Rom

Nowhere is the difference between the two faces of modern feminism polarised so perfectly as in Italy. And nowhere is it clearer which of those two faces will triumph in the end. Thank God.

Italy, which gave us Caesars and Popes, the Renaissance and the Mafia, Fascism and La Dolce Vita, has often been a laboratory for dramatic change in Europe. It is so once again.

Supposedly, it is a country in which men subjugate women but in reality it is women that call the shots. Now they are out of the shadows and they are in power.

On one side of the isle, is the permanently heterosexual and passionately “anti-woke” feminist Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first woman prime minister, who heads a right-wing coalition government which won a solid majority at last September’s general election. Most global media outlets brand Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia, the party she co-founded in 2012, as “far right”, ergo fascist, because she and other members were once part of Italy’s long defunct post-fascist party. Yet she identifies as a conservative and has no plans to dismantle democracy, as far as we know, nor introduce any law that can honestly be called fascist. And she is adament: you cannot change sex.

On the other side, is the currently lesbian and utterly “woke” feminist Elly Schlein, who has become the first women to lead the post-communist Partito Democratico (PD), Italy’s main opposition party, after her shock victory in February’s leadership election. Party members voted for her male opponent, the favourite, but party supporters voted for her. The PD is the heir to Italy’s communist party which was the largest in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Schlein identifies as “an L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ person” whatever that means. One thing is certain: she thinks you can be whatever sex you want to be.

Regardless of what both these Italian female political leaders believe about the other key issues of our time the question that above all divides them is: What is a woman?

Meloni, 46, is a working mother who is fiercely patriotic and has only one passport (Italian). She loves her country so much that she sometimes wraps herself in its flag.

Schlein, 37, has no children and is a rootless cosmopolitan, to borrow a phrase beloved of communist dictator Joseph Stalin, who has three passports (Swiss, American, and Italian). It is unclear what nationality she currently identifies as, but you can bet your bottom dollar she just loves John Lennon’s ode to the abolition of the nation-state “Imagine”.

Meloni is from a poor family whose roots are Sicilian and Sardinian. She was brought up in a working class area of Rome by her salt of the earth mother who wrote bodice ripper romances that sold poorly to make ends meet. Her father, an accountant, had abandoned the family and left them destitute to sail off on his yacht to the Canaries with his mistress when she was only one. The younger of two sisters, Meloni excelled at school but could not afford to go to university. She did a number of jobs such as barista, nanny, English teacher, and market stall holder, before becoming a full time politician. In 1995, her father was given a nine year jail sentence in Menorca for drug running. She loves singing Kareoke.

Schlein is from a well off radical-chic family which has Ukrainian Jewish origins via her American father. Born and brought up in Switzerland at Agno by the lake she went to the Liceo Cantonale in Lugano where she excelled. Her father, Melvin, is a politics professor at the city’s Franklin University. Her Italian mother, Maria Paola, teaches law at Insubria University just over the border in Italy. The youngest of three children, her brother Benjamin is a professor of physics at Zurich University, and sister Susanna is an Italian diplomat. After school, Schlein moved to Italy where she completed a law degree at Bologna University in 2011 with a thesis on migrant rights. In 2008 and 2012 she worked in Chicago as a volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential election campaigns. She has never worked outside politics. In 2014 she was elected an MEP. In 2022, an MP. She plays the electric guitar.

As so often, it is the down-to-earth poor girl - Meloni - who is right-wing and the head-in-the-clouds posh girl – Schlein – who is left-wing.

Meloni’ grandmother used to stuff her with cakes as a teenager which made her obese and as a result she was bullied. Schlein, too, as a teenager was bullied, because of her big nose which recently she claimed was not Jewish but “typically Etruscan”as her mother is from Tuscany. Asked by a journalist where does “the story of Elly begin” she replied: “With my nose, I’d say, is that ok?”

Which is – I must admit – a pretty cool answer.

Meloni’s ascent from base camp to the summit of political power can be dated to a 2019 speech she delivered at a rally in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome. At the 2018 general election, Fratelli d’Italia had got only 4 per cent of the vote. But that speech, which went viral, marks the moment when her popularity began to soar.

Speaking stridently and with intense passion, she said:

“Now they’re talking about getting rid of the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ on documents. Because the family is an enemy, national identity is an enemy, sexual identity is an enemy … It’s the old groupthink game: they’ve got to get rid of all that which we are, because when we no longer have an identity and we no longer have any roots, we will be deprived of awareness and incapable of defending our rights. That’s their game. They want us to be Parent 1, Parent 2, gender LBGT, Citizen X, code numbers. But we are not code numbers, we are people and we will defend our identity. I am Giorgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am Italian! I am Christian! You will not take that away from me! You will not take that away from me!”

Two fashionable Djs took the last part of this part of the speech and used it to create a disco dance song called “I Am Giorgia” in order to ridicule Meloni. But the song became a huge hit precisely because those shouted words were music to the ears of millions of Italians.

Three years later, Schlein tried to emulate that brilliant speech by her adversary during the PD’s rally to mark the end of the 2022 general election campaign. With equal stridency and passion, she bellowed from the stage in Piazza del Popolo in Rome:

“No, it’s not enough to be a woman to defend other women … There’s a big difference between calling yourself feminine and feminist, if you decide not to defend the rights of women, starting with those to do with their own bodies … Yes, I am a woman, I love another woman and I am not a mother. But not for this am I less of a woman.”

But her words were confusing and completely lacking in the clear precision and profound thought behind Meloni’s.

The only message that Schlein got across that night was that she is a lesbian (at the moment) and does not have children.

But so what? Who cares?

One thing is certain. Schlein cannot answer probably the most important question of the age: what is a woman?

To placate the miniscule proportion of the population who are transexuals and the majority of the media that cow-tow to them, her woke ideology obliges her to say that a person can be whatever sex they want.

But to garner the votes of the vast majority of people she will try to avoid giving a straight answer because they know otherwise.

Sooner or later, however, the Italians are going to put her on the spot.

They know that a donna is a donna and a uomo is a uomo.

And they are right. For if a civilization cannot even say what a woman is, what hope does that civilization have of survival?

Indeed, does it deserve to survive?