Populist Radical Right Frames of Gender and Sexuality in France and Italy:Targeting Feminists and Other Enemies of the People
Drawing on Critical Frame Analysis, and bringing together research on the populist radical right (PRR) and on anti-gender campaigns, this article explores how two main PRR transnational frames—the anti-gender and the "racialization of sexism" frame—are combined and recontextualized, varying over time and across contexts. It focuses on how the Rassemblement national (France) and the Lega (Italy) frame gender/sexuality to target the gendered internal enemies of the people—feminists, LGBTQI+ people, and political elites. The PRR frames its internal and external enemies as cultural and moral relativists in Italy (moral frame), and as "communitarianists" in France (modernist frame). The analysis identifies two PRR discursive strategies overtly attacking and delegitimating, respectively, feminist/LGBTQI+ claims. Gender/sexuality issues connect populist and nativist claims, and nationally specific regimes of gender, ethnicity, and religion as well as party cultures define how PRR frames of gender/sexuality are recontextualized and vary over time.
anti-feminism/anti-gender, frames, France, gender/sexuality, Italy, populist radical right, racialization of sexism
Introduction
In the past decade, in Europe, populist radical right (PRR)1 politics has become increasingly connected with anti-gender campaigns. These have equipped the PRR with new tools to support its exclusionary populist agenda. Today (some) PRR parties are important actors in anti-gender networks, associating with other anti-feminist forces in a coordinated attempt to oppose gender+ equality (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Umbrella notions such as [End Page 52] "globalizing right-wing populist complex" (Roth and Sauer 2022) or "politicized moral conservatives" (Ayoub and Stoeckl 2024) are used to define this transnational network of actors—including political parties, NGOs, and religious organizations—targeting "gender ideology," intended as the project of a "globalist lobby" to destroy the "natural" family.
Existing research points to the adaptability of this global anti-gender narrative, functioning as a "master frame" sustaining movements across contexts. Because of its transcultural significance as an "empty signifier," the idea of gender assumes different meanings and constructs a variety of enemies depending on the setting, supporting alliances among heterogeneous actors (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017, 23). Anti-gender politics relies on transnational organizational linkages and diffusion of strategies. PRR engagement in these networks is linked to the internationalization efforts made by these parties: since the mid-1980s, they have sought Europe-wide collaborations, particularly around EU elections. In turn, these build on longer-term historical "ideational and interdiscursive" continuities between far-right traditions across Europe (Wodak and Richardson 2013, 8).
PRR parties, however, do not necessarily espouse anti-gender positions. Their alliance with ultraconservative religious activists is based on an "opportunistic synergy" whereby the PRR "selectively and instrumentally" (Graff and Korolczuk 2022, 24) appropriates family issues to secure votes while anti-gender groups achieve institutionalization: the agenda of these actors do not necessarily overlap. Indeed, in Western Europe, PRR parties mobilize women's (and gay) rights issues to attack the racialized Others: gender+ equality is essentialized and used as a marker of national identity/whiteness. Variously termed "femonationalism" (Farris 2017), "ethno-sexism" (Dietze and Roth 2020), or "racialization of (hetero)sexism" (Scrinzi 2024), this discourse depicts migrants, particularly Muslims, as incompatible with women's (and, in some contexts, gay) rights. Like anti-gender frames, this PRR narrative has transnational relevance. The 2010 French ban on the niqab and the events in Cologne on New Year's Eve 2016, for instance, have had important echoes across borders. PRR campaigns used the figure of the Muslim veiled woman both as a symbol of women's oppression and of terrorist threat. In the context of the so-called "refugee crisis," PRR rhetoric constructed male refugees as misogynist sexual predators. This mobilization of gender equality issues importantly contributes to mainstream PRR ideas, as these parties aim at addressing a wider constituency beyond their traditional (largely male) electorate. In some countries, the traditional "gender gap" in PRR vote has narrowed or disappeared, such as in the 2022 French presidential elections and in the 2018 Italian national elections.
This article explores how these two transnational "discursive streams" of the West European PRR (Gustin 2024, 557)—the anti-gender narrative and the "racialization of sexism" narrative—vary across contexts and over time: it does so by considering frames (Snow and Benford 1988) of gender/sexuality2 [End Page 53] in the Rassemblement national (RN) in France and the Lega in Italy.3 In particular, the article examines how these parties deploy these (seemingly) contradictory framings to target the internal gendered enemies of the people—feminists, LGBTQI+ people, and the political elites—constructed as "traitors" of the native people's gendered/sexual identities and interests. The next section discusses research conceptualizing the ambivalent relationship between gender/sexuality and PRR politics, in comparative perspective. The article then presents the French/Italian cultural contexts in which PRR parties have deployed gender/sexuality frames, and traces how this framing has evolved over time. After a methodological section, the analysis presents the transnational similarities and cross-national specificities of PRR gender/sexuality framing, finding that that national contexts combine with party cultures to define how the two gendered discourses—as well as populist and nativist appeals—are espoused in PRR rhetoric.
The ambivalence of PRR gender/sexuality framing across contexts
The two PRR discourses on gender/sexuality—the anti-gender and the racialization of sexism narrative—draw on the same mechanisms. Research on anti-gender campaigns, on the one hand, and, on the other, on the PRR, converge to indicate key discursive strategies shared by these actors.
On the one hand, research on anti-gender movements (which include the PRR) has emphasized its populist rhetoric. These activists espouse a Manichean populist rhetoric juxtaposing the victimized people to self-interested elites supposedly attempting to impose deviant values on ordinary people: their discourse "create context-specific antagonisms to stigmatize and exclude specific social groups" (Roth and Sauer 2022, 100). This is supported by a moral panic4 around gender/sexual politics, securitizing various enemies threatening the native people (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). The actors targeting "gender ideology" also tend to present themselves as an alternative to the political, cultural, and economic liberal mainstream. This "reverse anti-colonialism" (Roth and Sauer 2022, 104) depicts gender/sexual democracy as an imperialistic technocratic global project threatening local identities and economies.
On the other hand, research on PRR gender politics has focused on examining how these parties paradoxically appropriate women's (and gay) rights to target the racialized Others and support their anti-immigration agenda. This scholarship has thus focused on the intimate linkages between the PRR framing of gender/sexuality and nativism (Akkerman 2015). As mentioned, while espousing conservative positions on the family, these parties contrast the gender backwardness attributed to the migrants with the morally advanced "national self." These studies are in line with classic feminist research [End Page 54] emphasizing the centrality of gender/sexuality to far-right politics more broadly: across contexts, these ideologies construct intersecting categories of difference/othering and enemies/outsiders related to gender/sexuality, ethnicity, and religion (Bacchetta and Power 2002).
