Keywords

1 Introduction

The document “Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European economic and social Committee and the Committee of the regions”,Footnote 1 issued by the European Commission in 2020, gives member States the guidelines for the gender equality strategy to be achieved by 2025, being Gender equality a fundamental element of rule of law for the European Union.

It is interesting to note that the first guidelines refer to the topic of gender stereotypes, considering them as an obstacle for women’s emancipation and legitimizing gender based violence. Data show that 44% of Europeans think that the most important role of a woman is to take care of home and family and 43% of them think the most important role of a man is to earn money. The Commission recommends finding strategies to fight against gender stereotypes, as eradicating them is considered essential to fill the gender gap in labour market, healthcare, decision-making process, and politics.

Based on this document, the aims of this paper are, first of all, to analyze how this issue is dealt with by Italian populist leaders in their political communication, and whether their gender representations correspond to the values defined at European level. Secondly, to analyze the tension between institutional populist actors and antagonistic feminist associations, which, breaking with stereotyped representations, take action in an anti-populist sense. In this articulated and complex framework, women's movements of the so-called ‘fourth wave’ seem to represent a valuable front of resistance.

In order to answer this twofold research question the methods used have been, on the one hand, a qualitative content analysis of a corpus of 2600 posts from the twitter profiles of the leaders of two Italian populist radical right-wing parties, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini; on the other hand, the qualitative content analysis of a corpus of 850 posts from the twitter profile of the Italian network of Ni una Menos and 20 in-depth interviews with female activists.Footnote 2 Both analyses have been carried out taking into account the communication that has taken place over a one-year period, from 9/04/2020 to 1/05/2021.Footnote 3

1.1 Right-Wing Populism in Italy: Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni

As a foreword to the analysis in this article, it is useful to briefly describe the historical context in which Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, two Italian leaders with right-wing political views, and the political entities they represent are situated. They both advocate for nationalist, sovereigntist, and identity-based positions. Their political careers and the progress that gradually led their respective parties to play a central role in Italian politics are historically framed within a new phase following the end of the first Italian Republic (1946–1994). This phase was characterized by a lack of confidence in traditional political parties due to the “Mani pulite” scandals that led to the arrest of several politicians and the rise of new political actors. Among these, in addition to Lega Nord, we can recall Alleanza Nazionale, the right-wing party founded by Gianfranco Fini in 1995, which later merged with other parties to form Popolo delle Libertà (2009), led by Silvio Berlusconi who played a significant role in Italy in bringing right-wing political parties together. More broadly, Salvini and Meloni’s political careers should be understood within a gradual crisis or transformation of democracy which has provided fertile ground for the proliferation of populist tendencies. These tendencies have been determined by the crisis of political mediation structures, primarily political parties, the personalization of power, the mediatization of political life (Cammarota and Raffa, 2018), and a global capitalist crisis, which has made class struggle nearly anachronistic and has channelled tension into an opposition of “us” (the people) versus “them” (the ruling class).

Matteo Salvini gained prominence as leader of Lega Nord, a party founded in 1989 in Bergamo to represent the interests of Northern Italian regions. However, in recent years, the party has transformed itself into Lega, expanding its reach nationwide with a strong anti-immigration and sovereigntist rhetoric. Under Salvini’s leadership, which began in 2013, Lega grew significantly, resulting in a major success in 2018 national elections after allying with Movimento 5 Stelle, Lega was able to form a government coalition, with Salvini being appointed as Vice President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Internal Affairs. During his time in office, Salvini introduced strict measures to control immigration, such as shutting down Italian ports to rescue ships and strengthening border controls.

Salvini advocated a sovereigntist and nationalist vision for Italian politics, calling for a return of state control over national borders and monetary policy while criticizing the European Union. He also promoted policies that emphasized Italian culture and traditions and strengthened national identity.

