Giorgia Meloni rose to power as the leader of the party she founded, but she has been politically active since she was a teen activist in a neo-fascist party’s youth wing in Rome.
She has accepted the role of Italy’s first female prime minister, despite the fact that she has chosen a government in which only one in every four ministers is a woman.
Meloni rose to power partly through luck.
Her Brothers of Italy party was one of the few that refused to join Mario Draghi’s national unity government, leaving her as the sole opposition voice.
Despite leading her party for ten years, her government experience is limited to a stint as Italy’s youngest minister in Berlusconi’s government from 2008 to 2011. Her party received 26% of the vote in the September 2022 elections, despite receiving only 4.3% four years earlier.
“Italians have sent a clear message in support of a right-wing government led by the Brothers of Italy,” she declared following her election victory. She has a strong majority with her partners from the far-right League and the centre-right of ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Her priorities were revealed in a typically raucous speech she gave in Spain last June.
“Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, yes to gender ideology… no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration… no to big international finance… no to Brussels bureaucrats!”
“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother… I am Christian,” she said in another well-quoted 2019 speech.
Eugenia Roccella, Italy’s new family and birth rate minister, has spoken out against abortion and threatened to reverse recently agreed-upon rights for same-sex parents.
Nonetheless, the new prime minister has promised to govern “for everyone,” and she has sought to reassure Italy’s allies in both Nato and the European Union that foreign policy will not change. This is significant because both the League’s leader, Matteo Salvini, and Silvio Berlusconi have been vocal supporters of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Giorgia Meloni is from Garbatella in southern Rome, a working-class but growing neighborhood. It’s difficult to find many Brothers of Italy voters in this traditionally left-wing district.
After her parents divorced, she gravitated to the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, which arose from the ashes of Benito Mussolini’s wartime fascists.
In 1996, she was 19 years old and was filmed as a party activist. “Mussolini was a good politician in my opinion. Everything he did was for the benefit of Italy. And in the last 50 years, we haven’t had any politicians like that “She told French television. The piece even included a clip of her mother, Anna Paratore, saying she did not try to instill her own far-right views on her daughter.
Giorgia Meloni later became the leader of the student branch of the movement’s successor, the National Alliance.
She discovered Tolkien’s fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings, when she was 11 years old and began dressing up as a Hobbit on a regular basis. Her political career would also be influenced by the book. When she was appointed youth minister in 2008, she posed for a magazine photo next to a statue of Gandalf, one of Tolkien’s five wizards. At the end of her election campaign, she even alluded to a Tolkien battle speech.