Studies of anti-gender movements and of the PRR and gender/sexuality thus converge to show that both PRR transnational "discursive streams" are informed by ideological antagonism—the discursive construction of an antagonistic relationship between Us/Them. More broadly, PRR scholars concur that such ideological antagonism is a defining aspect of this party family, serving an affective politics of resentment around the people's victimhood (Betz 2018). The PRR "politics of fear" (Wodak 2020) constructs common enemies while denying internal social divisions in the nation. This ideological antagonism of the PRR targets a variety of internal and external enemies. The outsiders are defined both horizontally (the racialized Others) and vertically (mainstream politicians, cosmopolitan élites) (Brubaker 2017) and based on their being within (political élites, feminists, and LGBTQI+ people) or outside the nation/the state (Mudde 2007). Feminist analyses of PRR politics confirm these findings: PRR gendered narratives delineate enemies within the nation—mainstream politicians, Marxists, feminists, and LGBTQI+ people—and enemies outside the nation—the racialized Others (Kinnvall 2015). PRR rhetoric tends to associate these various (internal and external) enemies, based on the notion that they coalesce to undermine the people's interests. In particular, demographic anxieties link the attacks on (pro-choice) feminists, LGBTQI+ people, and the political élites with that against the racialized Others (Kuhar and Adjanovic 2017; Mayer, Ajanovic, and Sauer 2014). The "birth-rate agenda" (Siddiqui 2021, 11) generates a moral panic about the threat of "ethnic replacement" of the native people by the migrants and is central to the appeal of the PRR for men: it validates hegemonic white masculinity, activating fear for native male decline and nostalgia for an idealized past where "men were men" and "women were women."
Besides these ideological affinities there are also, as mentioned, important lines of distinction between the PRR and other anti-gender actors. The PRR does not necessarily target "gender ideology" and its positions on gender/sexuality are not necessarily ultraconservative—although all these parties hold heteronormative and gender essentialist views. While in Italy, Germany, and Central and Eastern Europe the PRR constructs LGBTQI+ people as enemies, in Nordic countries it deploys homonationalism. In those contexts where PRR parties mobilize women's/gay rights issues in anti-immigration fashion, anti-gender actors need to "carefully calibrate their discourse" to maintain their "opportunistic" alliance (Graff and Korolczuk 2022, 88). Indeed, the narrative targeting "gender ideology" takes a context-specific tone, resonating with the varying intensity and orientation of debates on gender/sexuality, immigration/identity, religion and European integration (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Processes of "localization" of anti-gender politics encompass "recontextualization, from the transnational to [End Page 55] the local, and leading to the successful embedment of a transnational movement in the national contexts" based on adapting frames to specific settings (Lavizzari and Siročić 2023, 478). This is in line with earlier research on the far right, emphasizing how ideas "are being implemented, recontextualized and thus change on local/regional/national levels," according to distinctive cultural and historical contexts (Wodak and Richardson 2013, 8). While the discursive construction of Us versus Them is a constant feature, the targeted enemies vary in relation to context-specific gendered constructions of the out-group, involving different outcomes in terms of gender conservatism (Mayer, Ajanovic, and Sauer 2014).
With a view to explaining this variation, comparative studies of PRR and other anti-gender actors have considered the impact of interplaying national formations (or regimes) of gender, ethnicity, and religion:5 these shape the discursive opportunities and constraints (Koopmans and Statham 1999) defining PRR mobilization of gender/sexuality issues. Religious regimes are particularly relevant in gendered debates on immigration/identity: the PRR has importantly campaigned around the Muslim veil, mobilizing Christianity as a symbol of the nation (Rosenberger and Sauer 2012). The identitarian use of religion by the PRR has increased also due to its participation in anti-gender networks, with ambivalent outcomes. In more secularized contexts, the PRR casts Islam as incompatible with religious freedom and gender equality; in weakly secularized ones, it supports a religiously informed agenda. According to some, the relationship that PRR parties maintain with religion in a given country is key to defining their gender/sexuality politics (Ben-Porat et al. 2023). Others have emphasized the role of nationally specific gender regimes and gendered cultural and political opportunities. Where gender equality policies are an integrated part of the national political agenda, anti-gender rhetoric is less pronounced; where there is strong contestation of gender/sexual equality, these parties vocally target "gender ideology" (Reinhardt et al. 2024). Finally, others have argued that PRR parties instrumentalize gender/sexuality to serve their populist and nativist agenda, in ways that depend both on national regimes of gender, ethnicity, and religion, and on the parties' distinctive ideological traditions (Krizsán and Siim 2018).
Engaging with these debates, this article examines how two West European PRR discourses—the anti-gender and the racialization of sexism narratives—are combined, adapted, and declined in different contexts. In so doing, the article brings together debates on anti-gender and on PRR gender politics. Although there is growing attention to the ways in which anti-gender and PRR forces interplay, these two strands of research have somehow developed in parallel (Meret and Scrinzi 2024) despite significant political convergence and overlap between these activists. Research on anti-gender actors (which include the PRR) has focused on the populist strategies employed to attack LGBTQI+ and feminist activists—the domestic enemies of the people—casting them as part of a "globalist lobby." Instead, scholarship on PRR gender politics has mainly explored how gender/sexuality frames are used to target [End Page 56] the external racialized enemies of the people, considering the gendered dimension of nativism. As noted by Birte Siim and Christina Fiig (2021), we know relatively little on how PRR parties mobilize gender/sexuality to target their internal enemies in their populist appeals, including through anti-gender narratives. Dorit Geva (2020) suggested that, in the PRR, gendered symbolism functions as a glue linking populist repertoires to nativist ideologies. We need further research to consider the complexity of PRR discursive strategies, encompassing both anti-gender/anti-feminist and racializing/nativist framings, and targeting the so-called internal enemies of the people in addition to the migrants/ethnic minorities: it is such discursive complexity and adaptability that supports the "opportunistic synergy" (Graff and Korolczuk 2022, 88) of the PRR with anti-gender actors, and its ability to effectively target different audiences to pursue its agenda. Moreover, research is needed that examines how these ambivalent frames are deployed in specific settings, particularly in comparative perspective.