Regarding public order and security, Salvini adopted a more securitarian approach, supporting stricter measures against crime, including violence against women, and illegal immigration, aiming to increase the presence of law enforcement on the territory. He took conservative positions on social issues, especially on gender-related topics such as LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, pushing for more restrictive policies.

Salvini's disagreement with Movimento 5 Stelle's progressive stance, due to his conservative and sovereigntist positions, caused a government crisis in 2019. In an attempt to gain more electoral support for his party, he withdrew his support from the government led by Conte, with the hopes of winning subsequent elections. However, President Mattarella appointed Conte with the responsibility of forming a new government, and Salvini ended up representing the opposition to the main government.

Currently, Salvini holds the positions of Vice President and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport in the government led by Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d’Italia party, which won the 2022 general elections as part of a centre-right coalition.

Giorgia Meloni's political career began at the time when Salvini’s popularity was rising. She had been actively involved in the Italian right from a young age and co-founded Fratelli d’Italia–Destra Nazionale (FLN) party in 2012, when she was elected as its leader. Her decision to leave Popolo delle libertà, to which she belonged, came after being rejected by Berlusconi when she tried to compete in elections within right-wing parties for leadership.

Under her leadership, Fratelli d’Italia party grew and gained increasing electoral support, leading to its victory in 2022 general elections as part of the centre-right coalition, which included Salvini’s Lega. As a result, Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first female Prime Minister, succeeding Mario Draghi. She had previously been the first female president of the national right-wing youth organization in 2004 and the youngest minister in republican history during Berlusconi's government in 2008.

Giorgia Meloni’s political positions are conservative, sovereigntist, and nationalist. Her rhetoric appeals to a Catholic, traditionalist, and conservative electorate through warm and intimate language. She often uses redundant communication frames and tautological statements that can be found in various media outlets. A great deal of attention is also dedicated to biographical details (Meloni, 2021), with her private life becoming political, and herself becoming the embodiment of the values she proclaims on the public stage (Meo, 2021).

Like Salvini, Meloni has proposed strict policies to counter immigration, such as Mediterranean naval blockades and the construction of border walls. At the same time, she has been vocal about defending Italian identity and opposing the idea of a multicultural society. She has worked towards preventing ius soli or the acquisition of citizenship by underage children of regular foreign parents born and raised in Italy. She is also known for using certain issues, like gender-based violence and public safety, to build narratives and policies against the Muslim community.

Regarding gender and LGBTQI+ rights, she has taken conservative positions, supporting traditional family values and gender roles. She opposes same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples while also expressing opposition to gender theory.

2 Italian Right-Wing Populism and Gender Representations

An interesting perspective to study gender representation and stereotypes of female and male populist leaders is their political communication, in particular through social media (Massidda, 2018). Digital technology is an essential instrument for populism because it gives the possibility to build a strong image of the leader, to create a direct relation between the leader and people and a symbolic border between people and the enemy (Tramontana, 2021, p. 80; Saccà and Massidda, 2021). Also right-wing party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini use technology with this aim and it is interesting to see how in their speeches they use gender representations to this purpose.

Both cases, as we will see, are examples of representations of a typically right-wing political discourse supporting traditional models of femininity and natural family as fundamental basis of the social order. The nation is equalled to the domestic community through the metaphor of the family (Scrinzi, 2015, p. 83) and national belonging is naturalized through gender metaphors that are functional to the anti-immigration discourse: men are given the public role of fathers, protectors of the mothers of the nation against foreigners, women are instead given the private role of biological and social reproduction of the national community (Scrinzi, 2015, p. 83). It must be underlined how these traits, typical of Italian radical right wing parties, are common also among European radical right wing parties, with distinctions among parties having traditional positions about issues regarding women and family and others going towards more “modernly traditional” stances (Mudde, 2007) and therefore slightly more progressive.

