With a message that blends Christianity, motherhood and patriotism, Italian lawmaker Giorgia Meloni is riding a wave of popularity that next month could see her become Italy’s first female prime minister and its first far-right leader since World War II.
Even though her Brothers of Italy party has neofascist roots, Meloni has sought to dispel concerns about its legacy, saying voters have grown tired of such discussions.
Still, there are nagging signs that such a legacy cannot be shaken off so easily: Her party’s symbol includes an image of a tricolored flame, borrowed from a neofascist party formed shortly after the end of the war.
Illustration: Mountain people
If Brothers of Italy prevails at the polls on Sept. 25 and the 45-year-old Meloni becomes prime minister, it would come almost 100 years to the month after Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, came to power in October 1922.
In 2019, Meloni proudly introduced Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, a great-grandson of the dictator, as one of her candidates for the European parliament, although he eventually lost.
For most Italian voters, questions about anti-fascism and neofascism are not “a key driver of whom to vote for,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco, head of the YouTrend polling company. “They don’t see that as part of the present. They see that as part of the past.”
Still, Meloni is sensitive to international scrutiny about her possible leadership and prefers the term conservative instead of far right to describe her party.
She recently recorded video messages in English, French and Spanish that said the Italian right “has handed fascism over to history for decades now, unambiguously condemning the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws.”
That was a reference to the 1938 laws banning Italy’s small Jewish community from participating in business, education and other facets of everyday life. The laws paved the way for the deportation of many Italian Jews to Nazi death camps during the German occupation of Rome in the waning years of the war.
Yet by keeping the tricolored flame in her party’s logo, “she is symbolically playing on that heritage,” said David Art, a political science professor at Tufts University who studies Europe’s far right. “But then she wants to say: ‘We’re not racist.’”
Unlike Germany, which worked to come to terms with its devastating Nazi legacy, the fascist period is little scrutinized in Italian schools and universities, said Gastone Malaguti, 96, who he fought as a teenager against Mussolini’s forces.
In his decades of visiting classrooms to talk about Italy’s anti-fascist Resistance, he found many students “ignorant” of that history.
Only five years ago, Brothers of Italy — its name is inspired by the opening words of the Italian national anthem — was viewed as a fringe force, winning 4.4 percent of the vote.
Now, opinion polls indicate it could come in first place next month and capture as much as 24 percent support, just ahead of the center-left Democratic Party led by former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta.
Under Italy’s complex, partially proportional electoral system, campaign coalitions are what propels party leaders into the the office of prime minister, not just votes.
Right-wing politicians have done a far better job this year than Democrats of forging wide-ranging electoral partnerships. Meloni has allied with the right-wing League party led by former Italian minister of the interior Matteo Salvini, who, like her, favors crackdowns on illegal migration. Her other electoral ally is the center-right Forza Italia party of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Last year, her party was the only major one to refuse to join Italy’s national COVID-19 pandemic unity coalition led by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, a former European Central Bank president.
Draghi’s administration collapsed last month, abruptly abandoned by Salvini, Berlusconi and Five Star Movement leader Giuseppe Conte, who are all preoccupied with their parties’ slipping fortunes in opinion polls and local elections.
In opinion surveys, Meloni is “credited with a consistent and coherent approach to politics. She didn’t compromise,” Pregliasco said, adding that she is also perceived as “a leader who has clear ideas — not everyone agrees with those ideas, of course.”
She has apologized for the “tone,” but not the content of a blistering speech she delivered in Spain last month to drum up support for far-right party Vox.
“They will say we are dangerous, extremists, racists, fascists, deniers and homophobes,” Meloni thundered, in an apparent reference to Holocaust deniers.
She ended with a crescendo of shouted slogans: “Yes to natural families. No to LGBT lobbies. Yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology.”
She also slammed “bureaucrats in Brussels” and “climate fundamentalism.”
Meloni, who has a young daughter, said that “the most censured” phrase is “woman and motherhood.”
Abortion has not emerged as a campaign issue in Italy, where it is legal, but Meloni has decried Italy’s shrinking birthrate, which would be even lower without immigrant women having babies.
At a rally of right-wing supporters in Rome in 2019, Meloni drew roars of approval when she yelled in a staccato pace: “I am Giorgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian, and I am Christian. And you cannot take that away from me.”
Within days, her proclamation became fodder for a rap song’s lyrics. While some saw that as a parody, Meloni loved it and even sang a few bars on a state radio program.
According to a memoir she published last year, titled I am Giorgia, much of her identity was forged by growing up in Rome’s working-class Garbatella neighborhood.
At 15, she joined a youth branch of the Italian Social Movement, a neofascist party, and plastered political posters in the capital.
When she was 31, Berlusconi made her the minister of youth in his third and last administration, but she soon blazed her own path, cofounding Brothers of Italy in 2012.
Salvini and Meloni say they are safeguarding what they call Europe’s Christian identity. Salvini kisses dangling rosaries and wears a large cross on his often-bared chest, while Meloni’s tiny cross sometimes peeks out from her loose-fitting blouses.
Her party staunchly backed Draghi’s moves to send weapons to Ukraine, even as Salvini and Berlusconi, open admirers of Russian President Vladimir Putin, issued only tepid support. Meloni also defends NATO, but she often views EU rules as an infringement on Italy’s sovereignty.
If Meloni’s far-right forces dominate Italy’s next administration, there is concern about the support Italy would give to right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland “for their deeply conservative agendas” amid fears about a “democratic backsliding” in the EU, Art said.
For her part, Meloni said she would “fiercely oppose any anti-democratic drift.”
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