Thursday, March 28

Who is Giorgia Meloni, the woman who has led the extreme right to victory in Italy


Who is Giorgia Meloni? Who is the woman who is preparing to lead the future Government of Italy? The question has been echoing in Italy and abroad for weeks, since, after the fall of Draghi’s government, her party, Brothers of Italy, established itself as the winner of the elections. Who is Giorgia Meloni? The woman with the incendiary speech at the Vox rally in Marbella or the leader of a European and Atlanticist right-wing who has appeared for interviews on television? Is she the secretary of a party that considers those nostalgic for fascism the “useful idiots of the left”, as she once said, or the one who screams her head off at a rally who dreams “of a nation in which the people who they have had to lower their heads for many years, pretending that they thought otherwise so that they would not be fired, they could say what they think and not lose their job because of this”? Is she the “most dangerous woman in Europe”, as the last cover of the German weekly said Sternor the policy that promises to maintain European unity on sanctions against Putin, support for Ukraine and the link with NATO?

Giorgia Meloni’s extreme right wins the elections in Italy

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The short and at the same time very long electoral campaign has been for Meloni a game of balance so as not to disappoint the militancy, but also to avoid stumbling blocks when the wind blew in his favor. It has been weeks to sell an image of moderation that would convince inside and, above all, outside of Italy. A task that Meloni actually began a long time ago, long before the fall of the Draghi government and the early elections that led to victory. A little over a year ago, this now 45-year-old woman published her own biography to tell “in the first person who I am, what I believe in and how I got here.” A biography and a political manifesto containing, almost word for word, the phrases repeated in dozens of meetings and interviews. The book is titled I am Giorgiathat “I am Giorgia” with which the phrase “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian” began, that Meloni shouted at a rally in 2019 and to which two disjoqueis put music with the attempt to mock her, instead making it a hit danced to in discos all over Italy.

The boomerang effect announced the birth of Giorgia, the influencer, the leader who speaks of herself in the book, addressing readers with questions and direct comments planted throughout the text, as if it were a dialogue or monologue of an actor speaking to his audience in the theater. They are not minor details, because in the way this biography is constructed there are many keys to the success of the ‘Meloni phenomenon’, even though it is a phenomenon cultivated in 30 years of political activity. “They say we are scary. Who are we afraid of? Do I scare you? ”, She said last Thursday at the closing of the electoral campaign in Rome, the first where she was the leader and the gregarious of the coalition, the role that she had played until now, were others.

Three decades of militancy

A long journey that began in 1992, when a fifteen-year-old Meloni knocked on the door of the youth section of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the party founded after World War II by those who had been Mussolini’s henchmen until the end. That place, at number 8 via Guendalina Borghese, is now a headquarters of Brothers of Italy, in Garbatella —in Rome, where he was born in 1977— the left-wing neighborhood where Giorgia Meloni grew up. “There I found my second family. Certainly more numerous than the original one, ”she says in the book, which starts with the memory of the flames that engulfed her house that she and her sister accidentally set on fire while they were playing.

Chapter after chapter, the most intimate details of his life are intertwined with the defense of his party’s ideology. And so, the abandonment suffered by her father who, when she was still a girl, got on a ship bound for the Canary Islands and never came back, becomes one of the reasons that pushes her to reject adoption for homosexual couples. or single people. Or the story of her mother’s decision not to have an abortion, as she had considered when she became pregnant with her, opens her explanation of her vision of the current abortion law in Italy. Meloni has repeated on more than one occasion that she does not want to modify that rule but to apply the part that speaks of “prevention.” But it ignores the reality of a country where the right to have an abortion is compromised because two out of three gynecologists declare themselves conscientious objectors and in regions such as the Marches, governed precisely by the Brothers of Italy, the deadline for supplying the abortion pill RU-486.

To the summers spent in the Canary Islands, forced together with her sister to share a few weeks with her father, she attributes her familiarity with Spanish, the language in which she expressed herself during the speech at the Vox rally in Marbella last June to which everyone have referred in these months to dismantle their image of moderation. In Spanish, English and French, she spoke in a video at the beginning of the campaign to say that fascism was a thing of the past and that she was “ready” to govern, “whether the left likes it or not.” “Soon”, ready, has been the motto of the campaign. She has been preparing her whole life and does not deny it. She says that she smiles when she hears people say “Meloni is one who studies”. Who remembers her in her youthful years, when she led the protests against the educational reform promoted by the Christian Democratic government of the time, disputing the monopoly of the response to the left, speaks of her as a determined and smart girl.