2.1 Gender Representation and Stereotypes in Matteo Salvini’s Political Speech

The content analysis of Salvini’s communication reveals the characteristic features of his populism: the central role of leaders and their political team; the elements representing their sovereignty; a constant reference to the population, often defined with the term “people'’ or with the more confidential one of “friends” (Tramontana, 2021, p. 84). On the one hand he introduces himself as a strong leader in line with his people’s needs and requests, on the other as a common person near to everyone’s ordinary and daily problems. Out of the total of his posts, 12% of them deal with gender issues, but only with reference to women. His gender representation is based on the binary logics recognizing exclusively a female and a male gender. There isn’t, in fact, any reference to other genders and to LGBTQI+ people. However, even the gender distinction between men and women is neutralized; the woman loses her singularity because it is absorbed by the homogeneity of “us”, of the collective body.

However, within this homogenization there are some distinctions based on a sort of benevolent sexism in which women appear morally pure but weak (the reference is, for example, to cases of disabled women or victims of violence), in need of defense and support by a strong leader. Women’s weakness is threatened by a series of enemies. First of all, Muslims who represent an attack to women’s rights and bodies. This threat, however, hides another threat towards Western values and conquests. In this case Salvini’s nationalism uses some feminist claims (the topic of gender violence or rights) to mark the polarization between “us” and “them” and strengthen national borders, taking all the complexity of gender claims away from these issues (Tramontana, 2021, p. 86). The second enemy is represented by petty crimes and their anonymous and daily violence, putting women’s bodies in danger. Even in this case the stereotyped representation of women as weak victims is functional to the topic of calling for tougher punishment. Lastly, gender ideology represents for Salvini a serious threat to the iconography on which the traditional man/woman distinction is based. These dangers imply the construction of symbolic borders, internal and external to the social body, that must be protected.

As it is evident, Salvini’s political communication highlights the distinctive traits of populist experiences (Mèny and Surel, 2001), one of which is the construction of a dichotomizing identity friend-enemy.

His gender representations confirms the patriarchal trait, common element among populist phenomenologies (Kimmel, 2007), a traditionalist gender culture based on archetypes of hegemonic patriarchal masculinity as it seems to be common to the political and party-system dimension (Bellè, 2015, p. 66) and about heteronormativity as core discourse device (Giorgi, 2021).

In summary, therefore, Salvini’s political communication refers to an image of the woman who, on the one hand, disappears in the homogeneous unity of “people” through a process of neutralization of any specific features and whose weakness justifies the strong presence of a leader, on the other it is characterized by her specific role of mother, symbolically functional to the rhetoric on tradition through which to defend the nation from the “enemy” (Tramontana, 2021). This kind of representation finds correspondence in the political programme of Lega. If 2018 and 2022 electoral programmes are considered (Saccà and Massidda, 2018), it is evident how in both of them Salvini’s party frames references to women’s rights within a discourse on the social value of family.

Gender issues, in particular the issue of women’s rights, are quoted in Lega’s 2022 electoral programme exclusively with reference to Muslim women. Also in this case Lega’s populism uses some gender claims to build the Islamic enemy and carry out Islamophobic and racist policies. The rights mentioned are the ones to education, not to wear the veil and human rights in general. The proposed policies are aimed at «ensuring second generation Muslim women the necessary education to get integrated in the Italian social and cultural context».Footnote 4 Even in the 2022 electoral programme, as in the previous one from 2018 (Saccà and Massidda, 2018; Raffa, 2021), the issue of gender violence is dealt with as a problem of public security. An issue for which they call for tougher punishment, especially if offenders or rapers are black and migrants. The topic of violence against women is therefore exploited to legitimize the fight against Islamism and to safeguard Italianity, and it is never dealt with as a cultural and structural issue calling for the need to work on other aspects that are not mere penalties (let us think about the proposal, for example, to reform the Code of criminal procedure or accelerate timeframes of the Italian system of justice).Footnote 5

If Salvini (and his speeches) fully embodies the classical model of populist leadership within a traditionally male field as the political one, it is interesting to see what happens when populist rhetoric is female-oriented and the leadership is embodied by a woman (Meo, 2021; Raffa, 2021). Do the contents of political communication change? Do gender representations and stereotypes change? Is another model of leadership conveyed?

