As Italy indulges a nationalist agenda, women’s rights are being steadily eroded

Today’s populist Italian government seeks to weaponise nostalgic ‘family values’ in its crusade to put women ‘back where they belong’. Jane Fae explains why we should be concerned

As the pieces of the anti-women jigsaw come together, the picture emerging is ugly and, for women and LGBT+ minorities, terrifying (Rex)

As one surveys the Continent this Christmas it is hard to decide which once progressive state leads the race to the bottom when it comes to testosterone-fuelled muscular reaction. There’s a case to be made for Poland, whose ruling Justice Party has spent the last two years looking to strip back women’s reproductive rights. Then there’s Hungary, where Viktor Orban, the prime minister, has just shut down down gender studies.

My vote, though, goes to Italy, for a no-holds-barred, across-the-board assault on women’s rights: and I am especially thinking of them in this season of goodwill to all, as the ruling coalition seeks to weaponise “family values” in its crusade to put women “back where they belong”. To wit, on a pedestal, and in the kitchen, fulfilling their proper roles as mothers and home-makers.

Extra points, too, for bringing the church into it, or more accurately, that celebration of universal motherhood: the nativity. Because what is slowly emerging in Italy, as in a number of countries, is a final struggle between a progressive, intersectional feminist agenda which respects and promotes diversity, and something much more atavistic, grounded in religious fundamentalism – very much driven by militant Catholicism, but thereby hangs another story – and the traditional family.