[The Meloni Papers 03] Who is Giorgia Meloni? The Rise to Power of Italy's new Far-right PM and some of the Consequences

Giorgia Meloni has become almost two years ago Italy's first female Prime Minister, leading Italy's most right-wing government since the Second World War. Her rise to power at the head of the party she has founded with some neo-fascists has been meteoric. Giorgia Meloni has been politically active since she was a teenage activist in the neo-fascist party MSI in Rome.

Now in her forties she is broadly accepted in the role of Italy's first female Prime Minister, although she has picked a government in which only one in four ministers are women.

Meloni has come to power partly by fortune. Her party “Fratelli d’Italia” (Brothers of Italy) was one of very few that chose not to join Mario Draghi's formerr national unity government and she became a solitary opposition voice. Although she has led her party for 10 years, her experience in government is limited to a spell as Italy's youngest minister in a Berlusconi government from 2008 to 2011. Her party won then the September 2022 elections with 26 % of the vote, even though it had polled only 4.3 % four years earlier.

"Italians have sent a clear message in favour of a right-wing government led by Brothers of Italy," she declared after her election win. With her partners from the far-right Lega and centre-right party “Forza Italia” of ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (who died in 2023), she has a strong majority to steer through her programme.

A clue to her priorities came in a typically raucous speech she gave in Spain some years aggo. She declared then: "Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"

In another well-quoted speech from 2019 she had said: "I am Giorgia, I'm a woman, I'm a mother... I'm Christian." For the role of Italy's new family and birth rate minister, she has picked Eugenia Roccella who has spoken out against abortion and threatened to reverse recently agreed rights for same-sex parents. Italy has after a public poll since a lot of time very liberal abortion laws.

Nevertheless, the new Prime Minister has promised to govern "for everyone" and she has sought to assure Italy's allies in both Nato and the European Union that there will be no change in direction in foreign policy. "Giorgia Meloni comes from a post-fascist cultural background but recently she's taken a very moderate position and stated she won't change [predecessor Mario] Draghi's policy on Ukraine," Italian political scientist Professor Roberto D'Alimonte told the BBC. "She did this because she had to build her credentials to be a legitimate candidate for Prime Minister."

Giorgia Meloni hails from Garbatella in southern Rome, a working class but up-and-coming area. It isn't easy to find many Brothers of Italy voters in this district seen traditionally as left of centre. In the meantime she bought a very expensive home in a bourgeois area of Rome.

Raised by her mother, after her parents separated, she gravitated to the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, born out of the ashes of Benito Mussolini's wartime fascists. Aged 19, she was filmed as a party activist in 1996. "I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy. And we haven't had any politicians like that in the past 50 years," she told French TV. The piece even had a clip of her mother, Anna Paratore, saying she had not sought to push her own far-right views on her daughter.

Giorgia Meloni later headed the student branch of the movement's successor, National Alliance. At the age of 11 she discovered Tolkien's fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings, and regularly dressed up as a Hobbit. The book was to influence her political career too. When she became youth minister in 2008 she posed for a magazine beside a statue of Gandalf, one of five wizards in Tolkien's book. She even referenced a Tolkien battle speech at the end of her election campaign.

"I think that Tolkien could say better than we can what conservatives believe in," she recently told the New York Times.

Meloni is adamant that the party she formed in 2012 has no links to fascism, but some of its members appear to hold a candle for Mussolini and it retains an old logo of the tricolour flame in the official flag of her party, often thought to represent the fire on Mussolini's tomb.

She is not alone with these ideas. The new Senate speaker, Ignazio La Russa, collects even openly fascist memorabilia and his brother was seen making what appeared to be a fascist salute at a funeral.

"The hard core of the party is still far right, yet the new voters who backed Meloni are not," says Prof. D'Alimonte. He believes the new Prime Minister is taking Fratelli d’Italia into uncharted territory and needs to give it a new profile.

That may require a more moderate approach than she and her allies would naturally adopt. Meloni may have picked an anti-abortion minister but she has promised to fully enforce the law that protects access to abortion. Same-sex couples have fewer rights in Italy than many other European countries, and Meloni has no plans to overturn existing laws. But she has spoken out against adoptions and surrogacy involving LGBT couples.

During the election campaign, Meloni began to convey a softer image – not always pronouncing her hard-right convictions.

For now her coalition appears united. One look at the make-up of Italy's two houses of parliament shows the strong majority she has been able to muster with her own party backed by Forza Italia and the Lega. On the other side the centre and left parties failed to find enough common ground to challenge her bid for power.

But that unity may not last for ever. Forza Italia under the new leadership of Antonio Tajani in particular could become an awkward ally, especially after the death of Silvio Berlusconi.

(Refreshed. Based on an article of the BBC from the 21th of Octobre 2022.)