A FAR-RIGHT PARTY is set to take power in Italy after winning around one-quarter of the vote in the country’s general election.
At the head of the Brothers of Italy, which has neo-fascist roots, is Giorgia Meloni, who has been the party’s leader since 2014 and now appears likely to be Italy’s next Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri – its prime minister.
Outside of Italy, she is probably most known for her comments in an interview in 1996 where she called dictator Benito Mussolini a “good politician” and for a video that went viral in which she described herself as: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian.”
As her party prepares to take power, here’s your breakdown of Meloni’s political career and policies.
Giorgia Meloni
Born in Rome in 1977, Meloni was active in right-wing politics from her teenage years. At the age of 15, she joined the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist party. Four years later, she became the national leader of Student Action, the student branch of the National Alliance party, which was the successor to the Italian Social Movement.
She was elected as a councillor in Rome in her early 20s and then to the Italian parliament in the 2006 general election as a member of the National Alliance. She was made Minister of Youth for 2008, a role which she held for three years until the prime minister at the time was pushed to resign amid Italy’s debt crisis.
In 2012, Meloni founded the Brothers of Italy along with Guido Crosetto, an anti-EU politician and businessman who became the party’s first leader.
Their party merged shortly afterwards with a new National Centre-Right party that had been founded at the same time by Ignazio La Russa, who was the Minister of Defence in the same Cabinet that Meloni was Minister of Youth, to form the Brothers of Italy – National Centre-Right party (usually known as simply Brothers of Italy).
She was re-elected in the 2013 general election and became the party’s president in March 2014. The following month, she made an unsuccessful bid for the European elections to become an MEP.
She is the chair of the right-wing European Conservative and Reformist group in the European Parliament, which includes the Brothers of Italy, Poland’s Law and Justice Party, Spain’s Vox and the Sweden Democrats.
Just five years ago, in Italy’s 2018 general election, her party tripled its seats compared to 2013 but still received only 4.4% of the total vote. Personally, Meloni was elected in Latina, a single-seat constituency in central Italy, with 41%.
In contrast, yesterday’s election saw the Brothers of Italy win around 26%, putting it ahead of both its rivals and its right-wing coalition partners.
Under the current Italian coalition government, Meloni’s party has been the only one in Opposition, affording it more airtime than it might otherwise have received and boosting its performance in polls.
The prospective prime minister brings with her stances against abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage.
In her early campaigning for the National Alliance at age 19, she told a French television programme that “Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy”.
After being elected to parliament for the party in 2006, she said Mussolini had made “mistakes”, notably around racial laws, authoritarianism and entering World War Two on the side of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Meloni has made other attempts since to distance her public persona from extreme far-right elements of her party, but she came under fire again in 2020 when she publicly praised Giorgio Almirante, who was a Nazi collaborator, the editor-in chief of an antisemitic magazine, and the co-founder of the Italian Social Movement.
She has aligned herself with anti-LGBT+ and anti-Muslim policies, including opposing same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, and immigration to Italy from outside the EU. She has described wanting to reverse the decline in Italy’s population by encouraging birth rates, but not by allowing immigrants to naturalise.
In her autobiography, she wrote that she “does not belong to the cult of fascism”. However, she expressed sympathy for neo-Fascists who were killed in the political violence that wracked Italy in the 1970s.
As a Eurosceptic, she has echoed anti-EU populism similar to that in Hungary and Poland, but she is pro-Nato and backed the EU’s support for Ukraine after Russia invaded in February. She has allied herself with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has pushed anti-LGBT+, anti-migrant and anti-academic freedom in his country.
She has said Rome must assert its interests more and has policies that look set to challenge the EU on a range of issues from public spending rules to migration. Her coalition also wants to renegotiate Italy’s portion of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund.
So far, her party’s performance in the election has attracted praise from other nationalist parties in Europe, including Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Spain’s far-right party Vox.
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares, however, warned that “populist movements always grow, but it always ends in the same way — in catastrophe”.
The incoming right-wing coalition partners have a joint programme for government, including tax cuts and promises to cut mass migration. Meloni has called for a naval blockade to prevent boats carrying migrants from leaving the shores of north Africa.
Despite her opposition to the EU, Meloni is expected to put up less resistance to it than what she may have under different circumstances given the economic windfall Italy is receiving in Covid-19 recovery funds.
It’s expected that Italy’s current foreign policy, particularly around support for supplying Ukraine with weapons, will remain mostly the same under Meloni, though her coalition partners are known to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which may lay ground for future discord.
Additional reporting by AFP and Press Association
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