Issues related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights have for a long time been taboo in Catholic Italy, and they began to be debated in the mainstream media only after the organisation of a gay pride march in Rome during the 2000 jubilee. In the years since, the subject has become a bone of contention between the centre-left and the centre-right parties. In particular, a heated debate developed before and immediately after the 2006 parliamentary elections, when the centre-left coalition included parties -such as the Partito Radicale (Radical Party) and Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation) -willing to approve a law giving legal recognition to same-sex couples, while, on the other hand, the centre-right relied strongly on 'traditional values' in order to garner votes. After that discussion, the issue was revived only during the campaign for the 2013 elections, when Nichi Vendola, the former Communist -and openly gay -leader of Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà (the Left Ecology and Freedom), included in the centre-left coalition, put the problem on the political agenda again, without success in policy terms. This article will analyse the frames adopted by the various political actors to address the issue in the two campaigns, trying to understand the peculiarities of the two phases of the debate. In particular, it will show that there has been an evolution in the political actors' ideas of marriage that could lead to the adoption of a law on same-sex civil unions in Italy in the near future.
The current global political landscape is increasingly marked by the growth of right-wing populist parties. Although this party family has been the subject of a bourgeoning scholarship, the role played by religion in shaping its ideology is still an under-researched topic. Drawing on the qualitative context analysis of a large database of newspaper articles, electoral manifestos, and parties’ documents, this article studies the influence of religion on the political platforms of the Lega Nord (LN – recently rebranded just Lega) in Italy and the Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National – RN) in France since the early 1980s. Our aim is twofold. Firstly, we would like to describe the role of religious values in the different political phases of the life of these parties. Secondly, we wish to assess whether and to which extent the appropriation of religion by these parties can be considered a phenomenon of religious dissent. Our analysis focuses on LGBT+ rights, a policy field that tends to bear the imprint of religion norms. Past studies have noted that right-wing populist parties support not only a nativist idea of citizenship, which prompts anti-immigrants and anti-Islamic stances, but also conservative interpretations of Christian values in terms of family issues and gender roles. In the last three decades, European right-wing populist parties have partly revised their positions on these issues. While some of them have strengthened or made only marginal changes to their religiously-inspired moral conservatism, others have shown new openings on gender equality and LGBT+ rights.
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