Hillary Clinton Under Fire for Supportive Remarks of Far-Right PM Contender in Italy

Hillary Clinton has come under fire for her Thursday comments about the positive implications if Giorgia Meloni becomes Italy’s first woman, prime minister, with critics warning that the far-right candidate’s agenda poses a direct threat to the fight for gender and economic equality.

Italy is scheduled to hold its general election on September 25, and “polls are led by Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, part of a right-wing coalition widely expected to secure a majority of seats,” historian David Broder, Jacobin’s Europe editor, explained Friday. “With her own party backed by around one-quarter of voters, Meloni looks likely to become prime minister.”

Taking time away from the Venice International Film Festival to speak with Italy’s leading newspaper, Il Corriere Della Sera, Clinton warned of “very powerful” anti-democratic forces around the world, including authoritarian demagogues like former U.S. President Donald Trump.

But when asked about the Italian political scene, Clinton said that “the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing.”

However, critics do not agree with Clinton’s assessment.

Italy is already home to the highest jobless rate among women in Europe, and over 25% of Italian women workers make less than $9 per hour.

“Fratelli d’Italia would make the situation for precarious and low-paid women harder,” Broder wrote, pointing to the party’s opposition to a national minimum wage, efforts to eliminate unemployment insurance, and proposal to restrict welfare benefits to mothers.

Finally, Fratelli d’Italia, like other far-right parties in Europe, has sought to undermine left-wing feminism through what Broder calls “femonationalism.” This refers to the racist portrayal of rape and violence against women as foreign imports brought in by immigrants, especially Black and Muslim men—a lie that Meloni and others on the right tell to suggest that pro-immigrant progressives don’t care about Italian women.

Given that most Italian women’s lives would suffer due to Meloni’s election, Broder argued, Clinton’s comments exemplify the inadequacy of claiming that the increased representation of women within the upper echelons of the existing social order is an inherent victory even when no amelioration of its exploitative and hierarchical structure occurs.

Originally published at Commondreams.org.