The rise to power of a right-wing female leadership is not just an
Italian phenomenon; in recent decades, right-wing parties in the West,
especially radical ones, have chosen to talk about relying on a female
leader. ---- Until recently it seemed that Marine Le Pen was a very
special case: nothing could be more wrong, already in 1995 and until
2012 Pia Kjaersgaard took over the leadership of the Danish People's
Party (DF), paving the way already in 2001 and until October 2011, for
right-wing governments presided over by the Rasmussens, shifting
Denmark's policies to the right, especially with regard to welfare and
immigration; other right-wing parties, especially in Northern Europe,
have been inspired by her anti-emigration ideas. After a brief social
democratic interlude in the country's basement, the radical-populist
right-wing party of the New Bourgeois (Nye) came to power under the
leadership of Pernille Vermund, the party's founder.
In Norway too, the radical right has made a female choice: that of the
entrepreneur Siv Jensen who led her Progress Party (FrP) to government,
holding the prestigious post of Finance Minister from 2013 to 2020. Two
female leaders, Frauke Petry until 2017 and Alice Weidel (the latter
openly homosexual), have contributed to the rise of Alternative für
Deutschland in Germany.
The affirmation of these women in politics seems to have been
facilitated by the fact that public opinion mistakenly considers the
presence of a woman more presentable and legitimizing, which in 2000
pushed Jörg Haider, president of the Austrian radical right-wing party
Fpö, to resign in favor of Susanne Riess to give the organization the
institutional legitimacy that would allow it to govern. It is therefore
wrong to consider these parties a purely "male" phenomenon
(Mannerparteien) also because they are no longer voted for predominantly
by men: women are increasingly gaining roles in party organizations and
representation in local and national Parliaments, as is also happening
in Italy, where the gender gap in the electoral base of Fratelli
d'Italia has practically disappeared, going from 37% of women who voted
for this party in 2013 to about 50% in the 2018 European elections of '19).
Women and Politics
The presence of women in top positions in politics is a general fact,
the result of the transformation, albeit with a thousand contradictions,
of social relations between the sexes: the President of the European
Parliament and that of the Commission are women, and many of the
commissioners of the European Union will be women; the President of the
ECB, that of the Federal Reserve, and the President of the Russian
Central Bank are women; one of the candidates for the Presidency of the
United States is a woman and there could be many other examples to give,
but, in our opinion, the Meloni case is part of a broader transformation
of the conservative right in the West and has its own specificity that
leads us to ask what questions women are asking the governing right.
Given that the presence of a female leader does not necessarily
translate into a modernization of the social vision of the programs of
right-wing parties that remain largely focused on hyper-conservative
policies: anti-abortion, anti-feminist and anti-LGBT, Giorgia Meloni's
success seems to be constituted by an ambiguous and binary behavior:
Meloni is, at the same time, single and a mother, unmarried and a former
cohabiting mother, she claims to have fulfilled herself politically by
holding power and at the same time declares herself a persecuted victim,
an under dog; she declares that she wants to defend the traditional
family, but she has built a single-parent one: Her duplicity is such
that it does not prevent her from politically supporting the theses on
the "Orbán model" family promoted by Fratelli d'Italia, as she did
vehemently in her speech at the Verona Congress on the family in 2019.
This ambiguity seems to be attenuated on gender issues, although she has
entered into an alliance with the associations of Catholic conservatism
and has adopted Eugenia Roccella's positions on conservative nativism,
especially on reproductive rights; however, the contradictions and
duplicity shift to her muse, a former abortionist, a former radical
militant, who in her time supported do-it-yourself abortions with the
Karman method. From all this, it follows for her that "gender ideology"
must be opposed to preserve the Italian identity and relaunch the birth
rate.
It is therefore conceivable that the growing consensus of the female
component of the electorate towards right-wing parties is an indication
of the gender disorientation that pervades the female world and its
values, but at the same time it is the result of the left's inability to
intercept the needs that on the value level and even more on the
material level make the female condition less liveable or in any case
more burdensome than the male one. The left, despite having analyzed the
female condition and noted for some time the double exploitation
exercised by capitalism and patriarchal society on women, who are
entrusted with the function of free welfare, to support and supplement
the salary, and therefore, despite having acquired awareness of the
heavier exploitation that weighs on women, has not drawn the necessary
political consequences in terms of equal pay, expansion of services,
provision of care for the weakest subjects, unloading the burden on
them. It thus happens that the right can present the attribution of
leadership to a woman as an act of breaking with the establishment, thus
contributing to a substantial equality that represents a change from the
dominance of the prevailing elites, made up of males.
