By Sofia Ammassari
Pauline Hanson and her party One Nation have been dominating headlines after their recent electoral successes in South Australia and Farrer.
A new national opinion poll has One Nation’s primary vote at 31 percent – up from 7 percent just two years ago.
Not only are growing numbers of Australian voters openly expressing their support for One Nation, but the party, and its leader, are doing particularly well among Australian women.
According to an April study by RedBridge and Accent Research, Pauline Hanson is now the most popular party leader among women voters – ahead of the prime minister. And One Nation is their leading first-preference party.
That this is happening to a far-right party might raise some eyebrows. Far-right parties have traditionally been considered “men’s parties”: first, because men tend to be predominant among their voters, grassroots and elected politicians; and second, because their image and political agendas are seen as very masculine.
Yet, in Australia, where women rarely lead parties of any kind, Pauline Hanson has led hers for decades, and One Nation is mobilising women voters. This might look like an anomaly, but it isn’t.
Women leading ‘men’s parties’
In fact, Hanson is part of a small but substantial group of women who have led or currently lead far-right parties, including Marine Le Pen in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Frauke Petry and Alice Weidel in Germany.
What is particularly striking is that these women are at odds with the traditional gender roles and family values their parties promote – be that due to divorces (Hanson, Le Pen, Petry), having had a child when unmarried (Meloni), or being lesbian (Weidel).
So, how did they become leaders?
It helped that most of them did not have to climb a party hierarchy dominated by men. Hanson and Meloni founded their own parties. In the case of Le Pen, the National Front (now National Rally) was founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom she kicked out in 2015 to cleanse the party of its most toxic elements (read: antisemitic, monarchist, militarist).
As for Petry and Weidel, a mixed-gender dual leadership model is the norm across most German parties.
One might therefore think these women represent exceptions in the far-right party landscape. But women’s increasing participation in the far right is not only about party leadership, but voters and grassroots membership.
One Nation and women
Far-right parties are attracting more women voters than ever. Although their electorates in Europe remain those most dominated by men, the proportion of women voting for them, relative to men, has increased.
In Australia, poll data by RedBridge/Accent Research collected in April shows 28 percent of women voters have One Nation as their first choice for the House of Representatives, up from 9 percent in June 2025.
By contrast, the proportion of women with Coalition parties as their first preference fell from 30 percent to 22 percent in the same timeframe.
To be clear, the rise in popularity of One Nation (and the decline of the Coalition) is not driven just by women. Men display very similar trends.
And there are few gender differences in terms of the reasons why people say they are planning to vote for One Nation. For both women and men, supporting One Nation is a way to express dissatisfaction with the major parties and their handling of the cost-of-living crisis.
Yet, as my recently published book finds, we can also see this playing out in other countries.
A global trend
My book is the first study on women’s involvement at the grassroots of far-right parties. I interviewed more than 100 members and officials from the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the League in Italy, and the Sweden Democrats. I also collected survey responses from thousands of League and Sweden Democrats members.
In my surveys, women make up between one-quarter and one-third of party members. This sits somewhere in between other far-right parties, such as Reform UK (39 percent) and Chega in Portugal (15 percent).
Despite being a minority, I found women play a key role at the far-right party grassroots.
To begin with, women join the far right largely for the same reasons as men: because they hold grievances against racialised out-groups (immigrants, ethnic minorities, or refugees) and feel left behind by mainstream parties. Women’s motivations are therefore not a “softer” version, or more feminine, than men’s.
Second, the (few) women who join far-right parties are very active – even more so than men. They post political content online, stand as candidates and run local branches.
This is very surprising, given how in mainstream parties, it’s the opposite, with men being more active.
In bucking these long-standing trends, not only do women help far-right parties fulfil their key functions, they also mobilise other women to vote for the far right.
Finally, far-right parties actively try to recruit women members for electoral and reputational gains. They know that, by doing so, they can both improve their electoral support among women and appear as less extreme political actors.
So while far-right parties may still be numerically dominated by men, women are increasingly central to their success and legitimacy.
In that sense, Pauline Hanson and One Nation reflect a broader international trend in which women are helping make the far right appear more mainstream, respectable and electorally viable.
Sofia Ammassari is a Research Fellow at Griffith University. This article was first published by The Conversation.
