“We must open our eyes and act before we find ourselves living in a fascist Europe,” the Croatian feminist activist Marinella Matejčić told me. We met in late March in front of an old local church in Verona, Italy – the day after Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-Right Lega party, spoke at a major gathering in the city of US, Russian and other ultra-conservative activists, aristocrats and their growing list of political allies.
Matejčić was dressed in the distinctive red cloak and white bonnet of characters from ‘The Handmaid's Tale’, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel depicting the lives of women as reproductive slaves in a totalitarian state. Italian far-Right activists were rumoured to be inside the church, attending a Latin mass. Outside, Matejčić and eight other women lined up along the wall and bowed their heads.
It was a silent – and provocative – protest. Atwood’s novel is a “too accurate presentation of the times that we live in”, Matejčić said afterwards. They wanted “to highlight the clerical-fascism” that appears to be alive and kicking across Europe, she told me – from far-Right attempts to ban abortion in Poland to the rise of the Vox party in Spain, which opposes ‘feminazis’ and laws against gender-based violence.
