Who is Eugenia Roccella, Minister of Family, Birth and Equal Opportunities of the Meloni government – Corriere.it

Eugenia Roccella68 years old, the new one Minister of Family, Christmas and Equal Opportunities.

Daughter of one of the founders of the Radical Party, Franco Roccella, and of the painter and feminist Wanda Raheli, the deputy of the Brothers of Italy took her first steps in left-wing politics by participating as a leader, in the early 1970s, in the Women’s Liberation Movement, becoming, among other things, spokesperson for the battles for abortion.

And a feminist she still defines herself today, so much so that she declares: The first feminism was not linked to the left, the idea was of an oppression that ran through everything and there was the search for a transversal sisterhood.

In 1979 she was unsuccessfully nominated for the Chamber of Deputies for the Radical party but in the 1980s she moved away from that world in dissent with battles that she believed were leading to destruction of the individualstarting from the anthropological question and the idea of ​​a limitless freedom in which everything becomes right even at the cost of transforming women into containers as happens in surrogate motherhood.

At that point Roccella spent 20 years away from active politics, dedicating herself above all to the care of two children, of parents, of a large family of which she was the reference, but remains present in the cultural debate by writing articles for the Future, the Sheet and the Journal especially on biopolitics and the transformations introduced by biotechnology in the field of procreation.

In 2007 spokesman together with Savino Pezzotta of the Family Daythe manifestation of support for a family consisting of a man and a woman organized for May 12 by Catholic associations.

In 2008, without ever taking party cards, she was elected with the PDL and became undersecretary for Welfare and then for Health. In that position she led a battle against the interruption of hydration and nutrition in Eluana Englaro.

After a brief passage in the New Center-right of Alfano, he founded the movement together with Gaetano Quagliariello and others Identity and Action. In 2018, for her, she is not re-elected to Parliament.

In the last few years the approach to Giorgia Meloni: the first real female leader, who took a risk – she explained in an interview -, got involved and reached this milestone with her own strength. I think of her as a premier who knows how to decide but also to listen.

And the new prime minister is said to hold his views in high esteem. Starting from that idea of ​​the mother as a strength for womena role that encompasses competence, care, concreteness, attention, network development: what, for Roccella, politics should be and represent.

Certainly as Minister of the Family she will devote a lot to the issue of denatality: In Italy women no longer have children, but this does not seem to worry the left – she declared -. Instead we should ask ourselves if the desire for motherhood has really collapsed, or, as the Pope has said several times, if the truth is that motherhood hindered in a thousand ways. First of all, I would like to take care of women and motherhood. I think there is a lot that needs to be done to give motherhood back the prestige and centrality it deserves and to make it much easier for women. to indulge one’s desire for a child without making burdensome sacrifices.


Which, for her, would absolutely not mean bringing women back to the role of angels of the hearth but enhancing, following the feminism of difference, the symbolic and vital power of the mother, from the ability of women, as always, to make human history, that of everyday life, centered on the care of relationships.

And, to stay on the subject, at the beginning of next year Roccella will publish the book A radical family that tells his story and that of his parents for Rubettino’s types.