ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage.

None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes. The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force.

For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.

“It is disgusting to think you can manipulate the image of a woman for such deplorable propaganda,” the center-right junior minister in Meloni’s coalition whose image was manipulated, Matilde Siracusano, told POLITICO.  “I don’t think we have ever sunk this low, especially from someone aspiring to be a national political leader.”

Vannacci’s provocations may look like familiar trolling from a politician who has built his reputation on saying the unsayable. But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture.

Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women.

“I think young Western men are very often almost castrated in their instinct for dealing with women,” he said, arguing that even legitimate romantic approaches risk being treated as aggression. 

“The cultural problem is that sometimes everything seems to be harassment, everything abuse, everything violence,” he added, while stressing that genuine abuse must be punished.

Mediterranean patriarchy

Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women. National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.”

Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values.

The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.

The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance.

The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs.  

Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.

Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing.

“It’s like talking about the Mediterranean diet,” he told POLITICO. “You think of Italian food, mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil.” The result, he said, was to conceal a patriarchal model with men above women behind “bucolic, positive images. It’s monstrous,” he said.

Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.

“It is exactly the opposite,” he said. “When we talk about Mediterranean patriarchy, the main idea is to recover, preserve and pass on the responsibilities of being a man within the family and society.” Men, he argued, had a duty to show women respect, love and protection, while rejecting violence or coercive control.

He defended the “without skirts” remark as “extremely funny” — picking up on a reference to Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani advocating long skirts — and not remotely offensive, comparing Vannacci’s ability to connect with ordinary Italians to Silvio Berlusconi’s. 

At a recent rally in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, Vannacci defended the Mediterranean patriarchy concept as not “oppression and possession” but “duty, fidelity, sacrifice,” and said it was the family model that had allowed “us to prevail over the last 2,000 years.”

Elisa Ercoli, president of the women’s rights organization Differenza Donna, condemned the program as “a return to the supremacy of the white, cisgender alpha male, and the woman as his handmaiden.”

Appealing to alphas

Vannacci, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a media sensation in 2023 with the self-published book “The World Upside Down,” a broadside against immigration, feminism and homosexuality. In it, he told gay people: “You are not normal, get over it.”

Lionized by fans as a defender of common sense against progressive politics, he received more than half a million votes as a candidate for the anti-immigration League in the 2024 European elections, before founding National Future in February.

Polling analysis suggests that about 62% of National Future’s prospective voters are male, including strong support among manual workers and the unemployed.

Pozzolo denied National Future was deliberately targeting male voters, insisting the party’s ambition was to reach Italians of all backgrounds who felt unrepresented.

Federica Formato, a lecturer at Brighton University in the U.K., who studies gender and the far right, said Vannacci was “testing the waters” to see whether he can reach a younger male audience, tapping into what she described as the “aggrieved entitlement” of young men.

A career soldier, he has repeatedly portrayed himself through images of physical strength, competition and military prowess. On social media, AI-generated versions proliferate of Vannacci as an ancient Roman in scenes recalling the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator.

For Formato, the Roman imagery projects “virility and hyper-masculinity,” while Vannacci’s army background itself helps construct the image of an “alpha male.”

Humor, memes and deliberate provocation are particularly effective with a younger online audience, Formato said, allowing relatively complex ideological messages to be reduced to instantly comprehensible images. “He is not naive,” she said. “He says things to provoke and get more attention.”

That presents Meloni with a headache. Vannacci’s party is drawing voters from her Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, while offering a more uncompromising platform on immigration, social issues and foreign policy.

Yet Vannacci has opened the door to an alliance with Meloni if she needs his votes. He has described National Future as a natural partner for the center-right, while insisting that any deal must respect his party’s principles. With Italy’s new electoral law offering a parliamentary majority bonus to coalitions winning at least 42 percent of the vote, those votes could matter.

That presents Meloni with an uncomfortable choice: Keep Vannacci outside the coalition, or bring into her government a movement whose appeal rests partly on the grievances of men who believe feminism has gone too far.

For Formato, Vannacci is exploiting a space in Italian politics that has so far lacked a figure capable of turning those grievances into an organized political constituency.

Vannacci, with his promises to restore traditional masculinity, appears determined to occupy it.

“There is an empty chair,” she said.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already demonstrated his Department of Health and Human Services has no concern for disparities. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has escorted his dangerous vaccine skepticism into the homes of every American through his role as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, public health experts and attorneys are worried that Kennedy might do away with effective federal vaccine recommendations altogether.

Right now, vaccines are recommended either on a universal basis, using a risk-based assessment for people with specific risk factors, or using what Kennedy’s HHS calls shared clinical decision-making, a controversial vaccine skeptical-adjacent category that the department has defined as an individualized process between a patient and physician. The comment period for an HHS request for information concluded on Sunday and sought comment on whether existing types of federal vaccine recommendations should remain in place. 

The request, posted to the Federal Register, also sought to consider “individual autonomy and religious freedom…and the communication practices necessary to earn and maintain public trust,” related to the federal childhood vaccine schedule.

But while shrouded in language implying greater freedom, pediatric health advocacy groups, health attorneys, and public health researchers said in public comments that further changes to vaccine recommendations will only jeopardize public health and child safety. 

And HHS’s apparent plan to change childhood vaccines is groundless.

““[T]here simply is no basis for the RFI’s implicit suggestion that the current recommendation framework produces unsafe results and needs fundamental revision,” wrote a group of health advocacy groups and scholars, including the American Public Health Association, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Bruce G. Gellin, former deputy assistant secretary of Health and director of the HHS National Vaccine Program Office. 

The HHS request poses its own potential vaccine categories, including vaccines that are recommended but not for babies, or recommended, but with other undefined caveats.

It comes as part of President Donald Trump’s August 2026 executive order, which required HHS to revive a defunct childhood vaccine task force and to reevaluate childhood vaccines.

“The arbitrary categories identified in the RFI without context, without accompanying evidence and without a clear communication strategy with medical professionals, the public health system, and the American public will inevitably produce widespread confusion and uncertainty,” the group of public health advocacy organizations and experts wrote in the public comment. “In the setting of such confusion, the principle of informed decision-making is at risk with the likely result that vaccine doses will be missed and diseases that are vaccine preventable will recur.”

Currently, America is experiencing its worst year for measles, the once all-but-eradicated viral disease, since 1991, according to the Associated Press. There have been 792 cases of the disease in Pennsylvania this year alone, and four people in the state have died of the illness since January. RFK battled Governor Josh Shapiro, claiming without evidence that state officials errantly attributed the deaths to measles. Kennedy had two of the Pennsylvania deaths removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measles dashboard which, as of Sept. 18, did not have any measles deaths listed.

Echoing Trump’s executive order, the HHS information request emphasizes that evidence, alongside freedom and trust, are paramount when considering vaccine recommendations. A public comment submitted by members of Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, however, notes that patients overwhelmingly trust their personal healthcare providers. A July survey by KFF found 86% of respondents trust their own doctor compared to 51% who trust the CDC and 34% who trust RFK. Even MAGA Republicans are more likely to trust their healthcare provider than RFK, at 86% compared to 74%.

“Any change to the current categories could cause provider and public confusion, leading to greater mistrust and wider spread of misinformation,” Hannah Green, state health policy analyst, and Kelly Whitener, an associate professor, wrote in the Georgetown public comment.