11 Luglio 2025
Emma Gentili
Reproduction, Gender, and Nationalism in the Far-Right Demographic Policy and Rhetoric.
“Italy is a nation for old people,” is a common statement heard in places ranging from TV political debates to the family dinner table. The imbalance between elderly and young people in Italy is remarkable, as the country’s population has been aging for decades. Since the second post-war, fertility rates have dropped across all continents, and Europe in particular. An Istat study shows that births in Italy have declined from 1 million in 1964 to 380 thousand in 2023. Explanations on why that is have been the subject of countless debates and hypotheses. Nonetheless, it has become clear that when birth-rates and mortality rates are low, generational change decreases, unemployment rates increase, and tax funding to maintain the welfare state diminishes. While the European Union recognizes that social expenditure is burdened in aging societies and promotes policies to manage the demographic change, most action is taken at the member-state level. In the last few years, Italy consistently had among the highest median age in Europe, which in 2023 was 48,4 years. In light of this, it is impossible for Italian politicians to avoid discussing the demographic question. While there is generally unanimity that fertility decline represents a threat to national integrity, the approaches and discourses drastically vary on political grounds.
Giorgia Meloni has pledged to tackle the demographic issue. At a conference addressing the topic in April 2024, she stated: “It was time to have a government courageous enough to focus on demographics and birth rates as priority challenges that should be transversal to the actions of the entire government.” While Meloni recognizes that one of the main factors causing low fertility rates is the precarity that young people face, which is a shareable stance, her speech makes a series of arguments common to far-right populist rhetoric. Meloni states the economic reasons causing people to have fewer children, and argues that motherhood should not compromise the freedom and career of a woman, but then shifts to more ideologically driven arguments. She blames “bad teachers” for demonizing the concept of family as an archaic and patriarchal institution, indirectly targeting intersectional feminists. This fits into Meloni’s broader anti-feminist agenda, which promotes a model of women’s empowerment that merges tradition and modernity, by portraying herself as a symbol of a mother that did not give up her career path. Meloni’s argument also parallels the transnational far-right “anti-gender” discourse which links catholic and anti-LGBTQ+ stances. Thus, scholars Indelicato and Lopes, argued that for Meloni’s government, sexual and gender normativity are a nation-state project, intricately linked with her anti-immigrant views. Members of Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia, have openly suggested that if “native” Italians have fewer children, the population will be replaced by immigrants. The far-right’s opposition to expanding citizenship laws follows a similar rationale, rooted in the hierarchization of reproduction, revealing that racial biases are central to their demographic discourse.
In her speech, Meloni explains how the government plans to tackle the demographic challenges by allocating funds of the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) to establish 2,600 nurseries, aiming to allow young parents to have a better work-life balance. Recently it emerged that these funds did not closely reach their advertised target, they were partially cut, and that overall the project was not promising. Meloni in her speech also mentions wanting to broaden parental leave, but this still did not take place as hoped. The Democratic Party has been advocating since 2020, for obligatory paternity leave of five months, to better divide the child care labour between parents. During the 2025 state budget discussions, the government chose not to vote on an amendment to pass the law, once again revealing the mismatch between far-right rhetoric of tackling low fertility rates, and their actual actions. Rather, the government acts on performative grounds.
For instance, it diverted funds that the progressive party Piú Europa allocated to sexual and affective education in secondary schools, to awareness courses on fertility and infertility. It remains unclear what those entail. The underlying thought of this decision is the belief that if children are taught about gender they will not reproduce the nuclear family. Yet this is contradictory: if the state needs to enforce a prototype of the natural family, perhaps it is not so natural after all.
Meloni’ natality discourse is representative of the wider issues of fertility control policy. First, this manifests in the over-responsibilization of women. The Prime Minister emphasizes the need to shape a society in which: “Being a mother should not be a private choice, but a value that is socially recognized and valued, to be protected, safeguarded, and encouraged.” Similarly, she once stated that women that have two children, “have already made important contributions to society.” The private sphere is inherently political as the state directly impacts intimate choices. It is difficult to imagine that such nationalist discourse can radically spark the desire of a person to become a parent. But more importantly, framing reproduction as an action that women owe to the nation in the name of a greater good, removes individual agency. As historian Rickie Solinger argued, approaching female fertility as a social problem and seeking to change its trends as a means to solve the country’s issues, scapegoats women without children, ignoring that these issues may be rooted in a lack of gender equality and welfare state. This narrative fails to address the structural reasons that are impeding people to have the right to raise children in proper conditions.
In conclusion, I argue that Meloni’s government cannot address Italy’s demographic decline as it currently stands. By framing the issue as an arena for anti-immigration, anti-feminism, and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, it promotes misleading and discriminatory policies that affect people based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Furthermore, the government has repeatedly failed to match its heavily pro-natalist rhetoric with relevant action, as seen in the nursery case. It similarly overlooked the possibility of more egalitarian approaches to reproduction, such as paternal leave, that could defy gender norms and re-center parenthood as a shared responsibility. Meloni’s actions and inactions, paralleled with her discourse depicting reproduction as a duty to the nation, disproportionately affect and over-burden women. Beyond the Italian case, debates about what policies or incentives are most effective in increasing fertility rates are constantly revisited. More importantly, what is at stake here is whether principles of individual rights are respected. The state can not impose its ideal of family but should give the tools for people to independently decide when and if to have children.