Prospect of far-right female premier divides Italian women

ROME (AP) — If Italy elects the nation's first female premier, will its women be delighted or dismayed?

Should opinion polls prove on the mark, Giorgia Meloni and the far-right Brothers of Italy party she co-founded less than a decade ago will triumph in the Sept. 25 election. Meloni might then be asked by Italy’s president to try to form a viable coalition government with right-wing allies.

For many female voters, it's a question of gender versus agenda.

Some worry that Meloni, who exalts motherhood, might seek to erode women's rights, including abortion access.

For her supporters, what matters is her conservative, “God, homeland and family” platform, not her sex.

Brothers of Italy has roots in a neo-fascist movement that hailed the legacy of Benito Mussolini, who bestowed prizes on women who had many children. The party took around 4% of votes in the last election, in 2018, but according to some pollsters it could win nearly 25% in this one.

Licia Donati, as a young Communist activist in the 1960s, fought for the legalization of divorce, which came in 1970. She also mobilized so Italian courts would recognize that wives have the same right to justice as husbands in a country where, until 1981, laws sanctioned leniency for men who murdered women to preserve “family honor.”

If Meloni does become Italy's first female premier, it would be “a rupture (with the past) in the sense she is a woman, but it would be going backward in terms of the conservative women's culture,” said Donati, 84, a Tuscan native who lives in Rome.

Donati said that if she could speak to the politician, she would say: “What battle did you wage for women, what did you do? Nothing."

Meloni, 45, is the only main party leader who didn’t join Premier Mario Draghi’s pandemic national unity government in...