The Impact of Anti-LGBTIQ+ Campaigns on LGBTIQ+ Politicians: The Italian Case

• In Event: Global Politics of Queerness

Abstract

Within a set of multiple socio-economic, political and institutional crises affecting contemporary democracies, LGBTIQ+ issues have become a target of new form of mobilizations organized by (often) religious-based groups and movements. Anti-gender and anti-LGBTIQ+ campaigns against equality (Kuhar & Paternotte 2018) have emerged in Europe from the 2000s onwards. In a political context marked by the rise of far right and radical right parties, these movements have been able to institutionalize and legitimize their claims. Italy is a sort of paradigmatic case, because of a specific religious and political opportunity configuration within which anti-gender and anti-LGBTIQ+ movements have strategically positioned themselves as moral entrepreneurs (Lavizzari Prearo 2021).
At the same time, in the 2022 local and national elections, an unprecedented number of LGBTIQ+ activists and politicians were elected in right, center-right, center-left, and more often in left parties. In a very unfavorable context for LGBTIQ+ politicians, how do these anti-gender and anti-LGBTIQ+ campaigns affect their position within institutions or within parties? How do the attacks against them influence their career? And finally, how do they ended up becoming LGBTIQ+ politicians in a context were being LGBTIQ+ is both a political stigma and, perhaps, sometimes also a political resource?
The paper will firstly address LGBTIQ+ political career as a critical and overlooked topic in political science. Secondly, drawing on interviews with Italian LGBTIQ+ politicians, it will assess the determinants of their political trajectories.

- Kuhar R. & Paternotte D. (2018). Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing against Equality, Rowman & Littlefield.
- Anna Lavizzari & Massimo Prearo (2019) The anti-gender movement in Italy: Catholic participation between electoral and protest politics, European Societies, 21:3, 422-442.

Author

• Massimo Prearo, University of Verona