- Mark Lowen
- BBC correspondent in Rome
image source, Archyde.com
Meloni is emerging as the winner of the elections in Italy.
For 40 years, Anna Maria Tortora has been selling her ripe tomatoes and fresh cucumbers to loyal customers at her market stall in Rome. She didn’t realize that the young woman who used to stand in line holding hands with her grandfather would now be on her way to becoming Italy’s next prime minister.
“He was a wonderful person,” he recalls, “and in love with his granddaughter.”
With that girl, Giorgia Meloni, who led her party to first place in the elections this Sunday, Anna Maria is proud.
“I raised her on my beans! She ate well and grew well.”
The market is in Garbatella, a working-class neighborhood in southern Rome and traditionally a leftist bastion, an incongruous place to hear this from a politician who might become Italy’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini.
Once the results of Italy’s snap elections are confirmed, the country’s president, Sergio Mattarella, will consult party leaders to determine who can lead a stable government.
Meloni, as the favorite, will argue that she is the first option.
“She is not representative of this area, which is historically red,” says Marta, a shopper pushing her stroller between vegetable stalls.
His elderly mother, Luciana, tells me the prospect scares her. “I am deeply anti-fascist,” she adds. “If she comes in, it will be a very ugly period.”
The fascist label is something that Giorgia Meloni vehemently rejects. Speaking in English, Spanish and French in a recent video, she insisted that she had consigned ideology to history.
story problems
But history is part of the problem in a country that had no equivalent to the denazification of Germany following the war, which allowed the fascist parties to reform.
Founded in 2012, Brothers from Italy has its political roots in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which rose from the ashes of Mussolini’s fascism.
image source, Archyde.com
Giorgia Meloni is 45 years old.
The party maintains the logo of post-war far-right parties: the tricolor flame, often perceived as the fire that burns in Mussolini’s tomb.
“Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to drop the symbol because it’s the identity she can’t escape; it’s her youth,” says Gianluca Passarelli, professor of political science at Rome’s Sapienza University.
“His party is not fascist,” he explains.
Anna Maria met Meloni when she was a child.
“Fascism means gaining power and destroying the system. She won’t do that and she mightn’t. But there are wings in the party linked to the neo-fascist movement. She has always played somewhat in the middle,” he adds.
road to politics
Although she now tries to project a softer image, Meloni’s youth is anchored in the hard right, and between humble beginnings: key to her image as a woman of the people.
Born in Rome in 1977, she was only one year old when her father, Francesco, abandoned the family and moved to the Canary Islands.
Francesco was on the left, his mother Anna was on the right, prompting speculation that his political career was motivated in part by a desire to take revenge on his absent father.
The family then moved to Garbatella, near their grandparents.
There, at age 15, Meloni joined the Frente Juvenil, the youth wing of the neo-fascist MSI, and later became president of the student branch of the movement’s successor, Alianza Nacional.
image source, Getty Images
Giorgia Meloni hopes to form a far-right government with Silvio Berlusconi (C) and Matteo Salvini
Marco Marsilio was holding a meeting at the MSI office in Garbatella when Giorgia Meloni knocked on his door in 1992.
Ten years older than him, he became a close friend and political ally and today is president of the Abruzzo region.
“Here was this slender girl, but always very serious and determined,” he says. “You would notice her because at student meetings, she would stop anyone who took her microphone away.”
Over the years, they’ve shared family vacations, debates and social gatherings, and he’s watched her grow in confidence.
“She had her insecurities back then,” Marsilio says, “but maybe that was a strength because it made her read one more file, rather than less, before tackling an issue.”
political career
In 2008, at the age of 31, Giorgia Meloni became the youngest minister in Italy, appointed to the Youth and Sport portfolio by Silvio Berlusconi.
After forming his own party in 2012, he got just 4% of the vote in the last election in 2018.
Now, as the only major party to remain outside of Mario Draghi’s national unity coalition government, the Brothers of Italy are expected to win between 22-26% of the vote.
His right-wing alliance with Silvio Berlusconi and former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party secured a parliamentary majority.
A campaign poster for Giorgia Meloni in Garbatella, Rome
But while he has tried to reassure Italy’s Western allies, for example by strongly supporting the Draghi government’s pro-Ukrainian line, his hard-line conservative social policies are worrying many.
“Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies!” he said at a recent rally by Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Meloni has called for a naval blockade of Libya to stop migrant boats.
“Meloni is not a danger to democracy, but a danger to the European Union,” says Professor Passarelli, who puts her in the same mold as nationalist leaders in Hungary and France.
“He is on the same side as Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orban. And he wants a ‘Europe of the nations’, so that everyone is basically alone. Italy might become Putin’s Trojan horse to undermine solidarity, so it would allow him to continue to weaken Europe.”
In her quest to become Italy’s first female prime minister, she has asserted her feminine identity, but, Passarelli believes, in a political and macho way.
“The domain of the Italian family is the ‘mamma’. She is the macho figure who controls the kitchen. Meloni uses it wisely because it goes right to the core of our system,” he says.
For her allies, the woman would represent the radical political change that Italy needs, given its long economic stagnation and for being a society seen as a gerontocracy.
“I feel great, like a father walking his daughter down the aisle,” he says. Marco Marsilio.
“We wouldn’t have founded the party unless we thought she had the potential for this,” he adds.