2.2 Gender Representation and Stereotypes in Giorgia Meloni’s Political Speech

The political history of populism tells us that it does not exclude women nor their political participation, as demonstrated by several cases of women leaders of populist parties and movements in Europe and other continents (from Eva Perón in Argentina to Sarah Palin in the United States or to Marine Le Pen in France, just to quote a few names) (Saccà and Massidda, 2021, p. 130). They are parties which, according to Mudde’s analysis (2007) characterize themselves for nativism, populism and authoritarianism and for the fact that mostly they are originally men’s parties, due to a very low presence of women both within parties and among voters. One of the strongest elements uniting the political discourse and the communicative style of the women leaders of these parties is their use of mother-like warnings, often through the manipulation of their role as mothers within a traditional family. The representation of the woman that is given is strongly stereotyped and, as well as demonstrated by data released by the European Commission in 2020, it corresponds to the dominant vision of the woman-mother, both if they are women in positions of power and if they are not-working women.

In Italy we have a clear example with the case of Giorgia Meloni, who, as leader of the right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia, has now become Prime Minister. As we will see, however, the fact that the leader is a woman does not imply any considerable changes with reference to gender issues nor any progress in terms of women’s rights.Footnote 6

The content analysis of her tweets, in the period between 2020 and 2021, reveals that the topics her political communication focuses mostly on are linked to domestic policy. Out of the total of her posts only 10% is dedicated to gender issues, within a populist rhetoric that seems to have the same pattern as the one already seen in the case of Salvini and that gives a central role to leaders and their political parties and to the topic of sovereigntism. It is possible to group the gender issues dealt with by Meloni in three different areas.

The first is about framing gender identity only with reference to the female gender but without letting it have clear borders. This implies two consequences: the refusal to use the female grammatical gender in favour of a generic male gender and a process of neutralization of women within a community “us”.

If on the one hand the image of the woman, with her specific features, tends to disappear in the homogeneity of “people”, on the other it is evident how she is uniformed to the role of mother. For Meloni, maternity is a characteristic that goes beyond the specific role, both when she describes herself as mother and fighter, as a “maternal” heroine (Saccà and Massidda, 2021), and when she talks about female death in workplaces.

Maternity (second area where the gender discourse develops) is such a central topic that in Meloni’s representation the entire vision of the nation is built on it (and finds political correspondence in the electoral programmes of 2018 and 2022, in which much space is given to setting measures to support birth rate and working mothers, conceived to encourage “native” women to become mothers of future generations guaranteeing national ethnic homogeneity). It is framed within a traditional imaginary based on a heterosexual family, the founding core of motherland, that must be defined with clear borders, both internal and external (third area in which Meloni uses gender issues). Internal borders have the objective to protect the family from gender ideology that could reverse moral and social order; external borders are necessary to fight against the attacks coming from the process of Islamization. This kind of family is based on the figure of the Italian strong man within a patriarchal and basically misogynous culture. Here we are, also in the case of Giorgia Meloni, with a discourse device in which gender metaphors are used to naturalize national belonging, through a clear distinction of roles between man/public dimension/defender of the nation and woman/private dimension/biological and social reproducer of the national community.

Also the topic of gender violence is used by Meloni in an instrumental way to build a discourse based on sovereignty of the nation.

