Giorgia Meloni should actually be there by now. About 50 people are waiting for her in Piazza Galvani in Bologna, in vain. Everything is red here, the facades, the blinds and the hearts of many Bolognese. Bologna, la rossa, the Red, capital of the Resistenza against Nazi-Fascism, is not an easy place for the extreme right. A few officials, all friendly, in a good mood, elegantly dressed in suits or shirts, inform those standing around. “Unfortunately, Giorgia isn’t coming today,” says a party member. She had to go to Parliament in Rome at short notice. A little white lie that is supposed to tell the story of a responsible, strong woman.
Three women have also come to the Piazza Galvani and exchange ideas. “Bologna has to change,” says one. A disheveled young man rides by on a bicycle and calls Meloni’s sympathizers “assholes”. “See?” the other says and shakes her head. The third is so enthusiastic about Meloni that the fact that the leader of the Italian Brothers party is absent hardly matters to her. “She is strong, a woman, totally coherent. Hopefully she’ll put Italy back in order,” she says.
The anger is great
The parliamentary elections on September 25th are about nothing less. Fix the country. Although, according to many observers, the incumbent prime minister Mario Draghi the past 17 months tried in a meaningful way. But the people’s anger is great in view of the many crises and it’s getting bigger and bigger. The ambitions of the right in particular are the same. The right-wing extremist “Fratelli d’Italia” (Brothers of Italy) are doing splendidly in the polls. According to polls, they can count on around 25 percent, win the elections and form the government with their allies Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. It will be a choice of anger and Giorgia Meloni knows about anger.
The day before in the port of Genoa. About 300 supporters have gathered here under a tent and wave flags of the party, which bears a flame in its emblem as a reference to the Italian neo-fascists Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), founded in 1946. Here you can experience the new Giorgia Meloni. Not an unscrupulous agitator, but a 45-year-old who is sympathetic to trains. “Yes, I’m a bit tired,” admits the Roman. The election campaign makes itself felt, her voice is sometimes absent. Necessary rest is probably the real reason for her absence in Bologna.
“I love you”
“I love you,” Meloni calls out to her supporters in Genoa and then admits that Italy is facing major challenges in view of Corona, the energy crisis, inflation, immense national debt and the war in Ukraine. “Italy needs seriousness,” says Meloni, and her people applaud. These are new tones. Apparently she doesn’t want to squander the chance to become Italy’s first female prime minister. The mandate is given by the President, so it is better to show the moderate side now, to reassure the partners in the EU and the USA and, above all, to win over the many undecided but dissatisfied people. “I expect that even after the election victory, Meloni will move cautiously to convey security and to comply with international obligations, both financial and political,” says Roman political scientist Giovanni Orsina.
On trains that evening, Meloni seems trustworthy, she exudes wit, reacts spontaneously to heckling, sometimes harsh, sometimes affectionate. “You don’t learn to be a mother either, you just become one,” says the mother of a six-year-old about the prospect of becoming head of government, although at the age of 29 she was already the youngest vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies and had been Minister for Youth in the fourth for three years since 2008 Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet. She promises the “reconstruction of Italy, starting with politics”.
“So girls don’t get raped in a park by day”
Extreme tones cannot be heard from her today, apart from the sentence that Italy needs more security “so that girls are not raped in a park during the day”. Yes, Meloni is demanding protection of the EU’s external borders, more money for the police, more rights for Italian workers like their political friends Marine Le Pen in France or Viktor Orban in Hungary. “Why should an Italy that defends its interests cause fear?” she asks. “I want a serious Italy, respected in the world.”
But Meloni also sounded different, only in June during an election campaign appearance in Marbella, Spain. She was invited by the ultra-right, neo-Francoist Vox party. In addition to many Spanish flags, symbols of Spanish fascism could also be seen, such as a bundle of lictors. The Brothers of Italy, founded in 2012, also have their roots in Italian neo-fascism, of course. After a speech that roused Vox supporters from their chairs, Vox party leader Santiago Abascal thanked her, saying that Meloni had always been an “ideological point of reference” for his party.
“Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia!”
Meloni spoke for a quarter of an hour, rhetorically brilliant. In the end, all she could do was scream, “Yes to natural family! No to the LGBT lobby! Yes to sexual identity! No to gender ideology! Yes to the culture of life! No to the abyss of death! Yes to the University of the Cross! No to Islamist violence! Yes to safe borders! No to mass immigration! Yes to work for our people! No to the big international financial powers! Yes to the sovereignty of the peoples! No to the bureaucrats in Brussels! Yes to our civilization! No to those who want to destroy them! Long live the Europe of patriots!” The crowd went wild. Then everyone shouted: “Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia!”
Who is Giorgia Meloni? Born and raised in Rome. When she was two years old, her father, a tax consultant, left the family. A year later, when the sisters Giorgia and Anna were playing with a candle, the apartment burned down. The single mother, politically right-wing, somehow gets by herself and her daughters. The father, a communist, fled. Some explain Meloni’s enthusiasm for MSI’s neo-fascists in the 1990s with her biography. “The constant need to measure oneself, to be accepted, especially in a male environment, and the fear of disappointing those who believe in me probably stem from our father’s lack of love,” she writes in her autobiography, Io sono Giorgia” (I am Giorgia). Childhood as an impetus for a top political career?
From difficult family backgrounds to the “Youth Front”
When her father died a few years ago, she remained indifferent, says Meloni. “That’s when I realized how deep the black hole was where I had buried the pain of not being loved enough.” It was unlikely that male Italian politicians would be so open about themselves. That’s another reason why Meloni is admired by her followers, at least at the moment. “Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia” shouted the fans in Genoa.
At the age of 15, she joined the tight-knit youth organization of the MSI, later becoming the chairman of the “Jugendfront”. Meloni had already broken with her father, who had moved to the Canary Islands. “Many had separated parents or lived in problematic circumstances,” reports Meloni about her companions at the time. “The young people who were most committed were looking for points of reference, for their own dimension, they wanted to belong to something.” Neo-fascism, the “youth front” of the old Nazis from the MSI, became Meloni’s substitute home. “My second family,” she writes.
“Historically, Mussolini created a lot”
The ideological character has remained, even if Meloni today publicly distances himself from fascism. “The right handed fascism over to history years ago,” she claimed a few weeks ago in videos in English, Spanish, French intended to calm public opinion abroad. But her statements of the last few years are also remembered: Mussolini made mistakes, the racial laws, the entry into the war. “Historically, he also created a lot,” she once said. In 2006, Meloni spoke of having “a relaxed relationship with fascism”. This could be seen when she presented a great-grandson of Mussolini as a candidate before the 2019 European elections in front of the “Palazzo della Civiltà italiana”, the emblematic building from the fascist era in Rome. If necessary and brings consensus, she plays with Italy’s black past.
Dozens of their supporters, on the other hand, as well as numerous party members, have come out as neo-Nazis, with a Hitler salute and memorial services for the fascist dictator who came to power in Rome exactly 100 years ago. And much of Italy, including many of the people who will vote for Meloni on September 25, also has a relaxed, flexible relationship with fascism. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that the country got rid of its dictator itself in 1945 with the help of the partisans, a collective reappraisal never took place and many biographies shaped by fascism continued in the democracy as if nothing had happened. He is very cool there, says the recognized political scientist Orsina. “The topic is politically exploited, also by the foreign press.” Yes, there are nostalgics among the brothers of Italy. But that’s really not the problem today.