The Far Right’s Fake Feminist Gambit

From Giorgia Meloni to Kari Lake, genderwashing is becoming a favorite tactic in the ultraconservative playbook.

Giorgia Meloni at a podium
(Antonio Masiello / Getty)

Political “genderwashing”—hiding repressive and even authoritarian agendas behind a front of women’s empowerment—is a tale as old as time. At least, it’s a tale as old as 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was elected as the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister. Sure, she was a woman, but she was also one of the most conservative and politically regressive leaders the United Kingdom has ever had. She weakened unions, privatized government entities, and neoliberalized the country. But even though we now know how disastrous her policies were for the U.K., Thatcher’s gender still gets brought up as a point of big-picture progress. As the classics professor Mary Beard told The Guardian in 2012, “Well, she wasn’t a feminist, nor will she ever be a ‘feminist icon’ in my sense of the word. But we can’t deny that having our first woman prime minister was a major symbolic leap forward.”

Conservatives around the world have since caught on. In Italy, the far-right Brothers of Italy party proved last month that you can elect the most right-wing government since Mussolini if you find a pretty blond mom to lead it. If installed, that pretty blonde, Giorgia Meloni, will also have the distinction of being the first female prime minister of Italy. And she’s part of a women-led far-right movement that’s gaining momentum across Europe.

Meloni’s election is not one of those situations where writers and pundits are tossing around the word fascism lightly. The Brothers of Italy party proudly wears its neofascist roots, down to the tricolor flame logo it lifted straight from the Mussolini-adjacent Italian Social Movement (MSI). The former head of the party, Ignazio La Russa, has been quoted as saying, “We are all heirs of Il Duce.” In 1996, Meloni herself told an interviewer, “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy.” So when pundits like myself call her “girlbossolini,” it’s a title she’s earned.

Meloni is against so-called pink quotas (affirmative-action policies for women in positions of power), and she does not call herself a feminist. Meloni’s messaging, however, leans all the way into her identity as a woman and a mother, and she’s used these facts constantly throughout her political career. She once ran for mayor when she was seven months pregnant, The New York Times reports, “because she said powerful men had told her she couldn’t.”

As the Swedish political scientists Elin Bjarnegård and Pär Zetterberg wrote in Journal of Democracy earlier this year, “Autocratic genderwashing means the promotion of gender equality with ulterior motives. The idea behind it is to help a regime appear progressive, liberal, and democratic while diverting attention from its persistent authoritarian practices.”

Just as the so-called girlbosses of the mid-2010s were actually just normal capitalists with boobs, cosplay feminists like Meloni—along with France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Alice Weidel, Denmark’s Pia Kjærsgaard, and Norway’s Siv Jensen, for instance—are really far-right figureheads, with some of them selling misogynist fantasies about “family values,” the “Great Replacement” theory, and anxiety about “Islamification.” These women are pseudo-feminist window dressing, as lacking in pro-woman substance as the GOP post-primary pivot; they’re a mirage. They are a way to trick voters into supporting something they would otherwise not.

Sure, girlbossolinis represent a sea change. But they’re a change in the wrong direction.  As the writer George Pendle put it, “In these new narratives women are not being treated as subservient bystanders but rather as the main characters in an ethno-nationalist drama. Such careful shading has allowed Meloni to attract women—27 percent of female votes, more than that of any other partywho had traditionally shunned the far right, while maintaining her base.” Meloni made fascism look feminist.

This should obviously go without saying, but it seems to have to be said: Fascism isn’t, and can never be, feminist—no matter how much genderwashing a party does. Fascist ideology relies on women assuming the role of breeder above anything else, and being valued as little more than an incubator is inherently oppressive.

Although the U.S. hasn’t gone full girbossolini, we have our own genderwashing to contend with. The closest thing we have to a Meloni figure, on this side of the Atlantic, is arguably the Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who is running on a platform of election lies with a side of girl-power branding. In some respects, Lake’s focus on undermining democratic norms may make her even scarier than her European counterparts.

As Politico noted in August, “The rise of Lake’s status in Trump world isn’t just a testament to the power of the former president’s endorsement and the salience of 2020 election conspiracies in modern GOP politics. It also underscores Trump’s success in putting his imprint on governorships across the country.” Lake’s entire raison d’être is the Big Lie. Her rise to power is helping to further erode Republicans’ trust in election integrity and democracy as a whole. And she could be the next governor of Arizona.

It’s so weird and grim to watch the feminism I grew up with being weaponized against democratic values. My mother, the author Erica Jong, is a second-wave feminist pioneer; I don’t think she could have imagined in her wildest nightmares this weird, fake-feminist clusterfuck we find ourselves in. Somehow, genderwashing has created an army of women fighting for the chance to oppress one another.

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.