The abused and attacked bodies and the violated rights the leader talks about belong to Italian or Muslim women (victims of their men’s Islamic fundamentalism). The attacker is almost always the Islamic foreigner towards which the State must set tougher punishment. The topic of gender violence, therefore, is linked to the topic of xenophobic fight against Islamism (that is based on sexualization of racism) (Farris, 2019), essential to defend women’s rights and to protect the Italian identity. Fully in line with European nationalist right-wing parties, Fratelli d’Italia does not design tangible policies on equal opportunities but carries out an anti-Islamic programme in the name of women’s rights. The theoretical frame of “femonationalism” (abbreviation for feminist and female-oriented nationalism) proposed by Farris (2019) is used exactly to read and interpret this contemporary phenomenon that is based on the alliance between nationalists’ Islamophobic programmes, the rhetoric about emancipation carried out by some feminists and by some leaders at the top of some governmental organizations for gender equality and neoliberal politicians.

As well as in the case of Salvini, the analysis of Meloni’s tweets highlights the absence of a discourse referring to rights and to the topic of discrimination of the LGBTQI+ community.

In summary, a comparison between gender representations of the two leaders of the Italian populist right-wing parties allows us to note that while Salvini uses the image of a weak woman to legitimize the presence of a strong male leader, Meloni, on the contrary, uses a maternal image of the woman to legitimize the presence of a leader who is woman, mother, and fighter. In spite of the differences existing among them, they are two examples of the same political practice that is setting up gender stereotypes within a populist sovereignty-based rhetoric focused on four main topics (immigration, nationalism/homeland, safety, and criminality).

These gender representations prevent a policy which promotes women and sexual minorities’ rights because, on the contrary, they reinforce dominant gender stereotypes that, instead, need to be eradicated, as indicated by the European Commission.

3 Antipopulism and Intersectionality

Against this violation of the rule of law by right-wing populisms, there is the front of contemporary transnational and intersectional feminist movements that play a minority anti-populist role in the field of gender issues and sexuality.

Anti-populism, as well as populism, is a trans-ideological category, able to include right-wing and left-wing sectors (Enríquez Arévalo, 2019), or chameleon-like, that is, able to model and modify its messages according to rising opportunities, taking advantage of the indeterminate feature of its reference ideational systems (Ruzza, 2020).

As stated by Markou (2021), also anti-populism (as well as populism) can be seen as a logic with trends, nuances, and drives that are different from case to case and there are even moments when it can exercise some pressures that can improve the political situation.

Ruzza (2020) has pointed out how important it is, in the current political culture divided between a populist and an antipopulist front, to clarify the contribution provided by civil society in building a “good society”, that is a society based on the assumption of civilization as a positive value or where values such as social trust (Sen, 1999), reciprocity (Putnam, 2000) political and social rights are present, showing strategies, speeches, and actions helping or hindering this objective.

Through bottom-up initiatives of emancipation and using complexity and pluralism introduced by the gender category, these subjects contrast the chauvinism of the welfare and the narrow-minded cultural retreat around national ethnic majorities (Ruzza, 2020) and the manipulation of women’s rights and bodies to these purposes.

“Fourth wave” feminist movements are characterized by a strong capacity of anti-populist mobilization as they are in contrast to anti-cosmopolitan, anti-pluralist, almost always xenophobic, identity-oriented, conservatory and patriarchal perspectives of right-wing populisms, claiming to be open towards otherness, plurality, differences and complexity, factors representing the essence of gender.

The main characteristic of this kind of movements is the strong intersectional approach which builds its practices and discourses.

IntersectionalityFootnote 7 is a concept that contemporary movements echo from Black Feminism, which used it to denounce the multiple and simultaneous oppressions black women were victims of (oppressions not only based on gender but also on race and social class), and it is based on the idea that rights must be for everybody and they gain meaning only within a wider fight for social justice and only unveiling the intersections between gender, culture, class, race, as result of power relations (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990; Hooks, 1998; Davis, 2021).

The term “intersectionality” can be used with a double meaning. On the one hand it indicates the effort to deal with the issue of the position of subjects within systems of power and domain as continuously defined and redefined by multiple axes of differentiation having to do with sex, race, sexual orientation, class, etc. On the other, it also refers to a well-defined theoretical approach that perceives the need to overcome gender differences to read exclusions and power relations.