Gender/sexuality in the Lega and the RN
The RN and the Lega are among the oldest PRR parties in Western Europe, representing distinctive traditions of right-wing politics. The RN was founded in 1972 as a coalition of heterogeneous strands of the extreme right including traditionalist Catholics and nostalgics of French Algeria (Rydgren 2004). The Lega originated in 1991 from a coalition of regionalist movements, focusing on "fiscal revolt" against the central state and positing Padania as imagined nation based on northern Italians' shared ethnic belonging (Biorcio 2010). Despite their different political cultures, these parties share key ideological elements. The ethno-differentialist French New Right has been a key referent for both. The "nationalization" of the Lega by Matteo Salvini was directly inspired by Marine Le Pen. The RN, as the oldest and most influential PRR party in Europe, has been key to forging international alliances in this party family: these culminated in the recent partnership between Salvini and Le Pen in the 2019 European elections.
This section will present, first, the broader cultural contexts in which PRR gender/sexuality framing has been deployed and, second, the evolution of the parties' gendered ideologies over time.
The politicization of gender/sexuality and immigration in France and Italy
France and Italy are highly differentiated contexts with regard to national regimes of gender, ethnicity, and religion. In the French model of integration, citizenship is based on the prescriptive distinction between the public political sphere, which should remain "neutral," and the private sphere, where the display of religious/cultural specificities is tolerated. This political culture aspires to a [End Page 57] universalism that is "blind" to differences such as gender/sexuality and ethnicity (Scott 2007). Republican values are closely associated with Frenchness, with secularism—laïcité—appearing as a "civil religion." Since the 1990s, exclusionary framings making laïcité an emblem of national identity have been prominent to delegitimize political opponents as "anti-Republican": these are based on condemning the "communitarianism,"6 or cultural sectarianism, ascribed to migrants/ethnic minorities and associated with Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism.
Debates on migrants' integration are highly gendered. In the 2000s, "pseudo-feminism" emerged as an important figure of the "Republican racism" (Tevanian 2007, 17) of the mainstream right, trying to win back voters attracted by the PRR. Acts of sexual violence committed by migrant-background youth were intensely mediatized and explained based on their supposedly patriarchal cultures. In the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, debates on gender and Islam intensified as the Muslim veil was framed as a symbol of violent extremism.
The Italian "mixed" model of citizenship combines "ethnic" components of belonging with membership in the Catholic community, taking historical precedence over national identity (Koopmans and Statham 1999). The Church has significant influence on politics and society. Following 9/11, Islam and the association between Italianness and Catholicism/Christianity were prominent in debates on immigration: these centered on condemning the cultural and moral relativism of those who speak in favor of multiculturalism. Since the start of the 2000s, in an attempt to strengthen the Church's position in the public sphere, Catholic representatives have intervened in debates on immigration and on the family, blaming the supposedly dominant moral relativism, countering, for instance, the 2007 proposed law on civil unions. An ambivalence of the Catholic hierarchies on Muslim immigration emerged in successive "wars of symbols" including around the building of mosques, on which the Lega has campaigned (Ozzano and Giorgi 2015).
In the same years, a "civilizational" gendered narrative setting the Christian West in opposition to Islam—depicted as inherently patriarchal—was mainstreamed by the journalist Oriana Fallaci, who attacked the left wing for its alleged cultural relativism, significantly influencing PRR propaganda. In 2007, a highly mediatized act of sexual violence perpetrated by a migrant man against one Italian woman provided the Lega with an opportunity to mainstream its discourse and legitimating "law and order" legislation.
From the Front National to the RN
The positions on gender/sexuality of the RN under its former leader and founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, were shaped by its important Catholic conservative faction. References to Catholicism and the idea of nature were largely used to sustain a nativist and authoritarian agenda. Party programs maintained a strong pronatalist focus. These positions were the area of intervention of the RN women's subgroup, the CNFE (Cercle National des femmes [End Page 58] d'Europe), founded in 1985 to attract female voters: its activity was centrally devoted to anti-abortion politics and the defense of the family.
This Catholic conservative agenda on gender/sexuality was dismissed by the new leader Marine Le Pen, who has appropriated the Republican repertoire with the declared objective of transforming the RN into a mainstream party with a vocation to govern. In her strategy of "de-demonizing" the RN's public image, Le Pen has benefited from stereotypes of women as caring. Her gender allowed her to successfully manage the "double bind" faced by female politicians dealing with masculinist constructions of political leadership, as she presented herself as a model of "modern femininity" strikingly different from that celebrated by her father (Geva 2020). The RN has reformulated its anti-immigration claims, presenting itself as the defender of Republican unity against communitarianism and the "Islamization" of France. Le Pen widely employs issues of women's rights in an exclusionary manner, claiming that "our Republican values, including equality between the sexes, are rooted in our Christian culture" (Le Pen 2006, 78). The party has also softened its positions on gender/sexuality (Scrinzi 2017). The 2012 and 2017 political programs expressed tolerance of same-sex civil partnerships while opposing same-sex marriage. In 2024, when the French Parliament discussed enshrining abortion right in the constitution, Le Pen voted in favor of the amendment. Discontented conservative Catholic members and representatives, including Marion Maréchal, a champion of anti-gender mobilizations, have quit the RN while others have remained, constituting a socially conservative minority in the party.
Notwithstanding these shifts in the RN ideology, there is systematic ambivalence in Le Pen's positions on issues of abortion and women's work. For instance, she argued that many women do not have the choice not to take jobs and not to have a termination: for this, she blames the feminist movement presenting abortion "as the summit of freedom" (Le Pen 2006, 192). Similarly, the ethno-nationalist core of the RN ideology remains intact. In the 2022 presidential campaign, Le Pen carefully avoided reference to the "great replacement" theory championed by her opponent Eric Zemmour, leader of the far-right party Reconquête (Reconquest), while systematically including its key ideas in her speeches.
Finally, Le Pen's racialization of sexism discourse is reflected in the RN strategy to mobilize women. Today there is no longer a women's subgroup, which matches the party "republicanized" stance. The Daughters of France campaign (Filles de France (FdF)), launched in 2013 by the party youth organization, attracted both boys and girls. Rather than emphasizing the domestic role of women, the FdF organized street actions around issues of violence against women, claiming that "our first right [as women] is security."
