LGBTQ advocates, women worry in Italy after Meloni’s win

Swept away by Italian elections that are expected to see Giorgia Meloni soon form the nation’s first far-right-led government since World War II were veterans of successful battles for civil rights, including divorce and abortion, as well as lawmakers still struggling for freedoms like same-sex marriage.

ASSOCIATED PRESS ROME, 28 SEPTEMBER

Worried that the conservative tide of political sentiment that emerged in Sunday's voting for Parliament might erode hard-won civil rights, Italy’s women are mobilizing, organizing rallies in a dozen cities for Wednesday evening to raise their voices in defense of abortion rights.

Organizers said they feared Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party will launch a triad of God, homeland and family,” policies a reference to her political manifesto.

That could impose rigid gender roles and assign women the task of reproduction and growth of a white, patriarchal and heterosexual nation,” organizers said in their announcement of the rallies against the agenda of Meloni, who would become Italy’s first far-right premier of the post-war period and its first woman in that office.

Perhaps Italy’s most celebrated living civil rights activist, Emma Bonino, lost her Senate seat to a Rome city councilwoman from Brothers of Italy, the party co-founded a decade ago by Meloni, who exalts motherhood and traditional” families and who decries LGBTQ lobbies.” Lavinia Munnino’s no. 1 campaign priority was growing Italy’s birthrate.