Meloni has cast her vote in Rome /
The new winner of the elections defends that her party, Fratelli d’Italia, has overcome the nostalgia of fascism
Giorgia Meloni was born by the hair. Her mother, who already had another daughter, had decided to abort her because she had ended her relationship with her father, who would end up abandoning the family. The woman seemed so convinced that she even showed up fasting at the clinic where they were going to interrupt her pregnancy, but at the last moment she changed her mind, crossed the street and opted to go into a bar, where she had a cappuccino and a croissant for breakfast and to celebrate that her second daughter was coming into the world. This anecdote and many others are told by Meloni herself in ‘I am Giorgia’, the book in which the leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy) party presents her most humane side, thus trying to whiten the neo-fascist past of his political formation.
The strategy has been a success, as FdI won the legislative elections this Sunday by a wide margin, according to the first vote projections, and will have an absolute majority in Parliament along with the other forces of the conservative bloc: Matteo Salvini’s League, Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi and the small centre-right group Noi Moderati. Meloni had already shown his teeth in June of last year, when he became the first party in the country in terms of voting intention, surpassing the Salvini League, which has eaten up the ground among right-wing voters. Its success is explained in part because it has been the only opposition voice for the last year and a half to the Mario Draghi government, which was supported by a very broad coalition that included the League and Forza Italia.
But who is Giorgia Meloni? She explained it herself to the Spaniards in October of last year, when she participated in a political act in Madrid of Vox, a party with which she shares a group in the European Parliament. In halting Spanish, she bellowed as she beat her chest: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian! They can’t take it away from me!” Meloni thus translated into Spanish the phrase in Italian that has given her the most success so far in her political career. After pronouncing them at a rally, these words became a musical success in 2019 after two young Milanese DJs put an electronic base on it. Far from being scandalized by it, Meloni knew how to ride the wave of popularity in her favor.
45 years old and raised in the Roman neighborhood of Garbatella, the FdI leader has been in politics since her early youth, when she was part of the student movement of the National Alliance party, heir to the neo-fascist MSI formation. Tired of being reminded of those roots, Meloni time and again defends the refoundation that, according to her, has completed the Italian extreme right. “There is no fascist, racist or anti-Semitic nostalgia in the FdI DNA. There is no room for any of this. In our DNA is the rejection of any past, present and future regime. And there is nothing in my life, nor in the history of the right that I represent, of which I should be ashamed or for which I have to apologize », she declared in an interview with ‘Corriere della Sera’.
Despite these words, there is no shortage of signs that in the ranks of the Italian right there are still those who continue to view fascism with good eyes. Cases of leaders who are publicly discovered making the Nazi salute or praising Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler are very common. Meloni also refuses to remove from his party’s shield the ‘tricolor flame’, symbol of the MSI, the formation from which FdI derives.
The one who is called to become the first woman to lead a government in Italy has preferred to tiptoe over these issues, which generate repulsion in the moderate voter, and has focused her strategy in recent months on criticizing the Draghi government. Politically it was the easiest position, since the other parties in Parliament were part of the very broad coalition led by the former president of the European Central Bank. Meloni was thus left free of all the opposition territory, which he knew how to take advantage of to make his party grow also in the north of the country, a historic bastion of the League, and not only in the center and the south, where it achieved better returns. before.
“In addition to being the only political force that was not in the Government, which allows him to seduce voters from the League or the 5-Star Movement who are dissatisfied with the decisions of the Executive, Meloni is also successful due to his personal abilities. She is a direct woman with a very clear position: criticism of globalization, manifested in issues such as immigration and relocation », says Marco Almagisti, professor of political science at the University of Padua.