Breaking the Glass Ceiling to Attack Other Women
Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni represent a new model of far-right political marketing. It presents Western neoliberalism as a beacon of women’s empowerment — claiming to defend women’s rights, even as they attack migrants and low-earners.
Giorgia Meloni speaking during a press conference on September 25, 2022, in Rome. (Valeria Ferraro / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian, and you can’t take that away from me.” In Italy, these words are perhaps Giorgia Meloni’s most famous summary of her creed. First spoken in 2019, this line has been heard many times since, including via a disco remix and a Spanish version pronounced at rallies for the far-right Vox party: “Yo soy una mujer. . .”
At the Budapest demographic summit last September, helmed by Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán, Meloni elaborated on this catechism: “What I wanted to say with those words is that we live in an era in which everything that defines us is under attack. And why is it dangerous? It is dangerous for our identity — our national identity, our family identity, our religious identity — it is also what makes us aware of our rights and able to defend those rights.”
The move fits perfectly into what Italian philosopher and feminist Giorgia Serughetti refers to as “identity maternalism”: a leadership style that “takes advantage of qualities typically associated with women and mothers to offer the electorate a reassuring and protective face in times of great uncertainty.” The rhetoric of motherhood is part of a now common far-right playbook that makes an enemy of “gender” — but uses this English word to mean “feminist and LGBTQ ideology.” This means defending the “traditional” (heterosexual) family as the core of society, damning abortion and LGBTQ rights, and obsessing about birth rates.
The far right’s normalization strategy doesn’t mean dropping its authoritarian, discriminatory and anti-working-class elements. But it’s also worth understanding how the traditional reactionary model is hybridized with other elements of political marketing, under the guise of female leadership. Today we are faced with a more kaleidoscopic operation than the days when Margaret Thatcher embodied neoliberal conservatism.
Back then, the Tory prime minister enacted anti-social policies despite being a woman. In today’s political climate, the far right can serve the same purposes thanks to having female leaders.
Strategic Ambiguity
The fact of being a woman in no way implies feminist leadership. Although less-known than the “I am a mother” quote, a statement in Meloni’s memoir, I Am Giorgia, puts it quite plainly: “I have never been a feminist.” Meloni also appears to be in tune with machismo: “The leader (literally: “il capo”) must be a leader and prove to be the strongest!”
As in the case of Alice Weidel, leader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, or Riikka Purra, who leads the far-right Finns Party in Finland, this “strength” has nothing to do with empowering most women. They pursue a neoliberal agenda that glorifies competition and sacrifices welfare. As an example, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia opposed the recent European Union directive on strengthening the principle of equal pay for equal work. Finns Party leader Purra, who is also her country’s finance minister, is a fierce advocate of austerity. Weidel like Meloni opposes the minimum wage — a policy far more likely to benefit women — and cites Thatcher as her political model.
Still, we should note the role of strategic ambiguity in advancing this political vision. Fratelli d’Italia, rooted in historical fascism, retains a virile, macho posture even if its leader uses maternal rhetoric; the AfD still keeps up a homophobic discourse even if it is led by a lesbian. And when French far-right leader Marine Le Pen says she wants to defend the values of the West as a woman, her battle is not to extend rights but to restrict them.
Such a position is also notably shaped by its insistence that charges of chauvinism are false. “Like all women, even if you don’t necessarily make it a militant fight, you are sensitive to the condition of women in France and even in the world. As a politician, I myself am very attached to it,” Le Pen wrote last time she ran for the presidency. “The West must be proud of advancing the equality and emancipation of women.”
In the rhetoric of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, the West stands in opposition to Islam. When Le Pen asserts rights, she is not doing so to extend them, but to make them exclusive and exclusionary. It is no coincidence that, while preaching the emancipation of French women, Le Pen dreams of a “national preference” to exclude those with dual nationality from jobs in the state administration and to limit immigrants’ access to public services.
Far-right female leaders are not just depriving feminism of any revolutionary potential; they are also using femininity as leverage for exclusion. Even women’s rights are reshaped as a border: they are not conceived as a universal good but something that distinguishes us from dangerous outsiders (Muslims, immigrants, gays) who undermine these same rights.
We saw this in recent days, during the launch of a foundation dedicated to Giulia Cecchettin, a twenty-two-year-old murdered one year ago by her white, Italian boyfriend: the education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, caused a scandal by stating that “patriarchy does not exist anymore” and asserting a tie between femicides and the presence of foreigners. Meloni defended her colleague, insisting that illegal immigration is indeed a factor in gendered violence. This Monday, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, in an interview with Donna Moderna (Modern Woman) magazine, she hammered home this point, saying, “I’ll get called a racist for this, but there is a higher rate of cases of sexual violence by immigrants.”
Once social and economic demands have been scrubbed from public discourse, far-right leaders can easily reinterpret women’s rights as a matter of identity and security: the right (or rather the pressure) to give birth and the right to defend oneself (from the demonized Other). In the posters of the Alternative für Deutschland as well as its Austrian counterpart, this is symbolized by pregnant women saying “Don’t touch us” to migrants.
Mothers of Italy
Family matters to the Italian government. In the words of Isabella Rauti, a senator for Meloni’s party: “Without children, without the joy of being continued, there is no future, there is nothing.” (Rauti is the daughter of Pino Rauti, a founding member of the fascist Italian Social Movement who was involved in numerous judicial investigations over 1970s terrorism.)
Meloni insists that “everything that defines us is under attack” — and poses a traditionalist message of defending a besieged identity. Even her rhetoric about “conservative ecologism” (counterposed to “environmentalism,” deemed a far-left ideology) cites the higher cause of “God, nation and family.”
But there’s also a fourth term that needs adding to this trio: laissez-faire. This is asserted for both business (“those who produce must not be disturbed” by government, this party insists) and private life, although in the most contradictory way: Meloni herself is an unmarried mother, as is surely her right, and yet she routinely holds forth on what a real family is and isn’t.
Meloni has also made her own family a key communication tool, taking her six-year-old daughter on important official visits, like a recent trip to China. “Everywhere together: I love you, my little mouse,” she posted on social media, along with a photo. Here, traditional motherhood and the demand for privacy are fused with the opposite.
In their 1999 work The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello had already hinted how capitalism would be able to gobble up progressive movements and ideas. A decade later, philosopher Nancy Fraser explained how feminism was being distorted by neoliberalism, which under the rhetoric of “breaking the glass ceiling” left most women socially shattered. And now, in the 2020s, far-right female leaders are further contaminating the picture. In Meloni, Le Pen, and others, the politics of the hard right finds an ever-cozier home for their Fatherlands — a mother’s warm embrace.