The leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, an anti-European and nationalist, is set to become prime minister after Sunday’s election, where her party leads the polls.
An admirer of Benito Mussolini during her youth, Meloni, 45, known for her direct and effective language since her years as a student leader in Rome, could also become the first woman to reach the head of government.
A militant in the post-fascist right since he was 15 years old, he has been a member of the Chamber of Deputies since 2006 and has not mince words to criticize the outgoing government of national unity led by the prestigious economist Mario Draghi.
A dizzying ascent
Its vertiginous rise is due in large part to the fact that it was the only one to oppose the Draghi government for 18 months, which has favored it to collect the discontent of Italians in the face of inflation, the war in Ukraine and the restrictions due to the pandemic. .
A more than amazing phenomenon, since in the 2013 legislative elections it did not get 2% of the votes.
In ten years, he has managed to interpret the frustrated hopes of Italians against the “orders” of the European Union as well as the protests about the high cost of living and the blocked future of young people.
Representative of post-fascism, he is not afraid to defend a hard right; he raises his conservative and catholic, nationalist and centralist ideological baggage, and presents himself with a motto: «God, country and family».
His priorities are to close the borders to protect Italy from “Islamization” and to renegotiate European treaties so that Rome regains control of its own destiny.
Another of his priorities is to fight against “gay pressure groups” and against “demographic winter” in one of the countries with the most elderly in the world.
Matteo Salvini’s far-right League and Silvio Berlusconi’s moderate right-wing Forza Italia have allied themselves with the Brothers of Italy to achieve a historic victory on Sunday, as according to polls they would obtain close to 46% of the vote.
Of fascism and other demons
The leader of the heir party of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist formation founded after World War II by supporters of Mussolini, clarified in August her controversial relationship with fascism.
“The Italian right has relegated fascism to history for decades, unambiguously condemning the deprivation of democracy and the infamous anti-Jewish laws,” Meloni said in a video sent in August in several languages to foreign media accredited in Italy. .
However, the Brothers of Italy emblem bears the green-white-red tricolor flame, a symbol invented in 1946 by the group of fascist veterans who founded the MSI.
Several media have broadcast the video these days when at the age of 19 he declared his admiration for Mussolini: «For me he was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy », he explained then.
“I am Italian, I am Christian”
Born in Rome on January 15, 1977, Giorgia Meloni began a military career from high school in far-right student associations, “my second family,” she confessed, while working as a nanny or waitress.
In 1996, he became leader of the Azione Studentesca union, whose emblem was the Celtic Cross. In 2006 he got the journalist’s card. That same year she was elected deputy and vice president of the House of Representatives.
Two years later, she was appointed Minister of Youth in the government of Silvio Berlusconi.
His youth, his tenacity and his strong personality have conquered the networks. She became famous for her speech in 2019 in which she defined herself like this: «I am Giorgia. I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian. They won’t take it away from me.”
Very jealous of her private life, she is the mother of a daughter born in 2006 and lives without marrying the girl’s father, a television journalist..