Giorgia Meloni named 'man of the year' by daily; women rights activists denounce

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni being named as the ‘man of the year’ by a newspaper has triggered a gender debate.

Italy’s first woman Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been named the ‘man of the year’ by Libero Quotidiano, a far-right daily published in Milan triggering a battle of sex that the newspaper said Giorgia won in 2023. The epithet did not go down well with women’s rights activists and several women politicians who saw the term as an affirmation of male superiority. An MP from the the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra (Greens and Left Alliance) Elisabetta Piccolotti wrote on Facebook that Meloni should reject the title as it was only an affirmation of male superiority. “At this point, prime minister, please clarify: are you a woman, are you a man or are you non-binary?” Piccolotti wrote on Facebook, The Telegraph reported.

Why Giorgia Meloni has been called ‘Man of the year’

The article written by Mario Sechi, the paper’s Rome bureau chief, said Meloni won “the war of the sexes” in Italy and not only “broke the glass ceiling but dissolved it”. “In excessive diversity, we have reversed gender. In times of war, we have chosen someone who has shown she knows how to fight,” the article said. Mario Sechi led Meloni’s public relations team between March and September of 2023 before joining the daily. The prime minister confronted two wars, multiple geopolitical shocks, a changing Europe and a world order being reinvented, it said.

“Giorgia Meloni for Libero is ‘man of the year’ because above everything she has cancelled the war of the sexes by winning it, by thinking differently, being divergent, overcoming the arrogance of men and the defeatism of women. She has not only broken the glass ceiling, she has dissolved it,” it said.

Elly Schlein, secretary of the centre-left Democratic Party, said, “I don’t think my aspiration as a politician is to become man of the year. On the contrary, I think this is a surrender.”

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