At just 15 years old, Giorgia Meloni knocked on the door of the Youth Front, the puppies of Italian post -fascism. That small girl with a severe look was embarking on a career devoted exclusively to politics that has now taken her to the top.
After winning an overwhelming majority in Sunday’s elections, the far-right leader of the Brothers of Italy will preside over a right-wing governing coalition in Italy. It is the first time in Italian history that a woman will be prime minister .
“If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for all Italians, with the aim of uniting the people, exalting what unites them and not what divides them,” Meloni told reporters on Monday. “We will not betray your trust.”
The policy downplays his party’s post-fascist roots and casts it as a conservative group. He has pledged to support Western policy on Ukraine and not take undue risks with the euro zone’s third-largest economy.
This is what we know about the next Italian ruler.
Meloni’s origins
The life of the “queen” of the extreme right began marked by the stamp of abandonment. Her mother, Anna, had to raise her alone, along with her beloved older sister, Arianna, after their father abandoned them and left for the Canary Islands.
Theirs was “a wounded family,” a mother and two girls under the roof of a “good” Rome apartment that one day caught fire from a candle the sisters left burning in their room.
“We met on the street,” he recalls. His mother managed to sell what was left of the house and move to the working-class neighborhood of Garbatella, where he came into contact with politics, to which he would dedicate his life.
political career
Born in Rome on January 15, 1977, Giorgia Meloni began to be a soldier from high school in student associations of the extreme right, “my second family”, she confessed, while working as a nanny or waitress.
The girl, always opposed to celebrating the Day of Liberation from Nazi-fascism because it was “divisive”, inaugurated her militancy in the summer of 1992 while the First Republic collapsed under the weight of corruption and mafia bombs.
In 1996, he became leader of the Azione Studentesca union, whose emblem was the Celtic Cross. In 2006 he obtained 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.
The rise of this woman coincides with her presidency, since 2014, of the Brothers of Italy, the new heirs of the MSI, with whom she has managed to conquer the country.
In 2016 she tried to be mayor of Rome, without success, but she gained great popularity campaigning while pregnant with her only daughter.
Since then his role has only increased (in the 2018 elections he obtained a sad 4%). Its success stems from exploiting discontent over the pandemic and its role as the sole opposition to Mario Draghi’s defunct national unity coalition.
The biggest turning point in her political career was in October 2019, when before thousands of people in the Plaza de San Juan in Rome, a trade union fiefdom, she proclaimed: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, a mother, an Italian and a Christian and I don’t removed”, in a direct attack on homosexual legislation.
Two guys took her speech, mixed it with electronic music and unintentionally elevated her to pop icon. All of Italy danced and spread that catchy song.
His rivals, he maintains, are the “bureaucrats” in Brussels, the LGBT community or the “living room left”, while admiring Vladimir Putin’s Russia for sharing the “system of European values, defending Christianity and combating Islamic fundamentalism” , although it promises “loyalty” to the West.
post-fascism? This is their political ideology
The representative of post-fascism, who is not afraid to defend a hard right, with a conservative and Catholic, nationalist and centralist ideological background, is presented with a motto: “God, country and family.”
His ideology clarified it forever in a Vox electoral act in Marbella, in the south of Spain, when he presented himself to the world: “There are no possible mediations, you say yes or no. Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby; yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology; yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death; yes to the universality of the cross, no to Islamic violence; yes to secure borders, no to massive immigration.
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 priority is to fight against gay pressure groups and against the “demographic winter” in one of the countries with the most elderly in the world.
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.
“Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to drop the symbol because it’s the identity she can’t escape from; it’s her youth,” Gianluca Passarelli, a political science professor at Rome’s Sapienza University, said in an interview.
“Your party is not fascist. Fascism means gaining power and destroying the system. She won’t do that and she couldn’t. But there are wings in the party linked to the neo-fascist movement. She has always played in some way in the middle,” added the academic.
Family
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.
With information from AFP and EFE