“God, country and family”

When Meloni entered the party, the youth section of the MSI was called the Youth Front, then renamed Youth Action, when Gianfranco Fini in the mid-1990s transformed the party into the National Alliance, calling fascism “absolute evil” and entering thus in the first government of Silvio Berlusconi. The legacy of the past, however, still remained. In August a French site retrieved and published the video of a Meloni, then 19 years old, who said that Mussolini had been “a good politician”, and that there had been no others like him in the last 50 years. The symbol of the Youth Front was a hand holding a torch with the tricolor of the Italian flag and, with minor modifications, it is practically the same as that of the youth section of the Brothers of Italy, in whose logo the same green flame continues to appear, white and red that was in the MSI symbol. Just as “God, country and family” continues to be a slogan that the leader of the Brothers of Italy defends and vindicates.

“Those who are nostalgic for fascism are the useful idiots of the left,” Meloni reiterates, however. She did it in an interview Corriere della Sera a year ago when a journalistic investigation brought to light the relations of a prominent member of the party with radical neo-fascist groups. And he has repeated it again, in other words, in an electoral campaign where a candidate from his party has been expelled in Sicily for celebrating Hitler on social networks and another prominent member of the party, brother of the leader Ignacio La Russa, did the Roman salute at the funeral of a militant and was justified by saying that it was the will of the deceased.

Youth Minister

Meloni became the leader of the youth section of the National Alliance in 2004. Two years later, when she was 29, she was already vice president of the Chamber. In 2008, when AN had already merged with Forza Italia and Berlusconi won the elections with the People of Liberty, she entered as Minister of Youth in a Government in need of new faces. She was not a very important portfolio, but she gave her visibility. And she kept studying. Those were the years of the Great Recession, of the runaway risk premium and of a government experience that ended with Berlusconi out and a technical Executive led by former European Commissioner Mario Monti. It is there that Meloni decided that a new path had to be taken or, depending on how you look at it, the old one had to be taken up again.

Together with other companions, he founded a new formation whose name is the first three words of the national anthem: Brothers of Italy. In the last general election, in 2018, he narrowly exceeded 4 percent. Then came the Europeans of 2019, with 6.4 percent. A year later he was already presiding over the group of European Conservatives and Reformists, to which Vox, the Polish Law and Justice, the British conservatives or the Swedish extremist Swedish Democrats also belong. These are its international allies, among which Vox has a special place, the “twin brother party” of Fdi, which defines Meloni, who in an interview with EFE said that he wants his victory in Italy to open the way for his allies in Spain. To this network of international relations must be added the Hungarian Victor Orban, who in 2019 was the special guest of Atreju, the party’s political demonstration that is held every year and through which politicians of all stripes have passed. “In so many years it was the most exciting moment,” Meloni said.



Atreju is the character of The endless story -Michael Ende’s book, which inspired the film with the same title- that fought against the Nothing that prospered because “people had given up hope and forgot their own dreams”. It is one of the many references to the world fantasy. Meloni often mentions Tolkien as well as writers such as Gilbert Keith Chesterton with his famous phrase “the day will come when we will have to draw our swords to prove that in summer the grass is green”. But he also cites songs by artists identified with the Italian left such as Francesco Guccini or Francesco de Gregori. There are those who have criticized her for having planted her dating biography that seem to have been taken for the benefit of Instagram, and that would look good on anyone’s social networks. But, between a quote from Victor Hugo and one from Pasolini, in the pages where immigration and the naval blockade in the Mediterranean are discussed, the criticism of globalization and multiculturalism slides towards the theories of ethnic substitution so popular on the extreme right on this and the other side of the Atlantic.

“Useful Enemies”

Meloni talks about her adolescence as an obese girl, that she suffered harassment because of it and that she took advantage of it. “I went on a diet and lost 20 pounds in three months,” she writes. “I learned that enemies are useful.” Surrounded in the party by a group of faithful who went through the history of the post-fascist right with her —like her right-hand man Francesco Lollobrigida who is also her sister’s husband— she has been building the success of the party of which she is “the” president. . Thus, declined to masculine, it is as it appears in the notes of the formation: the president and not the president. Meloni has always said that she “isn’t a feminist” and that she doesn’t like women. pink installments because “women are not a panda in danger of extinction”

Now, she is preparing to be the first woman to sit in Palazzo Chigi, where she has remained in opposition for the last four years, in which she has seen how the Salvini phenomenon deflated and how her party grew. Many have voted her to “try something else, after having seen everything.” The election campaign is over, the polls have brought her and her party the victory they expected and “the day after” will be the time to see who Giorgia Meloni really is. “If she managed to iron out these flaws —she writes in her biography, also referring to the tone of her interventions at rallies— surely my image would benefit. But would it really be me? Deep down, I believe that a public figure cannot lie. In the long term you cannot hide who you are, for better or for worse. And it’s not fair to do it. People have to believe in you for who you really are, not who you pretend to be. And in any case, the bluff, sooner or later, always ends up being discovered. I have seen many “constructed” politicians, who have a face and a soul in public and then deform as soon as the lights go out. They have never lasted.”



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