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Feminism remains a hot-button word in Italy. But in fits and starts, the post-Berlusconi years have seen progress toward gender equality. The proportion of women on corporate boards in Italy — 38.8 percent — is now the second highest in the 27-member European Union, behind only France. The number of women in parliament has dipped from its highs. But Italian women have made political history — with right-wing Giorgia Meloni last year becoming Italy’s first female prime minister and Elly Schlein this year elected as the first woman to lead the center-left opposition. Mariangela Zappia is also serving as Italy’s first female ambassador to the United States, meaning that three of the most senior posts in Italian politics and diplomacy are now occupied by women.
“I think this is a historic moment in our country,” said Elena Bonetti, a mathematician and national lawmaker. “The presence of women [as prime minister] and head of the main opposition party represents epochal change: female leadership. It has never risen with such power and visibility. It’s a process of normalization of our democracy. It’s the outcome of battles and steps taken over the years. It’s a revolution.”
There are, however, caveats.
Meloni’s stunning rise came not by breaking with the old boys’ club, but learning to thrive within it. She ascended the ranks of the male-dominated right-wing Brothers of Italy party as a defender of traditional gender roles, and she won the premiership in a coalition with Berlusconi’s fading party.
Meloni, herself an unmarried mother, has sought to encourage Italian women to reverse a population decline by having more babies, and she has staked out conservative Christian stances on abortion and LGBTQ rights. To the chagrin of some Italian women, she has refused to embrace a feminine version of her title in Italian, sticking with the masculine article “il” rather than using the feminine “la.”
“Meloni is sexist [too],” said Rosi Braidotti, an Italian feminist scholar. “Look at how few women she promotes. … Meloni doesn’t care about merit and the female situation, because she’s convinced of her exceptionality, like women on the right tend to be. … Caring for mothers, and birthrate, sure. But for women, nothing.”
Yet, through a masterful balance of style and substance, Meloni is also fast emerging as one of the most savvy and respected voices on the global political right — and a more palatable standard-bearer for many of conservative policies Berlusconi once championed. She managed to bring the far right back to power in Italy in part by positioning herself as a more sensible choice than Matteo Salvini — her brusque deputy prime minister who once took the stage at a political rally with a blowup sex doll he used as a stand-in for a female political rival. During Meloni’s eight months in office, she has successfully navigated complex issues, standing firm with the West against Moscow and offering more nuanced responses to issues such as irregular migration than some of her critics had predicted.
On the other side of the political aisle, Schlein’s election as head of Italy’s Democratic Party amounts to a far more radical shift in the Italian political scene. An LBGTQ-identifying, Italian-U.S.-Swiss citizen who twice campaigned in the United States for President Barack Obama, she is forcing the issue of LBGTQ equality and gender rights in a country famously uncomfortable with both.
“I received a mandate to change people, methods and vision,” she said following her surprise win for the party leadership in February. “We will put the battle against every type of inequality and precariousness center stage.”
In a 2019 speech, Meloni famously introduced herself by saying: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian.” In a twist of those words, Schlein on her election night said: “I love another woman and I am not a mother, but I am no less a woman for this.”
Both Berlusconi’s backers and some of his detractors argue that he — however politically incorrect — was always falsely categorized as someone who dismissed women in power.
Seen by many as a forebear of President Donald Trump, Berlusconi could be brash and demeaning toward woman. Facing charges in 2011 of having sex with an underage prostitute — charges he later beat — he quipped in his defense that he’d already had sex with 70 percent of women and that the other 30 percent would have surely said “yes.”
Even as his health declined more recently, he promised to send a bus full of prostitutes to his men’s soccer team if they managed to beat a top rival — dismissing critics of his choice of words for making too much out of a “locker room joke.”
In 2018, Berlusconi’s party backed two of its female stars — Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati and Mara Carfagna — as head of the senate and deputy president of the lower house, respectively. He remarked then that the choice of Alberti had “great meaning” and praised her “rigor” and “serious and profound” experience as a lawyer.
Carfagna had already been a minister in one of Berlusconi’s past governments.
“Let me stress how [these choices] are based on individual merit, not an act of ideological feminism,” Berlusconi had said. “It’s a choice rewarding abilities, not gender.”
“People have always been impressed by Berlusconi’s language and irony on women, which is quite vulgar and dated, for sure,” said Andrea Cangini, a former senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “This way of making himself ‘likable’ went to show that he either hadn’t grasped how times had changed, or that he was maybe just talking to his grass roots, who were still anchored to the past. He was addressing them in a way that they would be receptive to, and that worked.”
“But,” Cangini added, “there’s a difference between theory and practice. Meloni was the youngest minister in the history of our republic. She was a female minister, and it was Berlusconi who put her there.”
In 2008, Berlusconi named Meloni as his youth minister, a role she held until 2011. In her biography, Meloni writes that “Berlusconi only passingly knew me.” She notes that when friction arose between the two over the years, “I was told that I was being ‘ungrateful.’”
Last year, she stared down the octogenarian — whose party remained influential but with a membership dwarfed by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
A week before being sworn in last October, a handwritten note by Berlusconi was made public in which he described Meloni as “overbearing, arrogant.” Then leaks emerged showing Berlusconi crowing over a birthday gift from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and parsing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an understandable attempt by his old friend in the Kremlin to install “more sensible leaders” in Kyiv.
Meloni responded by throwing down the gauntlet. Anybody unsupportive of Atlantic and European principles, she said, “will not be able to be part of the government, at the cost of not forming a government.”
On Monday, Meloni issued a short video bidding goodbye to Berlusconi.
“With him, Italy learned that it should never have limits imposed on it, it learned that it should never give up,” she said. “With him we have fought, won and lost many battles. And for him, too, we will bring home the goals that we set ourselves together. Farewell, Silvio.”
Faiola reported from Miami.
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