Giorgia Meloni’s Challenge to Modern Feminism.
When Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first female prime minister in 2022, headlines worldwide deemed the moment a milestone for women in politics. Yet almost immediately, that victory was met with a certain level of hesitation. A woman whose motto, “God, homeland, and family,” couldn’t possibly be called a feminist? Her politics, deeply rooted in the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, reject nearly every progressive cause typically associated with women’s liberation.
And still, there she is, a woman who commands the nation.
Meloni’s rise embodies a paradox that has long haunted political discussions about feminism. She doesn’t speak the language of sisterhood, nor does she claim allegiance to the movement. Her speeches often scorn what she calls “gender ideology,” and her government has quietly chipped away at reproductive rights.
While abortion remains legal under Italy’s 1978 law, Meloni’s administration has made it increasingly difficult to obtain. In fact, she has invited pro-life organizations into public clinics and funded pro-birth campaigns that frame motherhood as a moral duty. Her message is clear: womanhood is sacred, but it belongs within the boundaries of maternity. She presents motherhood as both destiny and duty, a patriotic act rather than a personal choice. To many observers, she appears as the antithesis of feminist progress.
Even linguistically, Meloni asserts control over her image. She insists on being called il Presidente del Consiglio, the masculine form of “prime minister,” rather than la presidente. Her reasoning is that power, in its truest sense, has no gender. To her, equality is about belonging to an existing hierarchy, not rewriting its rules. However, for many Italian feminists, that choice feels like erasure. The refusal to feminize the title becomes symbolic of a broader unwillingness to imagine power in a female form.
Yet dismissing her outright misses the deeper question: who really decides what feminism looks like?
Feminism, at its core, is not a checklist of beliefs but a claim to sovereignty, the right of women to define their own identities, ambitions, and moral frameworks. Meloni’s version of womanhood, although uncomfortable to many, is hers. She insists on autonomy even as she upholds traditions that others see as limiting. This contradiction is not unique to her; it’s embedded in the ongoing struggle between representation and liberation.
Meloni’s politics borrow the structure of feminist self-determination while rejecting its collective ideals. In her speeches, she invokes the right to be a mother, to protect the family, to defend the homeland. They are all framed as her individual choice. In doing so, she inverts the logic of feminist rebellion, instead of fighting it, she redefines it on her own terms. Power for Meloni lies in her ownership of identity, narrative, and authority.
The discomfort she provokes may say more about our expectations than her defiance of them. Western feminism often imagines progress as a straight line from repression to emancipation, but Italy complicates this. Here, Catholic values have long coexisted with strong, independent women who command households, businesses, and communities. Meloni’s appeal taps into that culture. She is both traditional and self-made, maternal and unyielding, provincial and powerful.
Of course, sovereignty without solidarity risks isolation. Meloni’s governance has rarely advanced women’s rights in any material sense. Female representation within her cabinet remains limited, and her social policies prioritize families over individual freedoms. But perhaps the lesson is not that Meloni is or isn’t a feminist, it’s that feminism itself must stretch to accommodate complexity. If feminism is truly about sovereignty, then it must also account for the uncomfortable reality that some women use their power to reinforce systems others seek to dismantle.
Giorgia Meloni doesn’t liberate women. But she does force us to confront the boundaries of liberation, to ask whether feminism is a shared goal or a field of competing claims to autonomy. Her Italy becomes a mirror for our own contradictions: a nation led by a woman who rejects the very movement that made her rise possible. Ultimately, Meloni’s premiership is less an end to feminism than a reminder of its unfinished work.