From the Lega Nord to the Lega
The Lega was initially marked by a rather liberal discourse on the family, informed by its ethno-regionalist agenda. Although women were seen as the [End Page 59] primary carers, their paid work was tolerated provided that this did not subvert the traditional gendered division of work. While celebrating traditional femininity, the party ideology attributed masculine superiority and a superior work ethics to the Padanian people as a whole (Huysseune 2000). At this time, the leader, Umberto Bossi, espoused an anti-clerical stance which, combined with an anti-immigration rhetoric, made the relationship with the Catholic Church tense.
In the 2000s, the party moved toward more conservative positions on gender/sexuality while also radicalizing its anti-immigration agenda. This shifted from the stigmatization of southern Italians toward attacking international migrants, particularly Muslims, intensifying its references to Catholicism as a symbol of the nation. In debates on abortion, bioethics and same-sex unions, the Lega and (part of) the Catholic Church converged in blaming the moral and cultural relativism of the elites.
Since 2013, under Matteo Salvini's leadership, the party has undergone a significant ideological transformation. Salvini has dismissed independentism and the Padanian mythology, attempting to expand its electorate beyond northern Italy. The party has further intensified its identitarian references to Catholicism, and the agenda of the government based on the coalition between the Lega and the populist Five Star Movement (2018–2019) has been heavily informed by the anti-gender movement: the 2018 party manifesto attacked abortion and set out measures to allow mothers to stay at home (Lega Nord 2018). In 2019, Salvini attended the World Congress of Families, an international pro-family Christian Right gathering in Verona. This represented the culmination of the alliance between the party and anti-gender movements (Lavizzari and Siročić 2023): the "Verona Declaration" confirmed the ideological affinity between them, centered on defending the "natural family" and the need of alternative measures to abortion. In 2021, the Lega campaigned against the Zan bill which criminalized homo-/bi-/transphobia, constructing the LGBTQI+ community as an internal threat. The alliance between ultra-Catholics, the extreme and conservative right, and the Lega rests on the intertwining between nativist constructions of Italianness and the heteronormative defense of the family. Italian anti-gender activists use an anti-immigration rhetoric, blaming the Italian "demographic winter" and pointing that, while Italian women are no longer interested in having babies, the demographics of (Muslim) migrants is burgeoning (Garbagnoli 2018). Yet while many Lega politicians espouse ultraconservative positions, Salvini's discourse is not overtly homophobic: he rejected gay marriage but expressed tolerance for homosexuality to the extent to which this remains in the private sphere. Also, he has refrained from questioning the right to abortion in itself, while arguing for the practice to be limited.
Two women's subgroups exist in the party: the Padanian Women association (Donne Padane (DP)), and the Feminine Political Group (Gruppo Politico Femminile (GPF)). Both subgroups center on "women's issues" but the DP [End Page 60] focused mainly on defending the family while the GPF mobilized against (racialized) violence against women. The DP association, founded in 1998, largely echoed the party agenda on gender/sexuality. The GPF, which included a small group of female MPs, was founded in 2006. Its activity echoed the aggressive anti-Muslim propaganda of the party in those years, linking immigration, crime, and violence against women. In recent years, both women's subgroups have been pushed to the margins of party politics.
Methodology
I draw on Critical Frame Analysis (CFA), previously employed to assess gender policy framing (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009) and PRR gender framing (Krizsán and Siim 2018). CFA makes it possible to understand how party documents represent the "problem" of gender/sexuality through identifying problems (diagnostic frames) and proposing solutions (prognostic frames) to motivate individuals to take action (motivational frames). Like Krizsán and Siim (2018), I used CFA to evaluate what the "problem" at stake is, who is to blame for it, and what can be done, as well as to identify similarities and differences in PRR gender framing across contexts and time. This makes it possible to examine how PRR ideologies identify various targets of blame—internal (native) and external (racialized) enemies.
Three kinds of documentary sources were used. First, brochures, newsletters, and leaflets of the women's subgroups/campaigns were analyzed as indicators of the ways in which the PRR frame gender/sexuality to attract female members/supporters and to mainstream its ideas. Second, party press, political programs, and leaders' writings and speeches can be seen as core textual expressions of party ideologies on gender/sexuality. Third, scholarly analyses of evolving PRR ideologies on gender/sexuality complemented these data. Coding was manual and mainly deductive, based amongst others on the conceptualization of intertwined regimes of gender, ethnicity, and religion. Three areas of framing were identified: gender/sexuality (spanning family, abortion, women's work, gender-based violence, gender+ equality, homosexuality, etc.), immigration (national identity, migrants' integration, etc.), and religion (Islam, Christianity, secularism, religious freedom, etc.). I considered how gender/sexuality frames were articulated with the framing of religion and of immigration/identity, detecting similarities and differences in PRR attacks on various enemies of the people across time and across parties. Table 1 synthetizes such similarities, differences, and evolution.
The chosen methodology does not make it possible to assess the relative frequency of the themes identified in the framing of each party. However, while I acknowledge that parties may speak with many voices and say contradictory things, this diverse corpus of data made it possible to identify the most frequent and prominent framings deployed by each party in their different [End Page 61]
Similarities and differences in PRR frames across parties and time.
[End Page 62] ideological phases. All three sets of sources were equally used to analyze framing in each ideological stage of the parties, and altogether cover a period spanning from the parties' origins until 2024. The analysis of long-term discursive configurations shows how, in each party, ideological changes have corresponded with evolving gender/sexuality framing.
PRR transnational frames of gender/sexuality: securitizing the traditional family as well as women's (and gay) rights
The analysis identified two main frames of gender/sexuality, used by both parties to target the internal enemies of the people.
First frame: the internal enemies of the people are a threat for the "natural" family
The first frame is associated with demographic anxieties around the survival of the so-called "natural" family: feminists and LGBTQI+ people, allegedly supported by the political elites, are going against nature. Women's and gay rights are not necessarily denied outright, but it is felt that feminism and LGBTQI+ activism have gone too far, undermining the rights of "normal" heterosexual families.
