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As a teenager, Giorgia Meloni used to sneak out late at night to help her put up far-right posters in Roman neighborhoods and play cat-and-mouse with her easily violent left-wing enemies.
Fast-forward 30 years, and Meloni no longer needs to be out in secret to get her message across. Instead, her image is on billboards across the country ahead of the Sept. 25 election that could make her Italy’s first female prime minister.
“It has been an incredible journey, but if I win the election, then that is not the end, it is really only the beginning,” Meloni told Reuters last week from her parliamentary office that overlooks Rome’s historic city centre.
Meloni’s meteoric rise in wealth is intricately linked to the transformation of her own party, the Italian Brotherhood, which has stepped out of the shadows and into the mainstream, but has never completely denied its post-fascist roots.
Pollsters predict the bloc will become Italy’s largest party, with a whopping 25 percent of the vote in the 2018 general election, compared with just 4.3 percent in the 2018 election, and outpacing once-dominant ally Malaysia Theo Salvini’s Union and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
Friends and critics alike said the surge in approval ratings was largely due to the determination of Meloni, 45, who won her first local election at 21 and became Italy’s youngest-ever Minister when she was awarded Berlusconi’s 2008 government youth portfolio at the age of 31.
Her rise is especially notable given her humble background in a country where family ties often trump merit.
She was raised by a single mother in a working-class area of the Italian capital after her father abandoned them after her birth, and never tried to lose her heavy Roman accent.
In her 2021 autobiography, “I Am Georgia,” Meloni said she joined the local youth group of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), run by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, at the age of 15. Founded in 1946 by supporters of Benito Mussolini).
Industrious and combative, she quickly caught the attention of party activist Fabio Lampelli, who organized courses to develop what he hoped would be a new generation of conservative politicians.
“My idea is to imagine a right-wing government that has nothing to do with (fascism) in the 1930s,” said Lampelli, vice-president of the Italian Brotherhood’s parliament.
“Meloni is blond, petite, easy-going and witty. She is also specific and has no ideology. We need all the characteristics needed to take Italian power to the next level,” he said.
flame and angel
MSI merged into a new body called the National Alliance (AN) in the mid-1990s and then merged with the mainstream conservative group created by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
In her biggest political gamble yet, Meloni and a team of AN veterans left Berlusconi in 2012 to co-found the Italian fraternity named after the lyric that opens with the national anthem.
The party retains the old flame symbol of the original MSI group, and the Italian media occasionally publishes photos showing fascist memorabilia in the offices of politicians in some fraternal regions of Italy.
No such relics adorn Meloni’s office. In its place are numerous statues of angels, a picture of her 5-year-old daughter, a chess game, a picture of Pope John Paul with Mother Teresa, and a jar of colored pencils she uses to make detailed notes.
She herself denies any suggestion that her party misses the fascist era. She distanced herself from a video that emerged this month showing her speaking in French as a teenager and praising Mussolini, an ally of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in World War II, as a “good statesman.”
“Obviously I have a different opinion now,” she said, without elaborating.
Melloni likened her party to the US Republican Party and the UK Conservative Party. Patriotism and traditional family values are celebrated, while political correctness and the global elite are condemned.
“Yes to natural families, yes to LGBT lobbying, yes to gender identity, yes to gender ideology, yes to living culture, no to the abyss of death,” she told Spanish right-wing supporters in June. Speaking of party Vox in a speech.
“Violence against Islam, against safer borders, against mass immigration, against working for our people, against major international finance,” she continued in Spanish, her voice growing louder.
“underestimate”
The secret to her success, pollsters say, is her apparent refusal to compromise and the firmness of her message.
Although her allies Salvini and Berlusconi joined forces with the center-left to form a unity government under Mario Draghi last year, Meloni refused, saying the appointment of an unelected former central banker was undemocratic.
The decision leaves the Italian brothers the only major opposition party, having to defend an unpopular decision amid the COVID emergency.
Meloni has been cautious ahead of the election, urging her allies not to make promises they can’t keep and promising to be a safe hand in managing Italy’s fragile public accounts.
She assured the Italian establishment, preached a strong pro-Western message, vowed to increase defense spending and pledged to stand up to Russia and China.
“When history calls, the usual ‘spaghetti and mandolin’ Italy doesn’t come along,” Meloni said.
All this tough talk inevitably draws comparisons between Meloni and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the Italian media.
The Italian leader elaborated on this, saying that one of her main inspirations was the British philosopher Roger Scruton, who gave British Thatcherism the intellectual dynamism.
Like Margaret Thatcher, Melloni will become the country’s first female prime minister if she wins next month. But that wasn’t her concern.
She opposes diversity quotas to boost women’s presence in parliament or on boards, saying women must rise to the top through merit. However, in masculine Italy, she says, being a woman has its advantages.
“You’re often underestimated when you’re a woman, but this can help you,” she said.
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