Her “Brothers of Italy” party, a scion of fascism, is high in the polls, rising even further in the final polls to widen the gap with the centre-left Democratic party. The lead is predicted to give Meloni and her coalition, made up of Matteo Salvini’s far-right League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, a comfortable victory in the September 25 general election. Born and raised in Garbatella, a working-class area of Rome, Meloni became involved in politics at the age of 15 after enrolling in the Fronte della Gioventù, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party founded by Giorgio Almirante, who he was a minister in the government of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It was 1992, and Meloni’s interest in politics was sparked by the collapse of Italy’s post-war political order, or the so-called First Republic, amid a series of scandals that exposed widespread corruption and mafia influence. She wrote in her biography, Io Sono Giorgia – I am Giorgia – that she was instinctively drawn to the MSI youth movement, where she said she found solidarity in a tight-knit, if marginalized, community of fighters who are often portrayed as evil or violent. they devoted all their time to politics as opposed to frequenting discos or shopping like their peers. On the first day he visited the MSI offices in Garbatella, he wrote that he found himself in a room full of men listening to a speech by Marco Marsilio, the Brothers of Italy, president of Abruzzo, the first Italian region won by the party in 2019. Three decades later, Marsilio still remembers her arrival. “I immediately noticed and appreciated her solid features,” he told the Observer. “She is determined, dedicated and always keeps her word. When he takes on something, he focuses deeply and stays with it until the end.” Meloni honed her craft through student politics, handing out flyers in schools and putting up posters on the streets around Garbatella, while also trying to gauge public sentiment by talking to people in markets, which she said she still does today. In 2004 he was elected president of the youth wing of the National Alliance, the party that emerged from MSI. A mural painted by a street artist shows Giorgia Meloni and other Italian politicians in Rome. Photo: Fabio Frustaci/EPA “Meloni is coherent, real too [success] it’s never gone to her head,” said Giovanni Donzelli, a Brothers of Italy MP who met Meloni as a teenager when she went to Florence to help with MSI’s youth campaign. “The public is told that she laughs a little and always looks angry. But in private, it is pleasant.” Federico Mollicone, who has also known Meloni since her early years in politics, describes her as passionate, not angry. “Think of the coldness and distance of other politicians,” he said. “She’s true to herself – when she’s angry, you can see it, and when she’s joking she’s very funny – she’s got a typical Roman sarcasm.” Meloni’s rise to politics was facilitated by the arrival of Berlusconi, who first came to power in 1994 in coalition with the revived National Alliance and the League of the North [now the League]. The government only survived a year, but the alliance returned for a second term in 2001. In 2006 she became the youngest ever vice-president of the House of Representatives. Berlusconi returned for his third term as prime minister two years later, appointing Meloni as youth minister. The National Alliance disbanded in 2009 and went on to found the Brothers of Italy in 2012. Meloni’s new party scored around 4% in the 2018 general election, but a small breakthrough came a year later when the party performed better than expected in European parliamentary elections. Since then, Meloni has worked to pull the party from the fringes, casting it as a conservative champion of patriotism. That approach helped the group move forward, an image further shaped by Meloni’s election as president of the European Conservatives and Reform Party in 2020. However, her hard-line views on issues such as illegal immigration – she asked the navy to return immigrants Africa – abortion, same-sex marriage and parenting remain. The Brothers of Italy coalition is against granting Italian citizenship at birth to children born in Italy to foreign parents and wants to reduce access to welfare benefits for foreigners. Meloni has said she is pro-European but, like Salvini, shares a vision of Europe more in line with that of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, arguing that EU policies should not override Italy’s. Meloni has also tried to purge her party of its neo-fascist image. In August, he posted a video, in English, French and Spanish, in which he said “fascism has been consigned to history.” However, he has refused calls to remove the MSI tricolor flame from the Brothers of Italy logo and retains the fascist slogan, “God, Family, Fatherland”. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Meloni, a single mother of one, does not describe herself as a feminist, but says she is against “pink quotas” and that roles should be achieved through merit rather than gender. She illustrates this point by arguing that hers is the only party that contains many women in leadership positions. But her opponents argue that she has done little to advance the social and economic advancement of women. “He has done nothing to remove the barriers that women face every day,” said Laura Boldrini, a Democratic politician. Boldrini pointed to the presence of Meloni and Salvini at the controversial World Congress of Families in Verona in 2019. “This conference is a powerful international lobby that wants to change laws on divorce, abortion and civil rules. The fact that Salvini and Meloni were there means they share a vision that sees time turning back on women’s rights.” Another explanation for the rise of the Brothers of Italy is that it was the only party left out of Mario Draghi’s coalition government, which collapsed in July after three key constituents, including the League and Forza Italia, snubbed a confidence vote. “Meloni had a structural advantage,” said Lorenzo De Sio, a politics lecturer at Rome’s Luiss University. “Of course she remained coherent because she was able to calmly work on her political plan without paying the political price of day-to-day governance.” Along the way, Meloni seems to have managed to attract voters with leftist ideals. For example, De Sio conducted a survey of supporters of the Brothers of Italy and found that while many support right-wing policies such as limiting immigration, they want to protect abortion rights and support the legalization of euthanasia. “In that sense, Meloni has an electorate that is not ideologically extremist to the right,” he said. If Meloni becomes prime minister, hers would be the most right-wing government since the end of World War II. “Leadership is natural for Meloni, she built this path,” Marsilio said. “We don’t just come from nothing, we come from a solid school of education and political tradition. The Italians were able to get to know us and appreciate us. We can make a guarantee that others can’t.”
