Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, president of the Fratelli d’Italia (FDI) party, embodies a movement with post-fascist DNA that she managed to “demonize” to come to power. Under the leadership of this 45-year-old Roman, the IDF became the first party in the country to obtain more than 26% of the votes in the legislative elections on September 25, 2022. His coalition with the far-right League of Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia (FI) party won around 44%, giving him a majority in both chambers. In the 2018 legislative elections, the FDI had to be content with a meager 4% of the vote, but since then Giorgia Meloni has managed to unite under her name the discontent and frustrations of many Italians exasperated by the “dictate” of Brussels, the high cost of living and the blocked future of young people. Referring to her opponents to her long experience as an activist in the neo-fascist movement, she tried to reassure her after the legislative elections in a brief speech to the press where she multiplied the calls for appeasement and national concord. “We will govern for all Italians… We will do it with the aim of uniting the people,” she said. In fact, Meloni and her party are heirs to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party created after World War II from which she took over, at the founding of Fratelli d’Italia at the end of 2012, calling it tricolor. At 19, she told French channel France 3 that dictator Benito Mussolini was “a good politician.” She still recognizes today that Mussolini had “achieved a lot”, without exonerating him for his “mistakes”: the anti-Jewish laws and the start of the war. But she also says that in her party “there is no place for those nostalgic for fascism, nor for racism and anti-Semitism.” Born in Rome on January 15, 1977, Giorgia Meloni became an activist at the age of 15 in student associations classified as far-right, while she worked as a babysitter or waitress. In 1996, she became the director of a secondary school association, Azione Studentesca, whose emblem is the Celtic Cross. In 2006, she became a deputy and vice president of the chamber. Two years later she was appointed Minister of Youth in the government of Silvio Berlusconi. This is her only governing experience. She then regularly frequents the televisions. His motto of her? “God, country, family.” His priorities of her? Closing the borders to protect Italy from “Islamization”, renegotiating the European treaties so that Rome regains control of its destiny, fighting against the so-called “LGBT lobbies” and the “demographic winter” of the country, whose average age is the most high in the industrialized world, just behind Japan. At the end of 2012, tired of the dissensions that were eating away at the right, she founded Fratelli d’Italia with other dissidents of Berlusconism, and opted to camp in the opposition. When Mario Draghi, former governor of the European Central Bank, formed a national unity cabinet in February 2021 to lift Italy out of the health and economic crisis, she and her party were the only ones to refuse to participate.
Source: BFM TV