Intersectionality is connected to the analysis of power. It does not refer just to recognizing multiple identities but, in addition to this, it starts to bring to light the way in which the structures of power (racism, patriarchate, sexism, class stratification, etc.) come into relation with one another “pushing to the margin” the victims of this system. When these coalitions start to become clear and evident as the structures of power and their crossroads, then it is possible and desirable that a connection network among movements, groups and individuals that are committed in a process of social transformation and fight against different forms of discrimination and marginalization is started: feminism is for everybody (Hooks, 2020). It is with this interpretation that the concept of intersectionality has widened in a series of contexts different from one another, emerging as an essential element to develop policies of equality, also thanks to the positions of the United Nations or the EU.

Evans and Lépinard (2020) identify three ways through which intersectionality is used by feminist and queer movements as political practice: as a collective identity through which to build “multidimensional” organizations; as a strategy to build coalitions through differences and fights; as a repertoire to guarantee that women and subjects coming from minority groups are included in already existing organizations. Feminist and queer movements are not the only ones using intersectionality as political strategy and practice. It is precious also for the movements for social justice, as put in evidence by Hancock’s studies (2016), to the extent in which it allows them to exercise solidarity and build political coalitions through differences, without implementing dangerous oppression hierarchies. Other studies (among the others Carastathis, 2013; Cole, 2008; Irvine et al., 2019; Lépinard, 2014; Montoya and Seminaro, 2022) emphasize the potential of intersectionality in building within movements a collective identity, agenda and collective frames and to build alliances among movements (Cherubini et al., 2021, p. 255).

In this perspective intersectionality becomes the essential matrix for practices of fight against subordination supported by alliances among different groups which do not necessarily look for unitary positions and identities and which represent real counter narratives in comparison to contemporary identity policies. Therefore the intersectional approach contributes to determine representations and anti-populist practices in two ways: on one hand it deconstructs the idea of people, it paves the way to pluralism, becoming the main device to state democratic logics, starting from the idea that rights must be for everybody and not for a few. On the other, supporting this view, it innovates political practices, representing a valuable front of antipopulist resistance.

4 Anti-populist Representations and Practices of the Intersectional Movement Non Una Di Meno

Among the feminist movements of the “fourth wave” a central role is played by the movement Ni una Menos which defines itself as anti-capitalist, transnational, transfeminist, and intersectional. It was born in Argentina in June 2008 after the femicide of fourteen year old Chiara Páez, with a demonstration that brought more than 200 thousand people to the streets, only in Buenos Aires.

Shortly later, it became widespread in many countries around the world, joining groups of women and feminists under the slogan “Not one less” and its approach to read violence against women as structural violence, which penetrates institutions and social relations.

In Italy the movement Non una di Meno was born in 2016, gathering a series of feminist political experiences created in the previous years thanks to the work of anti-violence centres, women’s houses, feminist organizations, LGBTQI+ organizations, family services and all those spaces lived by women.

Non una di meno defines intersectional feminism in terms of a “political perspective embracing multiple fights against all possible oppressions, without imposing a hierarchy among them, but reporting the specific features of each of them”.Footnote 8

From a series of in-depth interviews to some activists, it is evident that the intersectional approach taken by Non una di Meno and the complexity of the issues and realities it highlights represent a real anti-populist action because, tracing back problems to their complexity, it contrasts the hyper-simplification put into practice by populism which, on the contrary, uses stereotyped representations and simplistic slogans. The movement «digs into the roots of the problem and finds tangible solutions, where populism provides patches» (B. 33 years old).

