As Italy indulges a nationalist agenda, women’s rights are being steadily eroded

As one surveys the Continent this Christmas it is hard to decide which once progressive state leads the race to the bottom when it comes to testosterone-fuelled muscular reaction. There’s a case to be made for Poland, whose ruling Justice Party has spent the last two years looking to strip back women’s reproductive rights. Then there’s Hungary, where Viktor Orban, the prime minister, has just shut down down gender studies.

My vote, though, goes to Italy, for a no-holds-barred, across-the-board assault on women’s rights: and I am especially thinking of them in this season of goodwill to all, as the ruling coalition seeks to weaponise “family values” in its crusade to put women “back where they belong”. To wit, on a pedestal, and in the kitchen, fulfilling their proper roles as mothers and home-makers.

Extra points, too, for bringing the church into it, or more accurately, that celebration of universal motherhood: the nativity. Because what is slowly emerging in Italy, as in a number of countries, is a final struggle between a progressive, intersectional feminist agenda which respects and promotes diversity, and something much more atavistic, grounded in religious fundamentalism – very much driven by militant Catholicism, but thereby hangs another story – and the traditional family.

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Of course, there is nothing new to the idea that Italy, famous for its culture of machismo should play home to anti-woman sentiment. Back in 2016, Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing Lega, was addressing a rally in the province of Cremona when he spotted a supporter whose T-shirt bore the image of an inflatable sex doll.

Ah, he quipped: “Laura Boldrini’s double!” Boldrini was at the time, president of the Chamber of Deputies and therefore holder of one of the most senior offices of state. Reaction was swift and horrified. Boldrini hit back: “Women are not dolls. The political struggle is made with arguments, for those who have them, not insult.”

So was Salvini abashed? Not at all. He doubled down, responding with further invective against Boldrini and taking to Twitter with the hashtag #sgonfialaboldrini (literally: #BoldriniDeflates)

All good knockabout stuff? No. Not really. For it prefigures a degree of disrespect that would be disturbing in any party hack, let alone a senior figure who has since risen to the role of deputy prime minister and minister for the interior in Italy’s current coalition government.

(It also creates an atmosphere of misogyny that led, just this last weekend, to Boldrini being verbally abused by a Lega supporter as she passed through the airport at Milan.)

Or take the ridiculous efforts of Novara, a town in Northern Italy to return modesty to public life. At the beginning of November, the local comune (administrative division) – controlled, again, by La Lega – passed a regulation imposing fines of up to €500 for wearing clothes that are “skimpy” or disturb the “common sense of modesty”.

Bigots? Reactionaries? Of course not. This is all about a proper sense of decorum, argued local council official, Mario Paganini. And with queer groups organising a “Festival of Modesty” and flash mobs taking to the streets in a fashion anything but modest, it is easy to laugh.

Except: women are not laughing. Sara Paladini, for the local Democratic Party, explained: “This takes us back to 1929” – the year, as many Italians will be all too aware, that Mussolini’s Fascist Party made its peace with the Roman Catholic Church, and pivoted towards a more overt upholding of Catholic values.

Perhaps this local ordnance is targeted, as some claim, at the man who turns up at the local theatre in his underpants. Many suspect otherwise. And the idea of giving local police the power to issue on-the-spot fines to women who fail to adhere to some subjective standard of modesty is making many women’s flesh creep.

This use of local bye-laws to promote a reactionary political agenda is nothing new. It took more serious shape in Verona in summer with another comune initiative, proposing ordnances with the barely transparent aim of counteracting Legge 194, the law that gives to Italian women the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Existing law is, by comparison with the UK, very limited (intervention is restricted to the first 90 days of pregnancy). It also allows medical practitioners to refuse to carry out an abortion on grounds of conscientious objection. This is not very different from the UK position. But a sharp rise in gynecologists who object has had a major impact. Official data, from 2016, shows Italy has one of the lowest international abortion rates: at the same time, the overall proportion of gynecologists objecting rose from 58.7 per cent in 2005 to 70.9 per cent in 2016.

There are, too, significant regional trends. For women in southern, rural, more religious regions a termination is near impossible to obtain. Refusal rates by gynecologists peaked, in 2016, at 96.6 per cent in Molise, 88.1 per cent in Basilicata and 86.1 per cent in Puglia. These numbers led to Italy being condemned by the European Committee of Social Rights for the violation of the right to health of women who chose to abort.

This attitude has also led to cases like one reported recently from Naples of a hospital doctor who refused to attend to a woman undergoing a miscarriage.

