While Mario Draghi returned to the Chigi Palace after being betrayed in the Senate, in a box in Piazza Vittorio, on the Roman Esquiline, Giorgia Meloni exulted. Draghi's most difficult night was the sweetest for the far-right leader of Italy's Brothers, who has long toyed with the idea of an electoral breakthrough.
"I remember when everyone looked me up and down because I didn't understand anything about politics..." he said. And he warned: “I have my ideas about how this nation should be governed. The vote is in two months, the right is ready”.
Meloni, 45, leads the polls with 22.4% of the intention to vote. If nothing changes between now and September 25, the forecasts say that the coalition formed by Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini's League and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia will be able to govern with ease. Its internal regulations indicate –unless they change them– that whoever is first among them chooses the prime minister. Meloni could be the first woman to access the head of the Italian executive.
Silvio Berlusconi's Youth Minister at only 29 years old, Meloni is not a stranger. Her formation Brothers of Italy is the political heir to the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by Mussolini's allies in 1945. It is no secret that among her followers there are several who are nostalgic for the fascist stage. The dictator's granddaughter, Rachele Mussolini, is a councilor in Rome for this party.
In the 2018 elections, Meloni barely achieved 4% of the votes and his formation was seen as the little brother of the League and Forza Italia. But his consistency during these five years in which he has not wanted to leave the opposition has borne fruit. He shares with the League its radical vision against immigration and in defense of the Christian values of Europe, but his ultra-conservative proposal is more similar to that of Law and Justice in Poland than to that of Marine Le Pen in France. Meloni shouts “God, country and family”. With his refusal to be part of Mario Draghi's unity government – he was the only one to tell him that he was not – he has scratched Salvini's disenchanted voters, forced to lurch between populism and loyalty to the executive.
But Meloni, a political animal, understood very well that it was time to make a "patriotic opposition" to Mario Draghi and has supported him at key moments, such as in the response to the war in Ukraine. Unlike Salvini, who was photographed wearing Vladimir Putin T-shirts, Meloni is the favorite of US ultra-conservatives, who invite her to CPAC, the annual event of world conservatives.
“He has invested heavily in these relationships and even the State Department has concluded that it is acceptable. My impression is that it will have bigger problems with France and Germany”, says Giovanni Orsina, professor of Political Science at the Luiss Guido Carli University. In Madrid, his ally is Vox, whom he invites to his ultra covens in Rome. He has also managed to get Donald Trump's former adviser Steve Bannon or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to participate. Since 2020 she is president of the Party of European Conservatives and Reformists. Meloni participated in a Vox campaign rally in Andalusia.
Born in 1977 in Garbatella, a popular neighborhood in Rome, Meloni grew up surrounded by women after her father abandoned them to go live in the Canary Islands. She had to lend a helping hand at the Porta Portese market or work as a waitress to help out at home. She had not turned 18 when she joined the neo-fascist youth of the MSI. From there she went to the National Alliance. She has never militated in more moderate spaces.
Her concept of defending women has a lot to do with the nationalism of Marine Le Pen –against immigration because it supposedly attacks women– and she does not hesitate to claim her motherhood as a political tool. When she wanted to be mayor of Rome in 2016 and was pregnant, Berlusconi told her that a mother "cannot have such an important role." She then got 21% of the vote, almost twice as much as her mentor's candidate. She now she strives to soften the image of her. She has published a successful autobiography, Io sono Giorgia. It takes the title from a part of a 2019 speech that some DJs inadvertently turned into a hit on the networks. "They scored an own goal," she said, "they gave me a popularity that I would never have expected among the youngest."
