EU Anti-Racism Strategy 2026–2030 as its successor. Both instruments place NAPARs at the centre of national delivery.

Five years on, the report concludes that this architecture is structurally inadequate. The Action Plan and the Strategy are not matched by any obligation on Member States to adopt, fund and implement plans that confront the structural violence experienced by racialised communities. The 13 NAPARs assessed ( in Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden) were evaluated against seven indicators developed by ENAR, drawing on its longstanding expertise and on the European Commission’s 2022 Common Guiding Principles for NAPARs.

KEY FINDINGS

The patterns the research documents are consistent across very different national contexts:

1. Adoption is uneven and easily reversed. Austria, Croatia and Slovenia do not have a standalone NAPAR. Italy has gone six years without one. Ireland is alone in scoring above 2 on the first indicator (Existence of a comprehensive, identifiable and legally anchored NAPAR). The report shows how the absence of legal footing, earmarked multi-year budgets, independent monitoring and consequences for non-delivery “institutionalises disposability.” Austria’s Competence Centre for Diversity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Discrimination was dismantled after a change of government; in Germany, headline budget figures mask project-based funding that can be quietly withdrawn.
   
2. Plans coexist with racialised policies in the same governments. The Pact on Migration and Asylum, reforms of safe third country definitions and the Schengen Borders Code, and the proposed Deportation Regulation and Anti-Smuggling Package are adopted by the same governments that adopt anti-racism plans. Rather than being reconciled with them, these instruments “consolidate, legalise and normalise the racialised dynamics that the plans are meant to address.” The report frames this as what Sara Ahmed has called “non-performative commitment”: the public statement whose institutional life consists precisely in not being implemented.
   
3. Definitions reframe racism into the depoliticised vocabularies of “integration, social cohesion and hate crime”, leaving policing, ethnic profiling, asylum, border control, counter-terrorism and security policy largely outside the scope of the plans. Anti-Muslim racism, antigypsyism, anti-Black racism and anti-migrant racism receive uneven and often marginal treatment; antisemitism is increasingly securitised; colonial continuities and their afterlives are rarely acknowledged.
   
4. Intersectionality, where it appears, is reduced to a list of identity categories rather than an analytical framework for understanding co-constituted systems of power. Decolonial analysis, which would situate European racism within the longer histories of empire, trading in Africans as slaves and extraction, is almost entirely absent. The abstention of EU Member States at the UN General Assembly on recognising slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and calls for reparations is read as a measure of this reluctance.
   
5. Equality data collection remains weak and contested. Several Member States refuse to collect harmonised, disaggregated equality data by race and ethnicity. International human rights bodies, including the Council of Europe’s ECRI, CERD, and the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, have called repeatedly for such data collection with appropriate safeguards. The report reads the refusal as a political choice, defended in the language of protecting identities but functioning to protect whiteness as the unmarked norm of citizenship and belonging.
   
6. Civic space is shrinking. Racial-justice and Palestine-solidarity organisations face administrative vetting, conditional funding, protest bans, surveillance and prosecution. Those with the most expertise on racism are made the most precarious, affecting the very communities whose participation is meant to anchor NAPARs.
   
7. The EU framework is non-binding. NAPARs are encouraged, not required. Adoption depends on political will, which means that plans adopted by one government can be quietly discontinued, defunded or dismantled by the next, as is already occurring in several Member States as far-right and far-right adjacent parties enter or shape governing coalitions.

HOW TO READ THE SCORING

Readers should note: the scores assigned under each indicator are not designed to be added together into an overall national score, nor to generate a ranking or league table of Member States. Each score must be read singularly, as a reflection of the state of play on one specific dimension within one national context. Comparability across countries cannot be ensured through this research, because its scope is deliberately not wide enough to examine the full range of policies that would be needed to assess the mainstreaming of anti-racism across all areas of government. The scoring is best understood as a diagnostic snapshot that signals strengths and gaps within each national context, rather than as a comparative metric.

The report’s scope is deliberately focused and limited. It examines whether these plans are capable of addressing racism as a systemic phenomenon embedded in institutional and societal structures, rather than merely treating it as a collection of isolated incidents or discriminatory attitudes. It does not comprehensively assess all national laws, policies and public-sector practices that may reproduce racial inequalities in contradiction to the NAPARs, nor does it systematically evaluate the mainstreaming of anti-racism across every policy area. Where policy contradictions and wider institutional contexts are documented in the country research, they are considered, recognising that the effectiveness of a NAPAR cannot be understood entirely in isolation from the policies surrounding it.

WHAT’S NEXT

ENAR’s 13 national reports and the online Anti-Racism Map will be published in the days that follow this synthesis report. The national reports provide the country-specific evidence base for the trends synthesised here, and readers seeking detailed national analysis are encouraged to consult them for the contextual depth the present report cannot provide.

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