ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage. None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes.
The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force. For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.
But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture. Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women. Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women.
National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.” Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values. The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.
The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance. The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs. Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.
Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing. It’s monstrous,” he said. Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.
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