Policy Does Matter! How Far-Right Agendas Affect Women’s Access to Abortion Right. The Case for Italy (2013-2020)

Abstract

A foremost threat of populist politics concerns its "exclusionist" vision of social rights and liberties, also by the side of gender and women's right. Using their ethnocentric-based narrative, far-rights' agendas are trying to "normalize" traditional and neo-patriarchal stereotypes about family or women's self-determination, and this led in several democracies to a backsliding in the access to abortion right, as also the overturning of the Roe v. Wade seems to highlight. Although most of the populist right-wing parties and movements do not explicitly stand for abortion's ban, they use to surf over electorates hostile to abortion to generalize their ultra-conservative and segregationist policy-set about civil rights, pay-gap, gender diversity or pro-life standings. Italian political system seems to be a forefront on gender equality backsliding induced by populists' ethnocentrism, as also the outlook of a success to 2022's general elections of far-right. Brothers of Italy seem to indicate. Its party leader, Giorgia Meloni, currently supports stances about women's rights shaped by nativism and neo-patriarchalism, and she has frequently targeted the national law-number 194/1978-which regulate the safe, public, and universal right to abort for Italian women. But how much far-right parties are impacting on gender equality backsliding, by the side of the targets they support and of the social mood they feed? Did their electoral affirmation increase resistances to the implementation of abortion policy? The article tries to deal with these questions, by developing a frame both analytical and empirical to assess how much the ethnocentric cleavage running over the Italian political system is affecting the implementation of the policy at regional level.