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Earlier this month, Giovanna Melandri, a former Italian culture minister, flew across the globe for the inauguration of Chile's new president, Michelle Bachelet, and the swearing-in of Latin America's first cabinet with an equal number of men and women.
"Bachelet is changing the physiognomy of Chile's democracy," said Melandri. "I took note."
When she returned here, Melandri passed on her observations to the leaders of her party, the Democrats of the Left. "Something strong is changing in the Latin world," she said in an interview, "so the question is, what do we need to do to have this happen here?"
That is something Italian women across the political spectrum have been asking ahead of the country's forthcoming elections.
If the past year saw women rise to top posts in several countries think Bachelet in Chile, Angela Merkel in Germany and Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf in Liberia years of ingrained sexism have left the Italian political firmament bereft of female luminaries.
Unlike women who have consolidated their political clout elsewhere like Segolene Royal, on a fast track to becoming France's first serious female challenger for the presidency Italian women have yet to capture widespread popular consensus. To achieve that, they say, they have to change the rules of what is still very much a man's game.
"The problem is getting power within the political parties otherwise, we're not going anywhere," said Emma Bonino, a former European commissioner and one of two leaders of the Radical Party, which is running as part of the center-left in the elections.
Bonino noted that the dearth of women in politics mirrored the lack of female power in Italian banking, boardrooms and newspaper mastheads. "Power is always negotiated among the usual group of men," she said.
"It's a country that's come to a standstill. There's no room for new entries, like women and immigrants."
Italy is ranked 89th in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's global classification of women in parliaments. Women hold only 11.5 percent of the seats in the lower house and 8.1 percent in the Senate; just two of the outgoing cabinet's 24 ministers are women.
In contrast, 45.3 percent of Sweden's lawmakers are women. Although the percentage is lower in France (126 of 901 lawmakers) and the United States (70 of 535), women have managed to rise to positions of political prominence.
"It's evident that it's going to be hard for a Merkel or a Bachelet to emerge" in Italy "because you need to build from a strong, broad base," said Chiara Sebastiani, who teaches political science at the University of Bologna. "Women's chances are low to begin with, and then here you have mechanisms firmly in place that maintain power in the hands of men."
Other women, too, complain of a political system controlled by male-dominated parties where power is grudgingly conferred to women rather than taken by force or by right.
"It's tokenism, and it's explicit on the right, much less explicit on the left, where they feel the same way but they have to act politically correct," said Anselma dell'Olio, an American feminist and activist who now lives in Rome. "Italians are basically conservative, it has nothing to do with left or right, the prejudices are still there and they are strong."
The issue took on immediacy earlier this month during a televised debate between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his challenger, Romano Prodi. Berlusconi said that his center-right coalition had few women candidates because it was "not easy to find someone who wants to leave work and family and spend five days a week in Rome." This prompted sharp rebuttals from women, not just in the opposition but also among his own ranks. Berlusconi announced that if he were re-elected, women would occupy 30 percent of the positions in his new cabinet (taking deputy-minister positions into the equation).
Prodi countered that, if elected, his coalition would instate quotas ensuring the election of a fixed percentage of female candidates a system that many women here concur may be the only way to build a strong voice in Parliament.
"There's a calculation that without quotas it would have taken women in France 500 years to achieve parity," said dell'Olio. "It's got to be at least 1,000 in Italy."
Maria Ida Germontani, coordinator of women candidates for National Alliance, Berlusconi's principal ally, said, "Quotas are a means to an end: They're necessary to rebalance a situation and open up all positions that men are reluctant to let go of." The party, which currently has four women lawmakers in Parliament, has been one of the few to establish an unofficial quota for the April 9-10 elections (25 percent of its candidates are women).
Melandri, the former culture minister, said she backed the idea of a primary system for choosing candidates similar to the one that was used in Chile. "It's a form of legitimacy that comes directly from women, electors, voters, and I think this could help Italy," she said.
Bonino is about to put that to the test. One of the first acts of the new Parliament will be the election of the new president, since Carlo Azeglio Ciampi's seven-year term is about to expire. In 1999, Bonino threw her hat in the ring and ran an American-style "Bonino for President" campaign, hoping to build up political momentum through popular consensus. Ciampi was broadly backed by both the majority and the opposition, and Bonino did not have much of a chance. But she is planning to repeat the operation this year.
"Maybe people will realize they need a breath of fresh air," she said.
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
