Strongwomen? Gender in the Electoral Campaigns of Le Pen and Meloni

• In Event: Poster Session: Middle East and North African Politics & Posters on Europe
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Posters on Europe

Abstract

This paper, lying at the interdisciplinary intersection of Political Science and Political Sociology, investigates the ways in which female populist radical right leaders frame female leadership as well as gender-related questions. 2022 was a momentous year for the populist radical right and women in politics: Giorgia Meloni in the Italian general elections, and Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections scored meaningful electoral results. Le Pen lost minimally to her competitor Macron, but she experienced only a numerical defeat, since she achieved her best electoral result ever, getting very close to becoming President of the French Republic. Indeed, she gained around 10% points compared to her results in the 2017 elections. Despite the different electoral outcomes and the different political systems in the two countries, these elections represent a success for women in politics, where they are still underrepresented, especially in leadership positions. However, the articulation of gender-related issues in Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and in Meloni’s Fratelli d’ Italia is often at odds with the advancement of women’s rights and is markedly hostile to LGBTQIA+ rights. So far, the bulk of the theoretical and empirical literature on gender and populism has focused on populist parties’ variegated ideological stances and discursive styles on gender, leaving the analysis of populist leadership understudied. Some scholarly attention has been devoted to the case study of Le Pen’s female leadership and the place of gender in her ideology and proposed policy. Given the recency of Meloni’s skyrocketing popularity, her female leadership and ideological and policy stances on gender-related matters have been, so far, the object of scarce scholarly attention.

Therefore, in this paper, we apply a feminist and postcolonial framework to the comparative analysis of anti-gender ideologies and policies under female party leadership. Methodologically, we use the case studies of Italy and France to conduct an intersectional critical discourse analysis of Meloni’s and Le Pen’s posts on Twitter and TikTok (which is still underexplored in Italian and French political contexts), their party manifestos, and their official speeches given at critical junctures in domestic politics. Thus, we contribute to the literature on populist parties, leadership, and gender. Our provisional argument is that female leadership in the populist radical right results in the paradoxical pairing of the promotion of selected groups of women’s rights with an anti-gender stance, hostile to non-binary gender identities. Meloni and Le Pen are what we coined as ‘strongwomen’: while championing women’s rights and extolling their female qualities of compassion and maternal concern, they reiterate conservative values, such as the pre-eminence of the traditional family over any LGBTQIA+ family, and deploy racist and masculine tropes when imposing racist and gendered notions of immigrant women as needing salvation, and immigrant men as perpetrating women’s oppression.

Authors

• Laura Montecchio, King's College London

• Marianna Griffini, King’s College London