The association of the figure of the woman with the homeland allows the
right to re-propose the metaphor of the myth of common origins that is
the basis of nationalism. Women are reminded of their role as workers
and at the same time as generators who provide newborns, to whom
traditions and values are transmitted that allow the perpetuation of the
current order, preventing ethnic substitution.
The political and power rise of a female figure at the helm of the party
and the State favors the image of a normalized, reassuring right, far
from a model of violent masculinity, associated in the collective
imagination with the most extreme fringes of this political area. This
is because, in antithesis to male figures, the right-wing woman would
carry within herself the characteristic traits of gender, such as
compassion, leadership, empathy, sweetness. kindness and so on
constitute the stereotype of the woman who displays these qualities in
the management of the family and manages social welfare.
Thus the parties of the populist right formally appropriate feminist
themes and demands, bending them to the use and consumption of their own
nativist and identity campaigns, promoting conflict between Western
women, represented as emancipated and Muslim women, described as
submissive and relegated within the domestic walls, and this despite the
fact that the struggles of Iranian women, for example, demonstrate how
false and the result of easy generalizations this assumption is, because
it is the economic and material conditions that contribute to
determining the effective freedom of women and the affirmation of their
rights.
The women's struggle can become a tool for liberation for all those who
find themselves at the lowest rungs of the social ladder: for this
reason, the issues of income, equal pay - a problem often overlooked by
the left - the sexual division of labor, racism, institutional violence
against women, even more so if they are migrants, the cultural and legal
cancellation of non-conforming sexualities and discrimination against
them and their social rights are central. Feminism and its demands
constitute a force for radical transformation in relation to these
problems, the search for a quality life for all, which can only happen
through the construction and activation of a new dimension of power, of
another kind of power, a power of another kind.
A structural and material attention, an intervention on the level of
rights, the protection of women with regard to gender violence, the
effective overcoming of a patriarchal society in its founding values, is
the path through which the left can and must compete to gain
participation and support from the female component of society.
https://www.ucadi.org/2024/09/01/meloni-e-le-altre/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Italian phenomenon; in recent decades, right-wing parties in the West,
especially radical ones, have chosen to talk about relying on a female
leader. ---- Until recently it seemed that Marine Le Pen was a very
special case: nothing could be more wrong, already in 1995 and until
2012 Pia Kjaersgaard took over the leadership of the Danish People's
Party (DF), paving the way already in 2001 and until October 2011, for
right-wing governments presided over by the Rasmussens, shifting
Denmark's policies to the right, especially with regard to welfare and
immigration; other right-wing parties, especially in Northern Europe,
have been inspired by her anti-emigration ideas. After a brief social
democratic interlude in the country's basement, the radical-populist
right-wing party of the New Bourgeois (Nye) came to power under the
leadership of Pernille Vermund, the party's founder.
In Norway too, the radical right has made a female choice: that of the
entrepreneur Siv Jensen who led her Progress Party (FrP) to government,
holding the prestigious post of Finance Minister from 2013 to 2020. Two
female leaders, Frauke Petry until 2017 and Alice Weidel (the latter
openly homosexual), have contributed to the rise of Alternative für
Deutschland in Germany.
The affirmation of these women in politics seems to have been
facilitated by the fact that public opinion mistakenly considers the
presence of a woman more presentable and legitimizing, which in 2000
pushed Jörg Haider, president of the Austrian radical right-wing party
Fpö, to resign in favor of Susanne Riess to give the organization the
institutional legitimacy that would allow it to govern. It is therefore
wrong to consider these parties a purely "male" phenomenon
(Mannerparteien) also because they are no longer voted for predominantly
by men: women are increasingly gaining roles in party organizations and
representation in local and national Parliaments, as is also happening
in Italy, where the gender gap in the electoral base of Fratelli
d'Italia has practically disappeared, going from 37% of women who voted
for this party in 2013 to about 50% in the 2018 European elections of '19).
Women and Politics
The presence of women in top positions in politics is a general fact,
the result of the transformation, albeit with a thousand contradictions,
of social relations between the sexes: the President of the European
Parliament and that of the Commission are women, and many of the
commissioners of the European Union will be women; the President of the
ECB, that of the Federal Reserve, and the President of the Russian
Central Bank are women; one of the candidates for the Presidency of the
United States is a woman and there could be many other examples to give,
but, in our opinion, the Meloni case is part of a broader transformation
of the conservative right in the West and has its own specificity that
leads us to ask what questions women are asking the governing right.
