Right-wing Giorgia Meloni has a good chance of becoming Italy’s first female prime minister: what her victory would mean for Europe.
Giorgia Meloni seems exchanged, the right-wing populist in her seems to have disappeared. Moderate, diplomatic, pro-Western, completely in line with the mainstream EU line, she now expresses herself in public, her typically Roman malice has disappeared. Not only is exit from the common currency no longer an issue for the former euro opponent. Now she almost sounds like the reviled Eurocrats. “I wouldn’t be in favor of expanding our budget deficit because we have so much debt,” says the 45-year-old.
And further: Italy must remain on a western course in the Ukraine war. The Roman even published a video in three languages (English, French, Spanish) on the most sensitive aspect of her image. In it, she emphasizes how “the Italian right handed fascism over to history for decades” and “unequivocally condemned the suppression of democracy and the shameful anti-Jewish laws”. She does not explain why Benito Mussolini, in the form of a tricolore flame rising from a small rectangle (his coffin), continues to adorn the logo of their “post-fascist” Fratelli d’Italia.