She got involved in politics from the age of 15
Born in Rome to a communist chartered accountant father and a right-wing housewife, Giorgia Meloni got involved in politics at the age of 15. In the early 1990s, she joined the youth organization of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded after the war in line with Mussolini’s ideology. The party will become a few years later the National Alliance, and Meloni will be entrusted with the head of the student organization.
She then held her first political office as a councillor for the province of Rome and president of Youth Action, the party’s youth movement. At 29, she became a deputy, the youngest of her legislature, before becoming the youngest minister in the history of the Italian Republic, joining the government of Silvio Berlusconi as Minister for Youth.
In 2012, she took advantage of the split in Berlusconi’s party, Le Peuple de la Liberté, to found with former members of the National Alliance her Brother of Italy party, named after the Italian anthem. If the party defends itself from its links with Mussolinian ideas, it nevertheless retains the Italian tricolour flame used after the war by veterans of the Italian Social Republic.
2. She plays with her female figure
Unlike Salvini, another figure of the Italian far right, Giorgia Meloni is developing a strategy of demonizing her party. During her speeches, she regularly highlights her status as a woman. She insists on “feminine qualities such as ‘seriousness, responsibility and pragmatism’”, and underlines the Repubblica in an editorial.
The daily questions the candidate’s truly feminist commitment to social issues such as the right to abortion or gender equality in the professional world. “In general, she conceives a role for women very close to that promoted and practised in the 1920s, centred on the family and procreation”, judges the newspaper.
3. She has built an image of the only opposition personality
The Brothers of Italy refuse to participate in Mario Draghi’s national unity government, alongside the Democratic Party in particular, unlike the other right-wing and centre-right parties (Forza Italia, Lega or the 5-Star Movement). A position that has allowed Giorgia Meloni to assert itself as the only opposition figure in the country.
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Nearly 40 days before the elections, the Brothers of Italy party is considered the leading party in the country, winning 24% of the vote, ahead of the Democratic Party, given 21%, according to a poll by the Demopolis Institute.
4. Her motto is “God, country and family”
Of Christian faith and very conservative on social issues, Giorgia Meloni declares that she wants to defend “God, the fatherland and the family”. In her meetings, she defends the traditional family model, and strongly criticizes marriage and the right to the adoption of homosexual couples. In 2019, during a speech in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, she compared same-sex couples wishing to adopt to “ogres who steal children to eat them”.
Giorgia Meloni also defends an anti-immigration policy, notably by stopping the arrival of migrants from Libya via the island of Lampedusa. It promises to defend and promote “the classical and Judeo-Christian historical and cultural roots of Europe and its identity”.
5. She no longer defends Italy’s exit from the European Union
Although she has long defended Italy’s exit from the European Union and the eurozone, Giorgia Meloni has reconsidered her position. But she does not want to “kneel down” for all that: “I represent the third Blairian way of the right. I am in Europe with parties that share a confederal model, with nations that collaborate but remain sovereign at home, ”she said in 2020.
In a video broadcast in early August on social networks, she reacted to articles in the foreign press which define her “as a danger to democracy, to Italian, European and international stability” and defends herself in particular from wanting to leave the euro.
A long admirer of Vladimir Putin, Giorgia Meloni changed her position after the start of the war in Ukraine, describing the invasion of Moscow as an “unacceptable large-scale act of war by Putin’s Russia against Ukraine” and spoke out in favour of sending weapons to the Ukrainian army.
Certa stampa estera ispirata dalla sinistra descrive FDI come un pericolo per la democrazia e la stabilità italiana, europea e internazionale. Ho deciso di rispondere con un video in francese, inglese e spagnolo (sul tedesco non mi avventuro 😂) su chi siamo e cosa vogliamo fare. pic.twitter.com/4U6u3PJ8rv
— Giorgia Meloni 🇮🇹 ن (@GiorgiaMeloni) August 11, 2022
