In 1979, the communist Nilde Iotti was the first Italian woman to preside over her country's Chamber of Deputies. In 2018, the conservative Elisabetta Casellati became the first Italian woman to serve as president of the Senate, the second institutional position of the Italian State. But to date, no woman has ever managed to be elected Prime Minister of Italy.
This glass ceiling could be broken in a few weeks by Giorgia Meloni, a 45-year-old from Rome, founder and president of the Brothers of Italy, the extreme right-wing party that has all the numbers to win the next elections on September 25. While the big parties of the Italian left have always chosen men to lead them, Meloni could soon follow the path of conservative women like Margaret Thatcher, Liz Truss or Angela Merkel.
"It would be a great honor to be the first female president of the government, as it was to be the first woman to lead a European party," she told the Fox network, speaking of her position as president of the European Conservatives and Reformists, of which Vox is a part. .
Meloni defends the traditional Italian family, an idea that she has not experienced personally. Her father abandoned her when she was very young to move to the Canary Islands. She was raised by a single mother, who had to go out of her way to support her and her sister, Arianna. She has a daughter, Ginevra, aged six, with her partner, a television journalist whom she met on a set, but they are not married. The extreme right-wing shows off that her achievements have been the result of her work, and not that any man has placed her in the right place. When she was pregnant, she tried to dissuade her from running for mayor of Rome, to no avail.
Italian feminists warn that a Meloni government would not give women more opportunities. “We do nothing to have a premier woman if she doesn't fight for the rights of all other women, starting with her own body,” criticizes Elly Schlein, a rising voice in the Democratic Party.
The leader of the Brothers of Italy condemns feminism and attacks the so-called "gender ideology". “We have always fought feminists because they teach the wrong way to be women, that we should wear pants, look like men. We want women to continue being women, with their sensitivity, without transforming them,” Senator Daniela Santanchè, one of the few Brothers of Italy women known outside the party, tells the phone. In the style of Marine Le Pen in France, Meloni turns to women in her speech against immigration. “Defending women means not being silent in the face of insecurity in our neighborhoods with the growing ethnic violence in our society,” she declared in June at the famous Vox rally in Marbella.
Nor does it consider that establishing mandatory quotas is the solution to increase the low number of Italian directives (only 20%). Like many other conservatives, he believes that "able women should be able to compete with the same weapons" (so he writes in his autobiography) so that "we will understand the added value they can bring." And above all, he claims that this value is motherhood, given the serious demographic problem that exists in Italy, one of the countries with the lowest birth rate in Europe. The fear of the progressives is that it will hinder the right to abortion, already very difficult in Italy due to 65% of objecting gynecologists. She denies it, but she does promise help for those who decide to continue with the pregnancy. Building nurseries or increasing maternity leave are among her ballot proposals for women.
“From an economic point of view it is dangerous to identify women as mothers, and not as individuals. If the vision we have seen is that of women relegated to the domestic sphere, it is not a step forward”, says the professor of Economics at the Sapienza Azzurra Rinaldi university, citing an electoral announcement by a candidate from Forza Italia – Meloni's partner party – offering a pension to housewives as if it were a teleshopping. Beside her, a woman vacuums while another irons.
