Rome, September 18 (BNA) If Italy elects its first female prime minister, will its women rejoice or be dismayed?
If polls prove that way, Giorgia Meloni and the far-right Brotherhood of Italy party she co-founded less than a decade ago will win the September 25 elections, Reuters reports.
The Italian president may then ask Meloni to try to form a viable coalition government with allies of the right.
For many female voters, it is a question of gender versus agenda.
Some worry that Meloni, who glorifies motherhood, may seek to undermine women’s rights, including access to abortion.
For her supporters, what matters is her conservative platform, “God, Country and Family,” not her gender.
The Brothers of Italy has its roots in a neo-fascist movement that paid tribute to the legacy of Benito Mussolini, who awarded prizes to women who had many children. The party got about 4% of the vote in the last elections, in 2018, but according to some opinion polls, it could win about 25% in this election.
Licia Donati, as a young communist activist in the 1960s, campaigned for the legalization of divorce, which came in 1970. She also lobbied for Italian courts to recognize that wives had the same right to justice as husbands in a country that, until 1981, had lenient laws With the men who killed the women to preserve the “family honour”.
Donati, 84, of Tuscany said if Meloni became Italy’s first female prime minister, it would be “a break (with the past) in the sense that she is a woman, but she will fall back in terms of the conservative culture of women.” A citizen lives in Rome.
Donati said that if she could talk to the politician, she would say, “What battle have you fought for women, what have you done? Nothing.”
Meloni, 45, is the only major party leader who did not join Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s pandemic government of national unity in 2021. After populist forces, including two of Meloni’s campaign allies, withdrew support for Draghi in July, the bank’s president allied The former European Central Bank, which led to early elections.
Urea Gargano, whose organization BeFree in Rome helps women who have experienced domestic violence, noted with dismay that a politician from the Italian Brotherhood had pushed for cemeteries where aborted fetuses could be buried, publishing the names of women who had aborted even without their permission.
Most recently, Meloni angered women by retweeting a video of a woman being raped on a street “just because an immigrant raped her,” Gargano said.
Meloni ridiculed most of the immigrant men who sail toward Italian shores on smugglers’ boats, as independent workers who did not deserve refugee status.
Meloni has generally refrained from promoting women’s voices simply because she is a woman. But she retracted claims that it would not be a victory for women if she became prime minister.
“I challenge anyone to say that doesn’t mean breaking the glass ceiling,” she was quoted by Italian news agency ANSA as saying when she came to Monza for the Formula 1 race.
“I’m a woman, so saying you’re not a woman if you say the things I say, frankly, makes me laugh.”
According to polls, male milionists attract slightly more than female voters.
As a young woman, Senator Emma Bonino, leader of the Small Europe Party, allied in the campaign with Meloni’s rival, Democratic Party President Enrico Letta, pushed to make divorce and abortion legal.
During this campaign, Meloni was pressured to say whether she would abide by the Italian law legalizing abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or thereafter if the woman’s health or life is at risk. She insists she will respect the law, but she wants it to be enforced in a way that provides assistance to women who decide to have children.
“It would be indisputably so clever, we simply ‘won’t enforce’ the law,” Bonino said.
Several political opponents have pointed to the lack of doctors willing to perform abortions in some parts of Italy, including the Marche region, which is ruled by the Meloni party. Under a 1978 law, workers in Italy’s public health system can declare themselves “conscientious objectors” to avoid carrying out the measure.
At the first Meloni campaign rally last month in Ancona, a town in the Marche, nearly 1,000 cheering supporters outnumbered dozens of protesters, mostly women, on a side street.
“You are hyper-hating and don’t represent me, read the sign of a protesting woman.
Meloni, who has a young child with her male companion, denounces what she calls LGBTQ “pressure groups”, ridicules the concept of gender fluidity and supports Italy’s ban on adoptions by singles.
For her, “traditional” families are the bedrock of society.
Her conservative views are unacceptable to some women, including Alice Ripoli, who can vote for the first time at age 18.
“It would be better to see a woman in politics in that kind of role (like prime minister), but maybe not. Maybe someone with more open ideas, more modern,” said Ripoli, from the northern Italian city of Aosta.
But other women support Meloni’s agenda.
Lavinia Mercanti, 25, of Rome, said she supported her “as a politician, not as a woman”. Mercanti wants to see the political right come to power.
Still others are indifferent to women’s empowerment as a campaign theme, they just want a government with lasting power. Since 2018, Italy has had three different, often conflicting, ruling coalitions of all political spectrum.
“I guess I don’t care if the right or the left wins,” said Caterina Bazani, 52, a financial advisor from Agrate Brianza in northern Italy. “I want a government that Italians vote on that will last five years and fulfill its programme.”
For Meloni, “Some people say she should take the position because she’s a woman, but I don’t think that way. It’s enough for me that she’s capable. Man or woman, it’s the same for me.”