A Rising Political Star Aims to Lure Italy Further to the Right

(Bloomberg) -- Giorgia Meloni went from bartending at a Roman nightclub to leading one of Italy’s main political forces that’s leapfrogged the party of her former boss Silvio Berlusconi in popularity and is even giving ally Matteo Salvini a run for his money.

Just how she’s got so far was clear one afternoon last year at a rally in central Rome dubbed “Italy pride.”

Thousands of people packed into San Giovanni Square on Oct. 19, waving national flags and holding aloft green, white and red balloons as the three leaders who form the center-right bloc laid out their vision for Italy. The 83-year-old Berlusconi got a luke-warm reception, Salvini gave the typically combative performance his fans had come for, but it was Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, who enthralled the crowd.

“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian, and you can’t take that away from me!” she roared in a speech that opponents say is eerily reminiscent of the fascist message her party traces its roots to. A pair of Italian DJs made an ironic remix of her words—instead of hurting her, it went viral with almost nine million views on YouTube, and became the anthem of her followers.

As the Italian right comes to the fore, the League’s Salvini has grabbed most of the attention so far, but Meloni, 43, is starting to make waves. Friends and foes alike point to her charisma and say she’s steely and methodical, whereas Salvini is prone to flashes of temper and miscalculation. With half a dozen regional elections set for the spring, the next few months will tell whether she can expand her party’s support.

She calls for increased public investment and infrastructure projects, opposes granting citizenship to children born in Italy to immigrants and wants army patrols to be deployed to fight crime. She’s against gay marriage and is a fierce defender of Italy’s Christian heritage against “Islamization.”

Her office, on the top of parliament with a terrace overlooking central Rome, features a collection of plaster figurines she calls her “guardian angels.”

Like other right-wing woman politicians, Meloni doesn’t define herself as a feminist and rejects gender quotas as an instrument of the left. Meloni, who worked as a babysitter and bartender to pay for her studies, is fiercely pro-family. She’s pushed to get support for working mothers and to encourage them to have more children in a country that’s facing its worst democratic crisis since World War I.

Read More: Italy Is Facing Its Worst Demographic Crisis Since World War I

Her ascendancy is reshaping the center-right bloc. With the sidelining of Berlusconi, its most pro-European personality despite his often-poor relations with fellow-leaders when he was premier, the alliance is becoming more eurosceptic, more critical of the euro under the influence of Salvini and Meloni.

Abroad, her profile is also rising. She traveled to Washington earlier this month to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast and will go again for the yearly Conservative Political Action Conference. She’s a fan of President Donald Trump and European right-wing leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, while she frequently lashes out against France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel.

Born to a Sicilian mother and a father from Sardinia who left the family when she was young, Meloni grew up in Garbatella, a working-class neighborhood in southern Rome founded by former dictator Benito Mussolini. The fascist heritage endured, and it was to the right that Meloni turned when her interest in politics was awakened by a surge in mafia violence.

“She was a real activist, tough, combative, the one who had a megaphone to lead demonstrators,” said Carlo Fidanza, a European lawmaker for Brothers of Italy who’s known her since the 1990s when she was in the youth wing of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement, or MSI. 

Meloni won her first local election at age 21 and later entered parliament as a lawmaker for a descendant of the MSI, the increasingly mainstream National Alliance. It merged with Berlusconi’s conservatives, and she became the youngest person to hold a cabinet position, serving as youth minister from 2008 to 2011.

A year later, she broke with four-time premier Berlusconi to co-found Fratelli d’Italia, as the party is known in Italian, taking its name from the first words of the national anthem and the tricolor flame logo of its far-right predecessors.

There are echoes of Mussolini’s two-decade rule in what Meloni does. She chose Latina, a town south of Rome that he built, to launch her campaign for the 2018 general election. With his granddaughter Rachele by her side, she promised to take back “this symbolic place in the history of the Italian right.” Her talking points hark back to a far-right past—the nation, patriotism and the family.

Asked about the fascist dictator in a Feb. 3 interview, Meloni chooses her words carefully. “I see him as very distant from my own story; he’s a historical phenomenon and he has to be judged as such, in his context.”

Italy’s relationship with its fascist past is complicated. Mussolini retained a following in post-war politics among nationalists who were proud of his attempt to reestablish the country as a great power. Though banned and ostracized, fascism never became a political taboo like Nazism in Germany.

At the same time, the Republican constitution drafted by members of the resistance after World War II reflects mostly anti-fascist values. They form the core ideology of today’s Democratic Party, which sees the rise of politicians like Salvini and Meloni as a threat.

These voters she may never reach, but it’s the ones in between—disillusioned with traditional political parties and anti-establishment forces—that she aims to win over. And therein lies her problem.

“Meloni’s electoral base is a specific section of the right, for physiological reasons it could grow to 15% at the most, depending on the misfortunes of Berlusconi,” said Franco Pavoncello, a political science professor and president of John Cabot University in Rome. “Meloni could be stuck playing the junior partner to Salvini, because the League dominates the center-right.”

On social media, Meloni shares only glimpses of her private life with her 1.4 million followers, posting, for example, a photo of pink booties to announce the birth of daughter Ginevra with partner Andrea Giambruno three years ago. You don’t see her goofing off, kissing cured pork or buying underwear, like Salvini.

Meloni’s rhetoric can be tougher and even more controversial than that of firebrand Salvini. After a ship carrying migrants docked in Sicily in June—in defiance of Salvini who was interior minister at the time—she called for it to be seized and sunk, and the crew arrested. In an increasingly polarized society, such observations will find many Italians nodding in agreement, and just as many appalled. As Salvini discovered, being divisive and provocative gets you attention, but can stifle your cross-over appeal if people either love or hate you.

In the 2018 general elections, Brothers of Italy won just 4.4%, and her support in last year’s European Parliament elections mostly came from the economically depressed regions of Calabria and Puglia and around Rome. Now her party is polling 11%, has overtaken Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and is closing the gap with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. Meloni is personally more popular than Salvini and second only to Premier Giuseppe Conte, according to an Ixe survey on Tuesday.

That’s partly down to miscalculations Salvini made in trying to become premier, says Lorenzo Pregliasco, director of YouTrend polling and analysis firm. He failed to force general elections when he ditched Conte’s first coalition with Five Star over the summer and didn’t manage to win the leftist bastion of Emilia-Romagna in regional elections in January, despite high exposure on the campaign trail.

Some voters on the right in southern and central regions just prefer Brothers of Italy because they remember the League’s initial campaign for northern secession, which Salvini has since dropped, Pregliasco added.

Meloni’s strength is the consistency of her message, said a senior Democratic Party lawmaker, and she’s stayed away from Conte and Five Star so she’s seen as “pure,” by many.

But, the League is still Italy’s most popular party, and she gives any rivalry with Salvini short shrift.

“I don’t think it would be intelligent to target our allies as adversaries,” she says. The League, together with her party, would win a majority in the lower house—without Berlusconi—in a future parliament with fewer seats and if a proportional electoral system now under discussion is adopted, according to a recent projection by Corriere della Sera.

Italy has never had a woman prime minister. Meloni wants to be the first.

“It’s as if this society has taught us that we women can’t be good enough,” she says, “but if in daily life society entrusts to women what is most precious—your family, your children—why shouldn’t that be the case in politics?”

--With assistance from Alessandro Speciale.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Caroline Alexander at calexander1@bloomberg.net, Karl MaierBen Sills

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