Given that the presence of a female leader does not necessarily
translate into a modernization of the social vision of the programs of
right-wing parties that remain largely focused on hyper-conservative
policies: anti-abortion, anti-feminist and anti-LGBT, Giorgia Meloni's
success seems to be constituted by an ambiguous and binary behavior:
Meloni is, at the same time, single and a mother, unmarried and a former
cohabiting mother, she claims to have fulfilled herself politically by
holding power and at the same time declares herself a persecuted victim,
an under dog; she declares that she wants to defend the traditional
family, but she has built a single-parent one: Her duplicity is such
that it does not prevent her from politically supporting the theses on
the "Orbán model" family promoted by Fratelli d'Italia, as she did
vehemently in her speech at the Verona Congress on the family in 2019.
This ambiguity seems to be attenuated on gender issues, although she has
entered into an alliance with the associations of Catholic conservatism
and has adopted Eugenia Roccella's positions on conservative nativism,
especially on reproductive rights; however, the contradictions and
duplicity shift to her muse, a former abortionist, a former radical
militant, who in her time supported do-it-yourself abortions with the
Karman method. From all this, it follows for her that "gender ideology"
must be opposed to preserve the Italian identity and relaunch the birth
rate.
It is therefore conceivable that the growing consensus of the female
component of the electorate towards right-wing parties is an indication
of the gender disorientation that pervades the female world and its
values, but at the same time it is the result of the left's inability to
intercept the needs that on the value level and even more on the
material level make the female condition less liveable or in any case
more burdensome than the male one. The left, despite having analyzed the
female condition and noted for some time the double exploitation
exercised by capitalism and patriarchal society on women, who are
entrusted with the function of free welfare, to support and supplement
the salary, and therefore, despite having acquired awareness of the
heavier exploitation that weighs on women, has not drawn the necessary
political consequences in terms of equal pay, expansion of services,
provision of care for the weakest subjects, unloading the burden on
them. It thus happens that the right can present the attribution of
leadership to a woman as an act of breaking with the establishment, thus
contributing to a substantial equality that represents a change from the
dominance of the prevailing elites, made up of males.
The association of the figure of the woman with the homeland allows the
right to re-propose the metaphor of the myth of common origins that is
the basis of nationalism. Women are reminded of their role as workers
and at the same time as generators who provide newborns, to whom
traditions and values are transmitted that allow the perpetuation of the
current order, preventing ethnic substitution.
The political and power rise of a female figure at the helm of the party
and the State favors the image of a normalized, reassuring right, far
from a model of violent masculinity, associated in the collective
imagination with the most extreme fringes of this political area. This
is because, in antithesis to male figures, the right-wing woman would
carry within herself the characteristic traits of gender, such as
compassion, leadership, empathy, sweetness. kindness and so on
constitute the stereotype of the woman who displays these qualities in
the management of the family and manages social welfare.
Thus the parties of the populist right formally appropriate feminist
themes and demands, bending them to the use and consumption of their own
nativist and identity campaigns, promoting conflict between Western
women, represented as emancipated and Muslim women, described as
submissive and relegated within the domestic walls, and this despite the
fact that the struggles of Iranian women, for example, demonstrate how
false and the result of easy generalizations this assumption is, because
it is the economic and material conditions that contribute to
determining the effective freedom of women and the affirmation of their
rights.
The women's struggle can become a tool for liberation for all those who
find themselves at the lowest rungs of the social ladder: for this
reason, the issues of income, equal pay - a problem often overlooked by
the left - the sexual division of labor, racism, institutional violence
against women, even more so if they are migrants, the cultural and legal
cancellation of non-conforming sexualities and discrimination against
them and their social rights are central. Feminism and its demands
constitute a force for radical transformation in relation to these
problems, the search for a quality life for all, which can only happen
through the construction and activation of a new dimension of power, of
another kind of power, a power of another kind.
A structural and material attention, an intervention on the level of
rights, the protection of women with regard to gender violence, the
effective overcoming of a patriarchal society in its founding values, is
the path through which the left can and must compete to gain
participation and support from the female component of society.
https://www.ucadi.org/2024/09/01/meloni-e-le-altre/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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