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Tragedy was averted by the prompt intervention of a second doctor, who rushed to the hospital and treated the woman. His later complaint, to the local healthcare provider, lead to the dismissal of his colleague.

In other words, abortion rights, may not be “in play”: but they are under threat, both in practice and politically.

Back, though, to Verona: not a major city, but not insignificant either. In summer, the Lega-controlled comune proposed a local ordnance with three provisions:

In October, the first two provisions passed: the third ran out of time – so it could yet return.

Just another instance of localism? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Verona is birthplace to the present minister for family and disability, Lorenzo Fontana, who is outspoken on the issue of abortion. In an interview with magazine La Verità in July 2018, he explained: “In many instances, women opt for abortion because they have economic concerns. This is also the reason why some women decide not to have children. I would prefer it if the state was closer to them, to make them realise that where there is doubt, it is better to have a child [than not]”.

Not surprisingly, Fontana is no fan of gay parenting. That made July a busy month for him, as he was also declaring himself against recognising children born to same-sex couples, abroad, as a result of procedures outlawed in Italy (a reference to surrogacy), adding: “We will defend, in every way imaginable, the right of a child to have a mother and a father.”

Coincidence, or something more? As the various pieces of the anti-women jigsaw come together, the picture emerging is ugly and, for women and LGBT+ minorities, terrifying.

The success of this motion in Verona was followed by near identical proposals in two of Italy’s largest/most influential cities – Milan and Rome. Unsurprisingly, this has cross-party support on the right. The present government unites the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement) and the centrodestra, itself an alliance made up of La Lega (new right), Forza Italia (old right) and Fratelli di Italia (bonkers right/neo-fascist). The Verona comune is run by La Lega: the Rome and Milan proposals were put forward, respectively, by Forza Italia and Fratelli di Italia.

In Milan and Rome these attempts failed. Still, the aspiration is clear. Other major cities, such as Alessandria, are now being targeted.

Meanwhile, at national level, there are larger moves afoot. The so-called DDL (Disegno di Legge) Pillon is a proposal advanced in August 2018 by Lega senator Simone Pillon, promoted as an attempt to bring equity back to the divorce process. Because, it is alleged, the current process disadvantages men.

Pillon’s proposal is superficially attractive: it would enforce a 50/50 split of child support and residence after divorce, as well as forced mediation beforehand.

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But according to Marie, of feminist movement NonUnaDiMeno (Not One Woman Less): “From an economic point of view, the idea that women would provide 50 per cent of their children’s expenses ignores the fact that in Italy one in two women are unemployed and those who work do so in the black economy or part-time or with precarious contracts. In short, in a straight couple, the man systematically earns more but would pay the same as the woman. This would make it harder for women to think about getting divorced even if they wanted to.

“The proposal would also lead to children being forced to spend half their time with their father even if he is violent: and women being forced to mediate even where her husband beats her.”

Despite this, Pillon has further raised the temperature of debate with a suggestion that women who make unproven accusations of domestic violence should automatically lose custody and maintenance.

Still... random pieces. Fontana is not a fan of gay marriage. Pillon subscribes to some quite fanciful theories around a gay conspiracy to convert the straight population.

To see what is going on here, you must take one more step backward.

Italy (and many other countries in eastern Europe) are obsessed with “la gender teoria”. This, in the demonology of the right and of fundamentalist Christians, is an evil ideology uniting radical feminists (of the Judith Butler variety) with LGB and T activists to destroy society by undermining the family.

Because feminists are encouraging women to take up unnatural roles and so not fulfil themselves properly as women. The LGB, of course, are all about the sodomy and as the Bible tells us: it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. As for Trans: they are just beyond the pale.

Google “gender teoria” and you will find a plethora of learned Italian articles with a fair few by Catholic theologians. This, according to a UK theologian who knows about this sort of stuff, is ironic. Because, he explains, the Catholic Church has not, historically, been quite so wedded to family as now.

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Family values is very much a 20th-century thing. Meanwhile, a growing insistence on bringing Joseph back from the edges of the narrative and placing him side by side with Mary, is also new: a trend encouraged by none other than Pope Francis, with the explicit aim of centring the happy family unit at the heart of the New Testament story.

Modern feminism. Gay rights. Men excluded from their traditional roles. These are meat and drink to angry traditionalists, even if, as traditions go, they are not very traditional at all. Still, Christmas is for families. So do not be surprised if at this time of year, as congregations gather around the crib, the local priest does not inject a few extra family values into his Christmas homily.

It’s a recipe being played over and over in countries where the New Right has gained a toehold.

In Guatemala, for instance, evangelical groups are proposing the legalisation of homophobia, jail terms for women who have miscarriages, and the criminal prosecution of abortion rights campaigners.

