Happy Friday, Rulers! I’m très contente to be back for another edition of Women Rule. Before we begin, I want to give a special shoutout to POLITICO Europe reporter Victor Goury-Laffont, who kindly contributed to this newsletter from Paris. Let’s get into it! Around the world, the far-right is using anti-immigrant rhetoric around protecting women to woo female voters. Men tend to vote more conservatively than women do, but this tactic is starting to gain some traction among women, potentially closing the political gender gap. In France, where far-right politicians have sought to link women’s rights and safety to immigration, that’s proving to be an effective strategy. Earlier this month, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally party won 33 percent of the women’s vote in this year’s Parliamentary election, outpacing 30 percent of men — a 12 percentage point increase from women voters over five years, according to an election day poll by OpinionWay. On Sunday, French citizens will cast their ballots in the first round of voting in the snap election that will determine whether Le Pen’s party takes control of Parliament. (There will be another round of voting next month.) If the National Rally wins, Bardella, a protégé of Le Pen, could become prime minister of France, making him the leader of Parliament with Macron as president until 2027. Le Pen then could run for president against Macron in 2027. There are parallels across the pond. Le Pen’s populist, anti-immigration rhetoric is often compared to that of former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the approval rating for incumbent President Emmanuel Macron is at 26 percent, mirroring that of President Joe Biden’s, at 36 percent. Will France’s election serve as a preview for the U.S. in November? “There could be women who have very right-wing views that will be watching [Le Pen], to see how successful and maybe they can mimic some of that same rhetoric elsewhere,” says Amanda Hunter, executive director of the Barbara Lee Foundation, a nonprofit which advocates for women’s equality and representation in politics. During the European parliamentary elections on June 9, amidst the surge of far-right wins across the continent, Le Pen’s National Rally party sweeped the French election, crushing Macron’s Renaissance party by more than two to one. Macron responded by dissolving the National Assembly and calling for a high-risk snap vote in a last-ditch effort to prove Le Pen’s party cannot win on a national level. (Keep up with the French snap election results here.) Throughout their campaign, Bardella and Le Pen have made a concerted effort to appeal to women, mainly through hard-hitting messages about safety and protection. Immigrants, they say, are the problem. “There isn’t a single woman watching us tonight who, when she goes out in the streets of our country … isn’t afraid for her safety because she worries that … she will be harassed, insulted and sometimes assaulted,” by immigrants, Bardella said at a political debate in Paris Tuesday night. Last week, Bardella posted a “message to all the women of France” on X, saying he’d be a “prime minister who guarantees the rights and freedoms of every woman and girl in France.” He has also said he would deport “foreign delinquents and criminals” and introduce stricter sentences for violence against women. In the U.S., the Republican Party has applied similar tactics in efforts to woo the women’s vote, mainly through the narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against women. (And typically, they showcase white women victims.) At the State of the Union speech in March, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “Say Her Name,” a reference to Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student killed in February by a man who authorities say was an undocumented immigrant. “Laken Riley would be alive today if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country,” Trump said. At campaign events in April, Trump attempted to tie the death of Riley to the death of Ruby Garcia, a 25-year-old in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who was allegedly killed by Brandon Ortiz-Vite, a Mexican citizen. Trump asserted that his administration had kicked Ortiz-Vite “out of the country and crooked Joe Biden took him back and let him back in and let him stay in and he viciously killed Ruby.” Riley and Garcia are the latest in a string of womens’ deaths, linked to immigrant men, that have been used in Republicans’ anti-immigration policy push. Often, the victims are white and their killers are not: Kate Steinle in 2015, Sarah Root in 2016 and Mollie Tibbetts in 2018. Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, notes another example of this strategy in Republicans’ restrictions on transgender athletes, referencing how efforts to ban transgender girls from women’s sports teams are often angled as a precaution to protect young girl athletes. Italy’s first female Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has employed the same strategy in her country to further her nationalist, anti-immigration policies. After congratulating police officers for dismantling a Nigerian-run trafficking network in April 2019, Meloni said “the fight against illegal immigration involves saving trafficked women from the hands of their traffickers.” Meloni’s party, Fratelli d'Italia, won 28.8 percent of the vote this year, up almost 3 percent from the 2022 legislative elections, and Fratelli d’Italia now intends to engage in dialogue with France's National Rally party to form majorities in the European Parliament.
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