One of the practices through which this happens is represented by assemblies, spaces of conflictual debate among diversities proposing a horizontal organization and action in contrast with the typically populist hierarchy and which represent alliances among different fights. Also the feminist and transfeminist strike against male and gender violence is recognized by activists as anti-populist practice. It means stopping not only violence, but also «instability of life and working conditions, the double productive and reproductive workload imposed by the sexual division of work, residence permit and racism, the discriminations we suffer due to our genders».Footnote 9

Using intersectionality as perspective, feminist strike gives voice to differences, to diversified needs, to different levels of oppression, building an “us” as a political subject which is critical against binarism and a multidimensional organization. The practice of strike brings back to the centre the bodies of the women «and of the different subjectivities suffering from these systems of oppression as bodies free to self-determine themselves and not to be silenced but also free from being instrument for logics of power defending a victim and defenceless woman» (Montella et al., p. 272), at the same time refusing an abstract idea of woman, as well as a single path of liberation from violence.

Also, activists have defined as anti-populist practices the fight carried out by Non una di Meno in favour of abortion and pharmacological abortion (right put in danger by sovereignist drifts not only in Europe, as the case of Poland, but all over the world); the report of the instrumental use of women’s bodies (as in the case of rhetoric about safety) and the overturn of some topics such as, for example, maternity, whose populist representations is «patriarcal and essentialist».

One of the main levels on which resistance to populism is played is building an alternative gender representation.

The analysis of the tweets posted on the profile of the movement between 2020 and 2021 highlights an evident fracture between populist parties’ representation of the woman and the one resulting from the political discourse of the movement.

The main topics of communication are violence, health with reference above all to reproductive health and the topic of abortion, but also work, migrations and maternity. All of them are dealt with through an intersectional approach.

As far as reproductive health is concerned, as seen, gender representations of the two Italian right-wing populist leaders tend to criminalise abortion, defining it as a “defeat for women”, something that can be avoided by putting into practice policies in favour of maternity.

Tweets posted by Non una di meno, on the contrary, report the increase in the rate of conscientious objectors especially among young doctors and frame the issue as a form of institutional violence preventing women from the right to choose for their bodies.

The antipopulist discourse of the movement is based on the representation of abortion as a right for every woman, one of the most important juridical conquests in Italian history and among the sexual and reproductive rights recently defined by the European Parliament as “inalienable rights”.

As far as the topic of maternity is concerned, the discourse of Non una di Meno is aimed at deconstructing the stereotyped representation of maternity produced by populism as a necessary decision in every woman’s construction of identity, as a fundamental element of the natural family and therefore of the nation. The populist image of the woman-mother is replaced with the one of a woman who recognizes maternity as a possibility of being a woman, but not its funding issue.

In right-wing populist rhetorics problems connected to gender inequalities at work, both about a difficult access to jobs and about pay gap in comparison to men, are not mentioned nor is sexual division of work seen as a problem but, rather, it seems to be a given fact and therefore unquestionable.

On the contrary, the topic of work in the communication of Non una di meno is developed within a discourse about how the neoliberal system has produced exploitation, unstable conditions and weakened social rights, especially for specific subjects, among which women. The antipopulist discourse of the movement aims at giving a central role to the specific characteristics of work instability and women’s exclusion connected to gender, which is often entangled with other axes of oppression and vulnerability as in the case of migrant women. It goes against a populist vision which, as seen in the cases of Salvini and Meloni, still adheres to the image of a woman who is fulfilled in developing her main activity of mother within a heterosexual family.

To help single mothers Non Una di Meno proposes to redistribute the burden of care through measures such as parental leaves of the same duration and pay, equal pay, self-determination and basic income, against a populist proposal based on reinforcing measures helping women in striking a balance between work and family.

A different and evidently antipopulist perspective is about the topic of migrations and their relation with gender, seen from an intersectional point of view. Turning upside down the femonationalist approach proposed by right-wing populist leaders, the issue of migration is included by the movement within a more complex scenario which criticizes the global neoliberal system and focuses on the condition of migrant women, whose vulnerability is linked to multiple levels of marginalization and oppression. Non una di Meno criticizes the institutional system of welcoming migrants and the interpretation of migrations as an emergency, framing them as structural phenomena of global interest. It goes against expulsions and racism of the institutions, and it builds an antipopulist discourse which tries to relieve migrant women from invisibility giving back dignity to their daily fights inside and outside borders.

