Progress and Opposition to LGBTQI+ Equality Policies in Southern Europe: a Comparison Between Italy and Portugal

Since 2010, the year of Council of Europe Recommendation 2010/5 on measures to combat discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, LGBTQI+ equality policies have entered the institutional agendas of all EU countries, gained visibility, but also triggered heated debates in the public sphere and within institutions. The variation in LGBTQI+ policy trajectories between EU countries is still significant. Policies on sensitive issues such as the rights of same-sex couples and, in general, sexual orientation and gender identity involve fundamental values and religious beliefs (Ozzano 2020; Prearo 2020), which usually transcend the division between left and right and see cross-party alignments for or against, although, as with feminist issues, the so-called progressive parties usually show a more favourable stance than conservative parties. But much also depends on the national context in which these parties operate, with expected notable differences between more secularised and more religious countries. This too, however, is not always the case, especially in recent years. If we think of southern Europe, consisting of Christian countries that were rather religious compared to northern countries until some years ago, the differences are remarkable. In the ILGA's Rainbow Map (2024), which ranks 49 European countries on their respective legal and policy practices for LGBTQI+ people, from 0 to 100%, Greece ranks 6th with a score of 70.78, Portugal ranks 9th with a score of 67.14, Spain ranks 4th with 76.41, while Italy ranks only 35th with a score of 25.41. Data from the Pew Research Centre (2022) show that these same countries rank differently with respect to the importance attached to religion by their citizens and these differences do not correspond to the previous ones: Greece is the only country in which more than 50 per cent of citizens consider religion to be important for national identity (55), while in Italy, Portugal and Spain the percentages drop to 21, 36 and 22 respectively. 59 per cent of Greeks, 54 of Portuguese, and only 26 of Italians and 25 of Spanish consider themselves as believers. What can explain the difference in terms of LGBTQI+ equality policies between these countries, and in particular the backwardness of Italy? We will try to answer this question by focusing on Italy and Portugal in the last 20 years and investigating the policymaking process (legislative proposals, initiators, process duration, votes) and the debate generated within the parliament (parliamentary speeches), which led to either the approval or the rejection of all the legislative initiatives dealing with LGBTQI+ rights introduced in the period under examination. Then, we will investigate some of the variables possibly affecting the different outcome of the policymaking process. We expect that among the factors affecting the passage of such legislation in parliament, the content of the legislative proposals and its relative salience for the actors involved, together with their position on the same issue, might play quite a significant role in the policymaking process and its outcome, and might consequently contribute to explain the variation among the two countries in this regard.