For example, in Italy, Bossi's writings celebrated motherhood as the "natural" mission of Padanian women (Vimercati and Bossi 1992). Prominent party representatives such as Roberto Calderoli, a minister in the 2008–2011 government, used Christian religious references to attack LGBTQI+ movements as going against nature (Ozzano 2016). More recently, Salvini, acting as Interior Minister, declared that the government would "defend the natural family based on the union of a man and a woman" (ANSA 2018). In the same vein, the DP women's subgroup (2000) was against the proposed bill legalizing adoption by gay couples, claiming that "it is disturbing that a family that by nature can't be normal, is accepted as normal." The DP (2000) also called for pronatalist policies to support Padanian families who have fewer children due to economic difficulties. This echoes the official party discourse: in 2002, a law proposal supporting mothers was presented as a response to the "globalist" project promoting "multiracial" societies and claiming that migrants are needed to redress declining birth rates (Lega Nord 2002a). More recently, Salvini has employed the "ethnic replacement" narrative: attacking the government's immigration policies, he declared that such "replacement was coordinated by the EU through migrants" and that he was "defending the 'discriminated Padanians, victims of ethnic cleansing'" (ANSA 2015).
Further, the DP (2005) associated feminism with an "unnatural" war between men and women that was threatening the family. Its founder declared the value of equality between men and women to be crucial, but "we are feminine, not feminists, and men are our natural companions in life." Similarly, the GPF claimed to stand for a "true" feminism that respects "natural" differences between the sexes: the brochure marking its foundation echoed the [End Page 63] Vatican's call for a "new feminism" which has been integral to anti-gender narratives since the 2000s.
Much alike the Lega women's subgroups, under Jean-Marie Le Pen the RN's gendered authoritarianism found expression in a pervasive frame of moral decadence, targeting the enemies of the people for disrupting gender/sexual hierarchies. The party took the view that, just as Marxism creates conflicts between the social classes, feminism triggers the war between men and women, encouraging women to get abortions and take up jobs. Homosexuality was similarly seen as cause of gender/sexual disorder: Le Pen defined it as a "biological and social anomaly" and as "a mortal threat to our civilization" (quoted in Crépon 2015, 192). He proposed the Virgin Mary and Jeanne D'Arc as models of femininity embodying "true emancipation" for women. Echoing this, the CNFE women's subgroup claimed to be feminine, not feminist, and targeted feminism as "unfeminine" (Passmore 2000).
Besides attacking feminists and LBGTQI+ people, the party blamed mainstream politicians and migrant demographics for undermining the "natural" family. Its Family Committee claimed that the economic policies pushed women to enter the labor market, reducing natality, and attracted migrant labor; instead, the party intended to give native women the freedom to stay at home or take up jobs as they chose. The RN countered immigration, Marxism, and feminism with the ethno-nationalist appeal to "the thoroughly human sense of the child raised by his mother, protected by his father, developing among those of his blood" (Commission Famille du FN 1992, 5).
Second frame: the internal enemies of the people are a threat for women's rights
The second frame used by both parties claims that (native) women's rights are under attack: it has been consistently deployed by the Italian party throughout its different ideological phases, and by the French party under the leadership of Marine Le Pen and, since 2022, of Jordan Bardella. It centers on blaming the internal gendered enemies of the people for betraying the cause of women (and, in the RN, of gay people). PRR parties claim that they are the ones who truly defend women's (and gay) rights, accusing feminists, the left-wing political elites, and, in France, the LGBTQI+ community, of failing those.
In Italy, for instance, a female Lega MP, Carolina Lussana, while discussing "honor killings" and genital cutting, blamed mainstream politicians as hypocritical: "they speak about integration"—she argued—"but this will never take place until there are foreigners, particularly Muslims, who do not respect our values such as gender equality" (Macchi 2009). The transcript of a parliamentary debate indicates that Lussana (2007) referred to recent cases of violence against Muslim migrant women, denouncing the condition of the majority of these women in Italy and mentioning segregation in the home and polygamy. She accused left-wing female MPs of cowardice and turning their heads not to see these problems: "the hypocrisy is yours: you don't want to face this issue: [End Page 64] what are you afraid of? … You are afraid of hurting the Muslims' sensibility: this is the truth! Yours is the real negationism, you deny that there are different cultures, different religions, different interpretations of religions … according to which gender equality is not recognized"; "certainly you are not helping Muslim women … who are asking us to be brave and to tackle their problems and help them to achieve that freedom which here in the West—thanks God—is not denied!" GPF's initiatives included a petition in favor of harsher sentences for those committing sexual violence and a law proposal on the chemical castration of rapists.
The DP too was active in framing feminists as traitors of women's rights. Italy is described as having achieved gender equality, which is "the product of a long-lasting civilization and of progress in ideas and practices shared by secularism and Christian religion" (DP 2004). The DP blamed feminists for remaining silent while "massive immigration," supposedly favored by mainstream politicians, eroded women's rights: "Their ideology of solidarity is just a façade: immigration threatens the progress of gender equality" (DP 2000). Elsewhere the DP decried the "paradoxical and disconcerting behavior of left-wing women who, in the past, mobilized in the streets against native machos, while today they are silent, and accuse of racism those who express rightful indignation" at the patriarchal practices of the migrants (DP 2005). In this vein, the DP offered a populist representation of women belonging to mainstream right parties and of left-wing feminist women. The former, particularly women from Forza Italia, Berlusconi's party, are depicted as sexual objects, as frivolous and brainless sexual trophies. This narrative echoes the scandals involving the exchange between sexual favors and political positions in Forza Italia. The latter are blamed because they forget, in the name of multiculturalism, to defend the rights of Muslim women. The DP targeted Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist of the Italian communist newspaper Il manifesto who was kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq while working as an unembedded reporter. Because an Italian intelligence officer was killed while securing her release, the DP accused her of putting in danger not only her own life but also the lives of others. Contrastingly, DP women represented the Padanian women as strong women standing up for women's rights: like Fallaci, DP women are "women of common sense and courage" (DP 2005).
Later on, this framing was employed by Salvini. In 2021, commenting on a declaration of the Taliban's stating that women could not be allowed to work for their own well-being, he tweated: "where are the left-wing feminists?" A Lega leaflet issued in 2018 on International Women's Day promotes a proposal by the party for free nurseries, blaming left-wing positive discrimination measures as insulting and "banalizing women's issues," and suggests that female left-wing party representatives are "token" women, manipulated for the sake of party interests. Laura Boldrini, a left-wing party MP who was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies in 2013, was particularly targeted by being an elitist "fake feminist." This is in line with research on other European [End Page 65] countries, finding that PRR rhetoric targets feminists as an ideology-driven well-off minority unable to solve ordinary women's problems (Dietze and Roth 2020). Attacks against Boldrini had distinctive and sexual undertones: Salvini attended a rally with an inflated sex doll representing her, and described her as a "do-gooder" who does not care for the people but only for migrants.
