Italy, the Next Frontier of Authoritarian Family Policies?

Italy's Far-Right Government Seeks to Follow the Hungarian Model

"We don't want to become the new Hungary," was the slogan at a recent protest organized by the Milan chapter of the LGBTQ rights group Arcigay and the LGBTQ parents' association Famiglie Arcobaleno. "The government of Giorgia Meloni is openly homophobic [and] against the LBGTQIA+ community and women."  

Prime Minister Meloni's appointment of Eugenia Roccella as Minister of Family and Birthrates sent a strong message about how "family" would be defined under the new far-right government. Roccella is anti-abortion and anti-same sex marriage and has crusaded for years on behalf of the "traditional" family.

And while Roccella’s portfolio includes oversight of the Department of Equal Opportunity, she considers motherhood as the most important female occupation and wants to "give maternity the centrality and prestige it deserves."

This is an unsurprising appointment by Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party uses the slogan "God, Fatherland, Family." Other ministers in the new government, many of whom have a past of neo-Fascist militancy, share Roccella's views, often as part of a toxic brew of racism against immigrants and any other non-White, non-Christian group that threatens Italy’s traditions.

Matteo Salvini, Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, had called for “mass cleansings, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood” of immigrants last time he was in government. Now he controls the Coast Guard and Italy's ports: "The battle against illegal immigration resumes," he tweeted on October 24.

As for Roberto Calderoli, Regional Affairs Minister, he was convicted in 2019 of defamation and racial hatred for declaring at a 2013 League rally that Cécile Kyenge, Italy's first Black minister, looked like an orangutan.  

Meloni’s positions on population and the family befit someone who spent her entire youth as a hard-core MSI militant and founded Brothers of Italy in 2012 because at the time neo-Fascists had no autonomous political representation. She opposes "gender ideology, “LGBT lobbies” and same-sex unions that harm "the natural family," and promotes White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.

Meloni's version of Great Replacement theory, which she calls "ethnic substitution," goes deep into conspiracy theory territory. "I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack," she stated in March 2019, identifying Jewish democracy funder George Soros and the democratic European Union as among the masterminds of this plot.

All of this may sound familiar to those who follow Viktor Orban's Hungary, where the government and state media have gone after LGBTQ individuals with vigor, associating homosexuality with pedophilia. A 2021 law already outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientations in schools, television, and advertising. It followed a 2018 ban on gender studies in higher education and the end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people in 2020.

 "Hungary must defend itself because the Western left wing is attacking. It is trying to relativize the notion of family. Its tools for doing so are gender ideology and the LGBTQ lobby," Orban claimed at his 2021 Demographic Summit, using the same trigger phrases and talking points as Meloni. The two leaders have often met at conferences designed to lay the foundations of a new far-right order. Orban shared a stage with Meloni when he spoke at the Brothers of Italy's 2019 conference in Rome.

Orban and Meloni together at the annual Brothers of Italy meeting in Rome, 2019. Vincenzo Nuzzolese/SOPA Images/LIghtRocket via Getty Images.

Katalin Novak, Orban's former minister for family affairs and now Hungary's first female president, is another node of the emerging Italian-Hungarian axis organized around repressing sexual and racial minorities in the name of saving "Western civilization."

"Good to see that #family policy earns special attention in the new #Italian government," Novak tweeted, using an emoji of a man, a woman and two children to emphasize what "family" means to her. "We have always shared that family policies need to be strongly implemented. It's what we'll try to do in the coming years," Meloni replied.  

Yet such policies have already been rehearsed at the local level, in the places where Meloni's party already governs. Verona, where League and Brothers of Italy have been in charge for a decade, is officially a "pro-life city" where public funds are funneled to anti-abortion organizations and abortion services are difficult to access. Verona hosted the 2019 World Congress of Families, where gay conversation therapists, Russian Orthodox priests, and far-right ideologues all gave their takes on the "natural family."

It's too early to know how successful Meloni will be in scaling up such initiatives and policies. Italy is not Hungary, where Orban has had over a decade to suppress media and other freedoms. But powerful allies abroad and at home (such as the ultra-conservative wing of the Vatican) will enable this government's repressive policies any way they can.

The outcome of the "Hungarian example" is by now clear: legal discrimination, harassment and violence, restrictions on same-sex adoptions and reproductive rights. This is why Italian gay rights groups and gay parents' associations are sounding the alarm now.