Even that, though, fails to capture the totality of the Italian Right’s project, which is rooted in mutually reinforcing principles of racism and family.

Since La Lega’s arrival into power earlier this year, anti-migrant measures have proliferated. To the disgust of many Italians, the government has gone out of its way to interrupt refugees crossing the Mediterranean: and the rhetoric is corrosive.

Just last week, at a rally in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Salvini addressed the faithful. His broad message was clear and unabashedly nationalist. Italians, united, shall never be defeated; and if the EU or Germany or criminal elements in society should try to take us down, they would pay.

Of course, there are difficulties with this plan, not least a falling birth rate, which has meant, as elsewhere in Europe, migrants have been a “necessary evil” to plug workforce gaps. The solution? As he revealed in an earlier speech, he intends to “introduce the concept of a family quotient, in order to reward the birth and the bet on the future”. In economic terms that sits neatly alongside his rejection of gay marriage and his boasting that, as one of his first acts as minister for the interior, he had changed the wording on some official forms from “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” with “Mother” and “Father”.

Although in practice, La Lega has so far been more concerned with making it expensive to help migrant families than targeting extra resources at Italian ones.

You’d think that Italian women would see through this: see where the endgame for this “return to the family” lies. But Salvini is clever: picking up issues on Twitter and dominating the popular press in a way that closely resembles Donald Trump. Except, to date, he has not fallen into quite the same bear-traps as The Donald.

Take violence against women. The Italian press is as prurient as the next nation’s. And La Lega care. Boy, do they care. But that care is rationed.

Marie again: “La Lega do not care about migrant women. A couple of months ago Desirée Mariottini was raped by a group of non-Italian men. A week later, an Italian killed a Romanian woman, Violeta Senchiu, burning her alive. In the case of Desirée, Salvini visited the place where she was killed: in respect of Violeta he said nothing.

“In Milan, a woman with a veil on her head was kicked out of the post office. In Ragusa a woman, a rape victim just arrived from Libya, gave birth to a son, but other mothers drove her away from the hospital saying she brought diseases.

“In respect of these violent incidents they never say anything. Always they justify it saying: ‘people cannot see migrants treated better than the Italians’.”

Despite the rhetoric, government has done little of practical use to support women suffering domestic violence in Italy. But it has managed to implement one measure: a decree by Salvini that removes domestic violence as grounds for humanitarian leave to stay in Italy.

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And so, as women find themselves recruited on behalf of a racist agenda, we are back at the crib, the nativity, which has its origins in Italy of the 13th century. It is claimed that Saint Francis of Assisi created the first nativity scene in 1223, in an attempt to place the emphasis of Christmas upon the worship of Christ rather than secular materialism and gift giving. Perhaps he did. Certainly there is good historic evidence for the tradition being created and encouraged by the Franciscan order which he established.

It is not central to Catholic doctrine. Rather, the nativity has become twee representation of elements of the gospel story according to Luke and Matthew, reflecting an age when most people did not read at all: a way of communicating the fundamentals of Christmas to a populace that had no other medium through which to learn about it.

Yet this, too, is now politicised as Salvini takes to the airwaves in what is becoming a Christmas tradition in its own right, to defend the tradition of the nativity. This year’s outburst kicked off when Valeria Alessandrini, an elected official with the comune of Terni in Umbria discovered to her horror that all manner of things, from school prayers to the nativity had been banned “because multiculturalism”.

Well, not quite. There are rules about religion in the school environment. And Alessandrini’s proposal, that schools take part in a “new tradition” – putting on a “living crib” – was not received with the instant joy among education professionals that she felt it deserved.

Alessandrini, though, is no stranger to milking media attention. In November she ticked several populist boxes by gifting her fellow (women) councillors with pepper spray: because of violence against women.

And in respect of the nativity, she had a ready audience in the national press for her diatribe against “political correctness gone mad”.

Of course, Salvini piled it on. For the last fortnight or so, he has popped up time and again to talk about Italy’s Christian (family) tradition and how Italians need to ensure it is not overwhelmed by migrants. Verily a political twofer.

For it allows him to use that time of year most consecrated to family and welcoming the stranger to stick the knife into migrants – while simultaneously manoeuvring to reduce the role of women in Italian society even further.

Happy Christmas!

Acknowledgements: This rightward march has not gone unopposed. Many voices have animated the struggle for women and worked to organise national events including NonUnaDiMeno, as well as ReteDelleReti and Arcigay. All of whom, together with NonUnaDiMeno Milano and Pianeta Milk (Arcigay Verona) have contributed to this article.