Similar arguments are made by the French party. A press release of the FdF campaign attacks "dominant feminists" for disregarding the imminent threat to French women's safety represented by "wild immigration." It was announced that, in a demonstration organized on the day after International Women's Day, the FdF would have an opportunity to say "what they think about official feminism, which strangely disregards the first cause of suffering for women in our country," in relation to "rapes, attacks, threats, and insults." On this occasion, the FdF asked the socialist minister for gender equality to take into account the "suffering and the fear of the Daughters of France" and to take action on the issue of women's security. The campaign manifesto stated that enabling women to live safely in their own country would amount to "real feminism" (Filles de France 2013).
This matches Marine Le Pen's views. She claimed that the left wing has "betrayed the great principles of social equality, solidarity, school, republican values and women's protection" and, by promoting "massive immigration," has imported Islamism, thus betraying the women's cause (Le Pen 2006, 197, 200). She declared that she defends women's rights against Islamism, and claimed that women should have the right to dress as they want, including wearing shorts. She added that she was the only candidate to speak about this problem (RTL, 8 March 2017). After the Cologne events, she decried the "unacceptable silence, even tacit assent of the French left wing" on this (Le Pen 2016). Significantly, the 2012 presidential program addressed the issue of sexism only once, under the heading "Secularism and equality," which focuses on "communitarianism" and immigration (Front National 2012).
A press communication of the group Banlieues Patriotes (Patriotic Suburbs), established in 2016 to build consensus among migrant-background French citizens largely inhabiting these areas, similarly claimed that there are serious "civilizational regressions in the French suburbs," and asked: "where have the feminists gone?" (Banlieues Patriotes 2016). In the same vein, the RN White Paper on Security (2020) similarly victimizes women in suburbs, calling for more police in the streets and harsher penalties for rapists. The RN 2019 European elections leaflet claimed "French women, proud of our liberties! At the elections your choice will be a choice for your liberties and those of your daughters and grand-daughters." The leaflet mentioned "an explosion of sexual attacks and harassment cases," and claimed that "Islamism" is taking over the French society. The leaflet blames the ethnic minorities' communitarianism and mainstream politicians for this. Bardella's declarations during the [End Page 66] 2024 political elections echo this discourse, as he stated that "in France, women are free" and called on female voters to vote to defend their rights.
Cross-national specificities of PRR gender/sexuality framing
The analysis showed a substantial transnational convergence in the gender/sexuality frames employed by the two parties. Both claim that the heterosexual family, on the one hand, and, on the other, women's (and gay) rights are under attack. However, these gendered arguments are informed by distinctive repertoires in each party.
The Lega: targeting the enemies of the people for their cultural relativism
The Italian party employs a moral frame to blame feminists, the socalled "gay lobby," and the elites for their supposed cultural relativism. In this view, the problem is the growth of cultural and moral relativism, which favors "gender ideology" as well as multiculturalism and militant Islam.
For example, one article in the DP magazine defends Oriana Fallaci, accused of anti-Muslim hate speech, blaming the "faith in relativism whose function is to sustain globalization and its cruel individualism" (DP 2000). Elsewhere, the DP clarifies that the traditions which the association aims at defending from cultural relativism are Christian in nature. Discussing Islam in Europe and the persecution of Christians (referred to as "Christianophobia"), the DP argues that religious tolerance is a value, but that "fake tolerance," which indiscriminately opens the door to other cultures, is to be condemned (DP 2002). It is similarly argued that Western feminism has "lost its soul" due to its obsession with conforming to multiculturalist ideology (DP 2012). For example, it is claimed that "in the name of cultural diversity it is tolerated to make a step back with regard to women's rights": "in the 1970s, feminists burnt their bras, while today they accept anything that comes from the Muslim world." Feminists are accused of being complicit in the oppression of migrant/Muslim women in Italy: "over the past years Western women have mobilized to advocate the rights of women in many non-Western countries, but they have been found totally silent in defending those same women in their own countries" (DP 2004).
Complementing this denunciation, the women's subgroup blamed the the attempts by the people's internal enemies to destroy gender/sexual differences in the nation. Reporting the party demonstrations against wearing the Muslim veil in ID photos, the DP criticizes feminists for rejecting their "feminine roles" in the family, arguing that women's emancipation should not be founded on "uprooting" women from their "natural" place; rather, it should be based on the valorization of their so-called "natural" gender specificities. The DP advocates, for instance, that women should obtain positions of leadership in politics but argues that this should not be based on renouncing maternity and giving up their "feminine nature." It is argued that "women's issues should not be considered as a divisive matter, as the left wing has treated it: [End Page 67] feminists have abdicated their feminine role and neglected, rather than valorized, the female individual" and her specificities (DP 2000). Gender differences are thus regarded as a resource and a positive value in politics and society: decrying that work and politics are still a male domain, the DP declares that "until the time when women will enter the button room, and will make decisions as women without reasoning like men, things won't change" (DP 2006). Just like the local cultural specificities and folklore of the Padanian people are celebrated by the association, so is the gender specificity of women and their supposedly "feminine nature."
This narrative echoes the Lega's official discourse identifying cultural relativism with a transnational neoliberal "globalist" project, which aims at destroying the traditional (Padanian) values "transmitted to us with love in our families," "to replace them with economic interests and individualism." Party documents claim that "the multiracial society is supported by an alliance between financial globalism and the international left wing, based on economic and ideological reasons"; and state that, "in order to promote the process of globalization, they intend to create a figure of the global consumer, uprooted from his own history and traditions, with no identity other than that assigned to him by commercials" (Lega Nord 2002b). Interestingly, the Lega uses the same word—"uprooting"—and deploys a similar discourse to describe the ill-fated effects of globalization and immigration homologating local cultures and identities, on the one hand, and, on the other, of feminism and gender+ equality policies, destroying gender differences and the family. This discourse is still prominent today. Salvini claimed that the proposed bill against homophobia emanated from the so-called "globalist gay lobby". Similarly, he commented that feminists and leftists would rather swear on the Koran than on the Bible (Rame 2018), echoing the accusation of "Islamo-leftism" levelled at the French radical left by the RN.
