“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian, and you can’t take that away from me.” In Italy, these words are perhaps Giorgia Meloni’s most famous summary of her creed. First spoken in 2019, this line has been heard many times since, including via a disco remix and a Spanish version pronounced at rallies for the far-right Vox party: “Yo soy una mujer. . .”

At the Budapest demographic summit last September, helmed by Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán, Meloni elaborated on this catechism: “What I wanted to say with those words is that we live in an era in which everything that defines us is under attack. And why is it dangerous? It is dangerous for our identity — our national identity, our family identity, our religious identity — is also what makes us aware of our rights and able to defend those rights.”

The move fits perfectly into what Italian philosopher and feminist Giorgia Serughetti refers to as “identity maternalism”: a leadership style that “takes advantage of qualities typically associated with women and mothers to offer the electorate a reassuring and protective face in times of great uncertainty.” The rhetoric of motherhood is part of a now common far-right playbook that makes an enemy of “gender” — but uses this English word to mean “feminist and LGBTQ ideology.” This means defending the “traditional” (heterosexual) family as the core of society, damning abortion and LGBTQ rights, and obsessing about birth rates.