“It is the government of Giorgia” Italian newspaper title The print this Saturday, October 22. The new President of the Council was sworn in this morning at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, facing the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. She was followed by her two deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, and Antonio Tajani, of Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia.
On the left of the front page, the editorial is titled: “The little homeland of Meloni and his Brothers”. At 45, the one who has “founded his little party” in 2011, recalls the editorialist Massimo Giannini, “wrote a page of history. For at least two reasons: she is the first woman Prime Minister of Italy and she leads the first post-MSI right-wing government in the post-war period”. The MSI (Italian Social Movement) was a party of neo-fascist inspiration founded in 1946. Thus, “in one fell swoop, she shatters the glass ceiling of women’s subordinate position and the irreducible taboo of the ‘fascist matrix’”.
Pour La Stampa, “the Sister of Italy has provided notable proof of her leadership by showing herself capable of assembling her team in just twenty-six days, a concentrate of ‘pure melonism’, temporarily subduing Matteo Salvini and temporarily reducing to silence Silvio Berlusconi”. However, in the eyes of the centrist newspaper, his government “does not seem up to the challenges facing Italy”.
Lack of strong names, experience, assignment of positions to relatives: the editorial criticizes the choice of people but also the general orientation of a government “ideological” whose titles would translate a narrow idea of Italy: “We add to the Ministry of Economic Development the mention ‘et du made in Italy’ ; to that of Education ‘and merit’; to that of Agriculture ‘and Food Sovereignty’; to that of sports ‘and young people’; to that of the family ‘and the birth rate’.”
“With this government, democracy will not be abolished, we do not risk dictatorship or a new march on Rome”, tempers the editorialist. Concluding however: “Pour [Meloni] the crossing of the desert is over. For Italy, it starts now.”