Both the Padanian ethnicity (infused with notions of Christianity), under Bossi, and, later, in Salvini's "nationalized" Lega, the Italian identity, are framed as threatened by the "globalism" and cultural relativism of feminists, LGBTQI+ people, and the mainstream elites. The Lega repertoire revolves around the celebration of naturalized native cultural and gender/sexuality differences.
The RN: from defending the "natural family" to targeting its enemies for their "communitarianism"
The frames employed by the French PRR under Marine Le Pen and its current leader come across as very different from those employed by the Lega, but also from those characterizing the party under Jean-Marie Le Pen. The party no longer sees the internal enemies of the people as going against nature and subverting so-called "natural" gender/sexual differences, but it employs a modernist frame, blaming them for upholding divisive values and undermining the national unity based on their "sectarian" interests. More specifically, feminist and LBGTQI+ claims are delegitimized [End Page 68] through equating them to the "communitarianism" of the racialized Others. These claims are dismissed as apolitical matters which are irrelevant in the Republican public arena and should be dealt with in the private sphere.
For example, the FdF manifesto targeted feminism as idle, vain, and detached from ordinary women's reality. It criticized the actions taken by the government to counter inequalities between the sexes in relation to domestic work and education, dismissing these as apolitical "fake issues": "while leftist and conformist dominant feminism fights for trifles," the RN tackles the "real problem" of women—insecurity and the increasing violence against women perpetrated by racialized men. Referring to initiatives challenging the sexist nature of toys, the RN similarly claimed that feminists "aim at a wrong target, as the struggle for gender equality is not fought in toys' ranges in department stores, but in the French Cologne and Molenbeek," thus identifying immigration-driven erosion of women's safety and rights as the real political issue (Front National 2016). In this view, "dominant feminists" focus on apolitical matters such work/family balance or sexist toys.
Claims for sexual democracy are similarly blamed. As discussed, Jean-Marie Le Pen deployed religiously inspired arguments, condemning homosexuality as a moral degeneration of the (Catholic) nation. His daughter employed instead the frame of exclusionary Republican secularism to target LGBTQI+ people. The 2012 political program, under the heading "Secularism" (laïcité), advocates the dismissal of all measures inspired by "positive discrimination," defined as cynical "political marketing" around gender/sexual differences. Like women's mobilizations, LGBTQI+ movements are accused of undermining the Republic by raising divisive sectarian requests and putting at the center of the agenda issues that should remain private. Rather than claiming that homosexuality is against nature, Marine Le Pen compared gay marriage with polygamy, saying that these are not "our costumes" (quoted in Crépon 2015, 276). The RN thus frames gay (native) people as under threat and in need of protection, considering them as secondary members of the national community. Instead, they are targeted as internal enemies of the people if they express political claims in the public sphere.
This is in line with the broader party positions on "identity politics." In her autobiography, Marine Le Pen blames her political opponents for instrumentalizing the cause of women's rights, just like they have done with other social groups. The political elites, she claims, have played the card of the "struggle between classes, the struggle between generations, the struggle between men and women, and the struggle between people of different skin color" in order to secure votes: mainstream politicians emphasize internal social differences of the French people to pursue their own interest (Le Pen 2006, 200, 281). Similarly, she criticizes immigration and integration policies implemented by left-wing parties in office for yielding to "sectarian" claims based on ethnicity and religion, for instance by supporting migrants' associations which bring divisions in the Republican public sphere. Mainstream parties are thus accused [End Page 69] of undermining the Republican political contract by establishing an "Anglo-Saxon" "multicultural" model of integration. Le Pen attributes to mainstream parties a foreign—Anglo-Saxon—cultural legacy which conflicts with the native Republican political tradition: these imported harmful policies aim at imposing a "multicultural and differentialist ideology which is nothing but a form of inverted racism," harming white heterosexual men but also the ethnic minorities themselves (Le Pen 2006). Rather than supporting them, this imported "identity politics" undermines the interests of female, gay, and ethnic minority French citizens (Front National, 2012). More recently, the RN has denounced the supposedly "dominant wokeism" and "Islamo-leftism," accusing the élites of abdicating the defense of Republican values. While Le Pen has resisted making anti-gender/wokeism central to her program, Bardella has recently participated in a workshop featuring right-wing intellectuals and decrying the "woke culture" as an American import.
The RN thus assimilates the claims made by the migrants/ethnic minorities to those made by women and the sexual minorities: it is argued that national interests are overridden by partial interests and apolitical claims, supported by foreign multiculturalism and identity politics.
Conclusion
Examining two contexts that are highly differentiated in their formations of gender, ethnicity, and religion, this article provided evidence of the transnational relevance and national recontextualization of two PRR gendered frames: the anti-gender and the racialization of sexism narratives. The PRR targets feminists/LGBTQI+ people and the elites for undermining the heterosexual family, but also for betraying women's (and gay) rights, and it does so in nationally specific ways. The article makes three main contributions.
First, while existing research has exposed the contradiction between these PRR gendered narratives, the analysis shows how they correspond to two distinctive and consistent discursive strategies. These narratives serve the same opposition to gender+ equality, but they do so in different ways. The anti-gender framing overtly opposes feminist/LGBTQI+ claims, championing the "natural" heterosexual family and calling for a "real feminism" that does not trigger wars between the sexes. Conversely, the racialization of sexism framing delegitimates feminist/LGBTQI+ movements: it claims that these betray their cause, disregarding the "real" interests of "ordinary women" (and gays), and blame them for sustaining the racialized Others' attacks on native women (and gays) as a result of carelessness or of a strategy of importing "gender ideology." This narrative also claims that the PRR is truly pro-women (or pro-gays). While rejecting the label of feminist, both discourses claim to be in the interest of women (or gays). In other words, the anti-gender narrative overtly celebrates "natural" gender/sexual hierarchies, appealing to nostalgia [End Page 70] for "lost" male privileges. Instead, the racialization of sexism narrative objectifies women, amplifying their fear of gender-based violence, and emphasizes male control over female bodies and sexuality, based on a masculinist repertoire of male honor. This discourse obscures gender inequalities (and homophobia) in immigrant societies, racializing and thus "externalizing" these hierarchies: this delegitimates feminists and LGBTQI+ framings, making the "problem" that these movements want to tackle irrelevant or outdated. Further, women's rights are interpreted in a restrictive way, conceived as regarding native women exclusively and mainly associated with violence against women, while leaving aside issues of work and reproductive rights. Each party deploys both strategies.
