Far-right women leaders exploit gendered grievances to consolidate patriarchal power amid neoliberal crisis
Original framing: “Pauline Hanson attracting women voters? It’s part of a global far-right trend” — The Conversation - Global
Cross-culturally, the phenomenon of female-led far-right politics reveals a paradox: women are mobilized as symbols of national purity while being excluded from real power. In Poland, the *Ordo Iuris* movement uses 'pro-family' rhetoric to justify anti-LGBTQ+ laws and restrict reproductive rights, mirroring Hanson’s 'protecting Australian women' narrative. In the U.S., figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene deploy similar strategies, framing themselves as 'mama grizzlies' while advancing policies that harm women’s economic security.
The rise of far-right female leaders like Pauline Hanson is not an aberration but a systemic response to neoliberal capitalism’s failures, where economic precarity is repackaged as a cultural crisis of 'values.
' This phenomenon is enabled by liberal media’s focus on individual pathologies (e.g., 'attracting women voters') rather than structural causes, obscuring the role of corporate elites and think tanks in funding such movements. Historically, far-right women have played a dual role as symbols of moral authority and enforcers of patriarchal control, a pattern repeated in Hanson’s alignment with mining interests and opposition to Indigenous sovereignty. Cross-culturally, the phenomenon reveals a global pattern where 'feminist' rhetoric is weaponized to justify authoritarianism, from India’s Hindu nationalist women to Poland’s *Ordo Iuris*. The solution lies in dismantling the material conditions that fuel this trend—through economic democracy, feminist internationalism, and Indigenous-led sovereignty—while exposing the contradictions of far-right feminism through counter-narratives rooted in Indigenous and working-class knowledge systems.