Europe’s right-wing women

  

Europe’s right-wing women


Alice Weidel, Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni 

The British Conservative party may be hopelessly behind in the polls, yet all over Europe the right is surging ahead. Everywhere you look, the left is losing – in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary and now, following an election victory for the New Democracy party on Sunday, Greece.

In France, the Rassemblement National (the renamed Front National) keeps rising in the polls and now vies for top slot as the country’s most popular party, as does the Freedom party in Austria. And in Germany this week, the radical and increasingly popular right-wing Alternative für Deutschland won a district election for the first time. The AfD is Germany’s second most popular party according to polls, behind the Christian Democrats but ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.

Cue the usual agonised and simplistic commentary about the march of the far right. But one common, if not quite ubiquitous, factor in Europe’s rejection of the left is being ignored. It’s the women. Many of these insurgent and ascendant parties are led, or part-led, by members of what used to be called the fairer sex. The face of the new European right is, increasingly, feminine.

The co-leader of the AfD is a strikingly handsome blonde lady called Alice Weidel. She’s not exactly a predictable conservative: she is a lesbian with a philosophy PhD who opposes gay marriage and Islamic homophobia. She worked at the Bank of China yet is a free-marketeer apostle of Friedrich Hayek.

Weidel, 44, is far more economically liberal than Marine Le Pen, the 54-year-old leader of the Rassemblement National, in neighbouring France. But the two women share an ability to wrong-foot opponents and are not necessarily harmed by the media’s insistence that they are ‘far right’ or fascist.