Second, the analysis shows that, in both discursive streams of PRR rhetoric—the anti-gender and the racialization of sexism narratives—external and internal threats/enemies coalesce around gendered/sexual moral panics. Internal and external enemies are targeted together and represented as allied in undermining the family as well as women's (and gay) rights. In espousing its demographic anxieties, the PRR targets migrant women for their high fertility and male migrants as misogynist hypersexual men who, unlike native men, have not been "feminized" by the spread of feminism and sexual democracy supported by the elites. In this respect, the article concurs with earlier research pointing that PRR populist and nativist claims are interconnected and served by notions of gender/sexuality (Geva 2020; Mayer, Ajanovic, and Sauer 2014) but also evidences that contexts matter in defining how populist and nativist appeals, and the anti-gender and the racialization of sexism narratives, combine in PRR rhetoric. In each country, the same nationally specific gendered arguments are used by the PRR to level simultaneous attacks to the internal and external enemies: PRR anti-feminism relies on delegitimizing women's collective action and the policies implemented by mainstream elites through the same argument used to attack the sexual minorities and the migrants. In the RN, women/LGBTQI+ people are framed as in need of protection from the misogyny/homophobia and sectarianism attributed to the migrants/Muslims, while their claims are silenced based on the same accusation of "communitarianism": feminist/LGBTQI+ claims, endorsed by the elites, are thus delegitimated by associating them with private apolitical matters. In the Lega, the internal/external enemies of the people are blamed for "uprooting" the Christian/Catholic roots of the nation and destroying "natural" gender and ethnic identities: the emphasis is placed on the evils of globalization and, more recently, of the global "gender ideology" weakening the supposedly Christian/Catholic native gender culture. The Lega ultimately targets its enemies for operating against nature. The RN dismisses feminism/LGBTQI+ claims based on modernist issues of liberties and political contract: the internal/external enemies are blamed for not respecting the Republican principles and for endorsing apolitical gendered/sexual claims which should be limited to the private sphere. In Italy, the PRR targets its gendered enemies [End Page 71] by blaming their cultural and moral relativism, and, in France, their "communitarianism."
Third, and related to the above, the article sheds light on the processes through which the PRR's ambivalent frames of gender/sexuality are recontextualized, based on nationally specific repertoires, but also on party cultures. It thus responds to scholarly calls for comparative context-sensitive analyses of PRR gender politics (Siim and Fiig 2021), and more specifically of the "localization" of transnational anti-gender frames, as most studies of anti-gender campaigns have either examined their transnational dynamics or focused on national case studies (Lavizzari and Siročić 2023). It also responds to a need for research locating PRR discourses not only in space but also in time, as PRR gender politics may significantly change over the years (Krizsán and Siim 2018).
The PRR moral and modernist frames correspond to distinctive ways of constructing gender/sexuality in the nation (and in the party). In Italy, we observe a heteronormative celebration of gender/sexuality difference and, in France, today, a denial of the political relevance of gender/sexual difference. The Lega legitimizes women's political participation by mobilizing them as mothers in the "natural" Christian family, supporting the claim that women and their "feminine nature" have a specific role to play in society and in politics. In the French party too, under its former leader, PRR claims found expression in the frame of moral decadence, centered on idea of nature. Today there is no reference whatsoever to a so-called "feminine nature," as it was the case under Jean-Marie Le Pen. The shift from an earlier rhetoric celebrating "natural" gender differences to a "republicanized" denial of the relevance of gender/sexuality in the political sphere has constituted a major change in its gendered ideology and strategies for mobilizing women. Further, in France, the PRR is no longer openly homophobic, espousing instead tolerance of gay people provided that they do not demand equality: the RN remains, however, anti-egalitarian as gay people are expected to remain "invisible" as illegitimate political subjects in the Republican space. In Italy, the PRR remains detached from homonationalism. The two parties thus differ in their employing one or the other frame, but the same party may also move from one frame to the other over time.
This comparative analysis echoes recent studies (Kantola and Lombardo 2019, Krizsán and Siim 2018) to suggest that macro-level gendered cultural contexts and regimes interact with meso-level party cultures to shape PRR gendered discourses. Complementing this research, it advances the conceptualization of the processes through which PRR transnational frames are contextualized across contexts. In particular, the analysis points to the significant role of religious regimes, concurring that "the interaction between religion and radical-right politics is highly context-dependent" (Caiani and Tranfic 2024, 429). Both parties use transnational gender/sexuality frames to normalize exclusionary ideas and mobilize women/gay people, but gender equality [End Page 72] and sexism are racialized depending on nationally specific discursive settings, in ways importantly mediated by party cultures. In particular, the distinctive repertoires of Othering which each party employs—the ethno-regionalist celebration of an "ethnic Us" in the Lega and an ethno-nationalist emphasis on Othering in the RN—mediate the influence of national regimes on PRR ideologies. The combination of national legacies with distinctive (and evolving) party cultures accounts for the variation of transnational PRR gender/sexuality frames over time (within each country) as well as across borders.
Notes
1. This is defined by ideological populism, nativism, and authoritarianism (Mudde 2007).
2. Heterosexuality is a gendered relationship, defining not only sexual practices but also divisions of work across the public/private divide. PRR heteronormativity is linked to nativist celebration of the "natural" family where the nation is biologically and socially reproduced.
3. In 2018, the Front National was renamed RN while the Lega Nord was rebranded Lega.
4. Discursive strategy generating a state of anxiety around perceived threats to the social order (Krinsky 2013).
5. Gender regimes indicate the cultures, institutions, and relations defining the gendered division of work. Ethnicity regimes refer to dominant repertoires constructing the ethnic Self/Others. Religious/secularist regimes include state–church relations and confessional legacies. Regimes involve path-dependency but should not be essentialized: effects are also shaped by their interaction.
6. Originally used to denounce ghettoization, "communitarianism" operates as a discourse stigmatizing the perceived intent of ethnic/sexual minorities to make political claims in violation of Republican norms (Tevanian 2007).
Funding
This work was supported by the European Research Council (312711); the British Academy (090376, 170054); and the Adam Smith Research Foundation of the University of Glasgow.
Conflict of interest
None declared.
Data availability
The data underlying this article cannot be shared publicly due to legal requirements regarding the privacy of individuals who participated in the study. The data will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.
References
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
