In her meteoric rise through Italian politics, Giorgia Meloni has repeatedly broken the glass ceiling and is now the first female prime minister in the still-rigidly patriarchal country.

However, many women do not see the 45-year-old as an ally, citing her advocacy of traditional family values, including her opposition to abortion, and what they see as her failure to challenge the social status quo.

“All in all, it’s a positive thing that for the first time a woman is leading the government,” said Giorgia Serughetti, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca, who focuses on gender and politics.

“But to say from there that this is progress for women is another thing,” she told AFP.

Meloni’s post-fascist party, Brothers of Italy, won the largest share of votes among women in September’s elections, in which she relied heavily on her own personal brand.

“I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, I’m Christian,” Meloni said at a 2019 rally. The word wife was omitted as she was not with her partner, the father of her young daughter , is married.

Serughetti argues that this mantra was not a call for women’s rights, but a “declaration of hostility toward enemies,” be they LGBTQ activists, feminists, advocates of mass immigration, or other political leftists, whom she often rails against.

Meloni has “never played the woman card” in a majority-Catholic country where there is “widespread hostility towards feminism,” the expert said.

Although Meloni has risen to the top post in government, he is not seen as a challenge to “the patriarchy,” said Flaminia Sacca, a political sociologist at Rome’s Sapienza University.

Meloni is a working mother in a country where only about half of all working-age women are employed.

But “it in no way challenges traditional values, traditional culture and Catholic culture,” Sacca said. “She’s more acceptable, she’s not a threat.”

Meloni has broken through several barriers in her political career.

In 2008, aged just 31, she became the country’s youngest minister when then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – now one of her allies – handed over the youth portfolio to her.

A decade ago she co-founded Brothers of Italy and became the first woman to lead a major Italian political party.

As Prime Minister, she joins a very small group of women who have achieved positions of political power.

Italy appointed its first female leader of the lower house of parliament in 1979, but it was another four decades before a woman held the second most powerful constitutional role, president of the Senate.

In her 2021 autobiography, Meloni advocated for more women in decision-making roles that would “raise the morale and productive effectiveness of our leadership.”

But she said she will not rely on gender quotas mandated on company boards today and said she “loathes” them.

“I am a woman, but I confess that in my entire history in politics I have never really felt discriminated against,” she wrote in her book.

Her new government includes six women among 24 cabinet posts, while her coalition – which includes Matteo Salvini’s far-right League – has fewer women MPs than any other bloc in parliament.

About 30 percent of its MPs and Senators are women, compared to 46 percent of the centrist bloc and 45 percent of the populist Five Star Movement, Sacca said.

However, they are almost on par with the 31 percent of the center-left Democratic Party, which actively supports gender parity and women’s rights.

“Giorgia Meloni is like a fish on a bicycle for feminism: harried, precarious and out of place,” prominent Italian-born philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti wrote in August in the newspaper La Repubblica.

Meloni’s discourse on women revolves almost exclusively around mothers, with measures to support fertility and families, such as providing free kindergarten, protecting young mothers in the workplace, or lowering taxes on baby products.

The focus on motherhood is a holdover from fascism, which still resonates with right-wing voters and is particularly reassuring in times of economic hardship, academics Sacca and Serughetti agreed.

“She’s not talking about empowerment and careers, she’s talking about mothers and their right to keep their jobs,” Sacca said.

Small protests, usually attended by young people, took place across Italy and focused on Meloni’s opposition to abortion.

Meloni, who is also opposed to same-sex adoption and surrogacy, says she has no plans to challenge Italy’s 1978 abortion law, but rather to offer more choices to women who feel they have no choice but to have an abortion.

Emma Bonino, a veteran rights activist who heads the +Europe party, fears Meloni will instead “push for the law to be ignored,” compounding existing difficulties in finding gynecologists willing to perform abortions.

Despite the criticism, Meloni’s strength lies in consistently presenting himself as a leader with control, Sacca said.

“She managed not to frighten an electorate that wasn’t necessarily right-wing before her,” she said.