After almost three winters of discontent, Europe is swinging to the right and – reminiscent of the UK’s response to the economic disaster of the 1970s – it is women who are leading the charge. Anti-Woke female leaders from Italy to Sweden are offering economic solutions after years of draconian lockdowns. Writing from one of the most continually locked down cities on the planet, Melbourne, I can certainly see the appeal.

Europe’s latest rising star is a 44-year-old member of Spain’s People’s Party and President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso. Six months after her inauguration, the Covid pandemic reached Spain, however, Ayuso’s common-sense approach to the virus preserved freedoms and kept small business alive. Reflecting on a rise in cases in the Autumn of 2020, after cases had previously fallen and a sense of normality returned in much of Spain over the summer, Ayuso summed up her response thus: ‘When everyone was asking to close, with no alternatives, we decided to go against the virus, not the people.’ And it was the people she won. With the most relaxed restrictions in the country, Ayuso became the unofficial patron saint of the capital’s theatres, shops, and hospitality industry. Acknowledging that life in Madrid can be expensive and difficult during the pandemic, she maintained that the one good thing about the city was that you could go for a beer with family and friends at the end of a hard day’s work (something lost on Victoria’s Daniel Andrews).

Leading up to May 2021’s snap regional election, posters of her accompanied by the word libertad! became a common sight behind the bars in Madrid’s watering holes. Her face appeared on the label of an artisanal beer and Ayuso-style papas became a popular dish – they came with two extra huevos: eggs, but also a reference to the expression’s other meaning: ‘with a pair of balls’.

Stylising herself as the ‘freedom’ candidate, Ayuso pitched the election as a fight against the national government of Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, and its months-long application of pandemic emergency powers. The lockdown-fatigued public rewarded Ayuso with a landslide victory – she won almost 45 per cent of the vote. The PP fell only four seats short of an overall majority and secured more votes and seats than all three main leftist parties combined.

Almost two years on and Ayuso is running for re-election this May in a campaign that could see her ultimately face off with Sanchez and become Spain’s first female Prime Minister. The Madrilenian election is seen as crucial before the battle for Spain’s future is fought in December’s general election. Having already established herself as a more credible opposition figure to the central government than the PP’s previous national leader Pablo Casado, ‘Saint Isabel’, as her supporters praise her, is tipped to challenge the PP’s current leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, and if she does, she has a serious shot at the top job.

It is not just a prudent response to the pandemic that has Madrid gripped by ‘Ayusomania’. Post-Covid, Ayuso cut taxes and red tape in a suite of open market policies that saw Madrid attract US$15.3 billion in foreign investment, growth climbed two points above the national average of 5.7 per cent, and Madrid overtook Catalonia as Spain’s richest region. Further, Ayuso vows to be tough on an increasingly ‘Woke’ Spain and has taken aim at the government’s social program. She has condemned the recently passed law that allows 16-year-olds to change their gender without parental consent arguing that while Spain was the first country to offer publicly funded sex changes and ‘Madrid is the capital of Pride’, this new law is ‘radical’ with the power to harm ‘adolescents who don’t have their sexual identity clear’ as well as whole families. ‘Its type is doing much harm all over the world…’ she observed.

And it seems much of the world, or at least much of Europe, agrees with her. As I pointed out in the lead-up to last year’s Italian general election won by the Brothers of Italy’s sorella Giorgia Meloni, many of Europe’s right wing politicians are united by an aversion to Woke ideology, and many of them are women. Over the past ten years the effects of unregulated immigration from majority Muslim countries and a divisive Woke identity politics have been critical issues for female politicians on the right. As Marine Le Pen has argued, in the face of mass immigration and subsequent attacks on women in France, ‘every woman must be protected in their right to wear shorts or a miniskirt’. When she was the gender-equality spokeswoman for the nationalist Sweden Democrats, and the youngest MP in Swedish Parliament, Ebba Hermansson echoed Le Pen by identifying keeping women ‘safe from sexual violence’ as her main concern. Drawing attention to the changing face of Western Europe, she stated bluntly: ‘If you come from a from a country where women are not worth as much as men, or women don’t have the right to live their lives as they want, when you come [to Sweden] there’s a shock.’

Women seem to agree across the board. Le Pen won 41.5 per cent of the vote in last year’s election – a record both en masse and for female voters. In Germany FridA, or Frauen in der AfD (Women in the AfD), is gaining traction, and Alice Weidel, the recently re-elected leader of Alternative for Germany, who is a strong opponent of what she calls ‘gender idiocy and early sexualisation classes’, led the party to record their strongest performance yet in the states of Saxony and Thuringia in 2021’s federal election. Of note is that Alice Weidel is opposed to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, stating that she supports protection of the ‘traditional family’ while also supporting ‘other lifestyles’. Weidel herself is a lesbian in a civil partnership with another woman. This brings me to the question the Left may ask: why is it that women are leading the Right?

The answer, I think, lies in their unwillingness to be typecast, their commitment to freedom in an increasingly ideologically Woke world, and their unmatched tenacity, or huevos. When the radical feminist activists of Spain’s left criticise her, Ayuso retorts that they reveal their hypocrisy in hating that as a free woman she chose the Right side of the political spectrum. She has also dismissed death threats as things not to ‘make a song and dance about’, echoing the views Afd MP’s Nicole Höchst and Morinna Miazga who are both tough-skinned. ‘I could kill every man in the party’ karate champion Höchst has joked. On the male-female divide in the AfD Miazga laughs, ‘It takes only 10 of us to keep the 82 men in check.’ All quip that as women they can ‘do two things at once’. All have also predictably been called fascists. But as Ayuso states ‘When they call you a fascist, you know you’re doing it right […] and you’re on the right side of history […] In Spain they call anyone a facha who disagrees with the most authoritarian people.’ Unlike Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon, I don’t see these women leaving politics anytime soon.