The party leader is currently ahead in the polls with her “Fratelli d’Italia”.
(Photo: dpa)
Rome Giorgia Meloni is currently sharing a video on all of her channels: “Don’t underestimate us,” says the Italian politician. “We are blood, flesh, passion.” The past that needs it for the future. “When we are gone, our children will be there. And when our children are gone, our grandchildren will be there.” This story – it never ends.
Only five years ago, the “Fratelli d’Italia” under its chairman Meloni was still a political no-man’s-land, a little later it got just four percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections. Today they are leading the polls – and Meloni could become the first woman prime minister in Italian history after Mario Draghi resigns.
Who is the 45-year-old who may soon be ruling politics in Europe’s third largest economy? And how radical is the post-fascist party that Meloni helped build?
Draghi has not used any social networks and has hardly given any interviews in the past year and a half. With Meloni, a completely different style would move into the Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister’s official residence, after the early elections at the end of September. She keeps her 1.2 million followers on Twitter up to date on a daily basis. “This nation urgently needs to regain its conscience, pride and freedom,” Meloni posted on the day of Draghi’s resignation.
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Your articles are packaged as for a tabloid: bold headlines, shrill sound. On Instagram (almost a million followers), she sometimes shows herself donating blood or holding a rabbit. Two years ago she was photographed for a magazine in a green, white and red bathing suit – the national colors.
Against immigration, homosexuality and Europe
Her political program is primarily one of exclusion: She agitates against Islam, which she doesn’t see as part of Europe. She fights for the classic family image – and is against abortion, homosexuals and the gender movement. She is also critical of immigration, especially from Africa. She is against the further deepening of the EU – and prefers to propagate the “Europe of patriots”.
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Racism, conservatism and national pride. It is these three pillars on which Meloni has built her party. And from which she does not move away – her followers love her above all for this straightforwardness.
Meloni grew up in Rome in modest circumstances, her mother was a single parent. At the age of 15 she joined the “Youth Front”, the youth organization of the Italian Social Movement – a neo-fascist party. She later became involved in the successor party “National Alliance”, for which she sat on the provincial council of Rome from 1998. Even today, the symbol of the neo-fascists, a flame in the national colors, also adorns the logo of Meloni’s party.
She hasn’t worked much outside of politics: she completed language training at the age of 19 and calls herself a journalist on her website. She also worked as a babysitter, waitress or barmaid, as she once said in an interview.
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In 2006 she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in Parliament for the first time. Under Silvio Berlusconi, she became sports and youth minister in 2008 – at the time the youngest woman with a cabinet post. She stayed for three years, but increasingly struggled with Berlusconi’s leadership style. At the end of 2012 she founded the “Fratelli d’Italia” together with other comrades-in-arms. She has been party leader since 2014.
During the period of Draghi’s broad ‘coalition of national unity’, Meloni was the leader of the opposition, her party the only major opposition force. Meloni easily rallied behind him all those on the right who were dissatisfied with the government – with Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia being part of the coalition to the end. Until a few years ago, Lega boss Matteo Salvini was still the leader of the right-wing camp. That has now turned in favor of Melonis.
Mussolini’s grandchildren ran for the party
Her handling of fascism is ambivalent: she herself would never go on stage with a Hitler salute. She accepts that the stretched right arm can sometimes be seen in the audience during her performances. They don’t make up the core of the party, but there are the fascism nostalgics who glorify the time under Benito Mussolini. Again and again, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the “Duce”, who led Italy from 1922 to 1943 and made an alliance with Adolf Hitler, ran for the “Fratelli d’Italia”.
She has a “carefree relationship with fascism,” Meloni once explained. She prefers to portray herself as a democrat and emancipated woman who has made her way through male-dominated politics. She recently declared that there was no place in her party for “racists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis”.
Whether after Draghi, the reformer, pragmatist and pro-European, a nationalist and euro-critic will actually come to power is far from decided. The election campaign in Italy has only just begun. In the most recent poll, Meloni’s party has 22 percent of the vote. The social-democratic PD, which Draghi supported to the last, comes a hair’s breadth behind.
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