The most common topic dealt with in their twitter communication is violence against women and LGBTQI+ people.

To a stereotyped populist representation normalizing violence or making it a tool to carry out xenophobic policies and design symbolic borders, and to a media representation resulting in processes of secondary victimization, Non una di Meno opposes a complex representation of violence as a daily and structural issue permeating institutions and social relations.

If populist leaders propose tougher punishment as measures to contrast violence, exclusively referring to male violence against women, Non una di Meno highlights the need to take action on a cultural and educational level to eradicate the roots of violence which reside in the power asymmetries among genders and underlines the importance of increasing funds for anti-violence centres and anti-discrimination centres to support LGBTQI+ people victims of violence or discrimination.

5 Conclusions

The category of gender, as previously seen, is more and more central in Italian populist leaders’ narratives and discourses who, framing gender relations within a binary heteronormative system in which genders are antagonists and complementary, use it as a tool to build coalitions in an ethnonationalist scenario that criticizes globalization, and as a vehicle to obtain cultural hegemony.

Vingelli (2021), following Farris and Rottenberg (2017), describes this phenomenon as “the righting of feminism”. These suggest that «a complex new constellation has emerged in which not only is being a feminist a mark of pride and source of cultural capital, but the feminist project has also increasingly been linked with non-emancipatory agendas, such as neoliberalism and right-wing xenophobic politics» (Ibidem, p. 6). Dzodan (2017) has coined the term Alt- feminism to underline the contradictory use of elements of feminism to support the requests of radical right-wing parties. Some writers underline instead the specific contents of the gender discourse of right-wing parties and their leaders, highlighting how sexual complementarity is part of an organicist, hierarchical and functional view of society: in this sense, it is a feminization of the right, rather than a drift towards right of feminism (Arfini et al., 2019). Women have become powerful amplifiers of radical right-wing rhetorics and need to remodel the whole structure and requests made by these parties.

The analysis of the political communications of the two main leaders of Italian right-wing populist parties, Meloni and Salvini, and their gender representation clearly shows how they deal with gender issues in a dichotomous way, that is based on a man/woman distinction, in which the woman sticks to stereotyped image, at times as a weak subject, at times as mother and fighter, and is manipulated by a populist rhetoric that stresses homogeneity of people. And from a national and therefore local perspective, the female populist rhetoric refers to Italian women or, at most, foreign women who live in Italy. There is no space for other gender distinctions.

This kind of representation not only hinders the promotion of gender rights and the full implementation of rule of law, but it even threatens it, with serious consequences on the quality of democracy, on the functioning of civil and political society.

If the guidelines issued by European Commission with the gender equality strategy–which make gender equality a fundamental element of the rule of law for the European Union–seem to be disregarded in Italian populist leaders’ discourses and representations, on the contrary some tensions seem evident between institutional populist actors and antagonist feminist associations.

As previously seen, contemporary feminist movements work on gender inequalities putting them in a context of a wider scenario and bringing to light power relations as result of global economic, social, and political hegemonies. To this aim, using intersectionality as a device to decompose top-down built “people” replacing the idea of people with the one of plurality, the concept of identity with that of difference, it allows to create common alliances and battlefields with other social movements. This intersectional feminism, that proposes itself as a 99% feminism (Arruzza et al., 2019), working both on the level of representations and on those of practices, seems to be able to represent an anti-populist antidote, building antibodies reinforcing the resistance of the democratic model. In this way, it overturns the populist thin-ideology, embodying “good society” versus the «evil populists» (Ruzza, 2020) and it becomes an important space of civil and democratic resistance for achieving a full implementation of the rule of law.