Meloni has expressed controversial views, such as praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1996 when she was 19, as well as Giorgio Almirante, a Nazi collaborator and subsequently co-founder of MSI, in 2020 when she was 43. On the uncontroversial side, she has condemned both the suppression of democracy and the Italian racial laws during and before World War II.
Giorgia Meloni was born in Rome on 15 January 1977.[1][2] Her father was from Sardinia and her mother from Sicily. Her father, a tax advisor who was convicted for drug trafficking and sentenced to 9 years in a Spanish prison,[3] left the family when she was eleven years old moving to the Canary Islands.[4] She grew up in the district of Garbatella.[4] In 1992, at 15 years of age, she joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party that dissolved in 1995.[1] During this time, she founded the student coordination Gli Antenati (The Ancestors), which took part in the protest against the public education reform promoted by minister Rosa Russo Iervolino.[5]
In 1996, she became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), the national-conservative heir of the MSI, representing this movement in the Student Associations Forum established by the Italian Ministry of Education.[6] In 1998, after winning the primary election, she was elected as a councillor of the Province of Rome, holding this position until 2002. In 2000, she was elected national director and in 2004 she was the first woman president of Youth Action, the AN youth wing.[7] During these years, she worked as a nanny, waitress, and bartender at the Piper Club [it; fr], one of the most famous night clubs in Rome.[8][9]
Meloni graduated from Rome's Amerigo Vespucci Institute (AVI) in 1996.[2] She declared that she obtained the high school diploma in languages at the AVI, with the final mark of 60/60.[10] However, the school was not a foreign language high school and was not qualified to issue a diploma in languages; instead, it was a technical high school specialized in the tourist industry.[10] This created a controversy about whether she lied about her diploma.[11]
Political career
Minister of Youth
Meloni in 2006
In the 2006 Italian general election, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a member of the National Alliance (AN), where she became its youngest ever vice-president.[12] In the same year, she started to work as a journalist.[13] In 2006, Meloni defended the laws passed by the Berlusconi III Cabinet that benefited companies of the prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi and also delayed ongoing trials involving him. Meloni stated "it is necessary to contextualise them. Those are laws that Silvio Berlusconi made for himself. But they are perfectly fair laws."[14] In 2008, she was appointed Minister of Youth in the Berlusconi IV Cabinet, a position she held until 16 November 2011, when Berlusconi was forced to resign as the prime minister amid a financial crisis and public protests.[15] She was the youngest-ever minister in the history of united Italy.[16]
In August 2008, she invited Italian athletes to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in disagreement with the Chinese policy implemented towards Tibet; this statement was criticized by Berlusconi, as well as the foreign affairs minister Franco Frattini.[17] In 2009, her party merged with Forza Italia (FI) into The People of Freedom (PdL) and she took over the presidency of the united party's youth section, called Young Italy.[16] In the same year, she voted in favour of a decree law against euthanasia.[18]
In November 2010, on behalf of the ministry, she presented a 300 million euro package called the Right to the Future. It was aimed at investing in young people and contained five initiatives, including incentives for new entrepreneurs, bonuses in favour of temporary workers and loans for deserving students.[19] In November 2012, she announced her bid to contest the PdL leadership against Angelino Alfano, in opposition to the party's support of the Monti Cabinet. After the cancellation of the primaries, she teamed up with fellow politicians Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto to set out an anti-Monti policy, asking for renewal within the party and being also critical of the leadership of Berlusconi.[20][21]
In December 2012, Meloni, La Russa, and Crosetto founded a new political movement, Brothers of Italy (FdI), whose name comes from the words of the Italian national anthem.[22][23] In the 2013 Italian general election, she stood as part of Berlusconi's centre-right coalition and received 2.0% of the vote and 9 seats.[24] She was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Lombardy and was later appointed the party's leader in the house, a position that she would hold until 2014, when she resigned to dedicate herself to the party. She was succeeded by Fabio Rampelli.[25] In March 2014, she became president of FdI, and in April she was nominated for the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy as the leader of the FdI in all the five constituencies. FdI party obtained 3.7% of the votes, not exceeding the threshold of 4%, and she did not become a Member of the European Parliament;[26][27] she received 348,700 votes.[28] On 4 November 2015, she founded Our Land – Italians with Giorgia Meloni, a conservative political committee in support of her campaigns.[29] Our Land is a parallel organization to FdI,[30] and aimed at enlarging FdI's popular base.[31]
On 30 January 2016, she participated in the Family Day, an anti-LGBT rights demonstration, declaring herself against LGBT adoption. At the same Family Day, she announced that she was pregnant; her daughter Ginevra was born on 16 September.[32] In the 2016 Rome municipal election, she ran for mayor with the support of Us with Salvini, a political party led by Matteo Salvini, and in opposition to the candidate supported by Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI). Meloni won 20.6% of the vote, almost twice that of FI's candidate, but she did not qualify for the run-off, while FdI obtained 12.3% of the vote.[33] During the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum on the reform promoted by Renzi's government, Meloni founded the "No, Thanks" committee and participated in numerous television debates, including one against the then prime minister Matteo Renzi.[34] As "No" won with almost 60% of the votes, Meloni called for snap elections. When Renzi resigned, she withheld confidence from the next government led by Paolo Gentiloni.[35][36] The 2–3 December 2017 congress of FdI in Trieste saw the re-election of Meloni as president of the party, as well as a renewal of the party logo and the joining of Daniela Santanchè, a long-time right-wing politician.[37]
In February 2021, she joined the Aspen Institute,[44][45] an international think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.,[46][47] which includes many financiers, businessmen, and politicians, such as Giulio Tremonti.[48][49][50] On 19 February 2021, the University of Siena professor Giovanni Gozzini insulted Meloni calling her vulgar names from a radio; both the president Sergio Mattarella and the prime minister Mario Draghi phoned Meloni and stigmatized Gozzini, who was suspended by the board of his university.[51][52] In October 2021, she signed the Madrid Charter,[53] a 2020 document that describes left-wing groups as enemies of Ibero-America involved in a "criminal project" that are "under the umbrella of the Cuban regime".[54] It was drafted by Vox, a Spanish ultranationalist party. She also took part at Vox's party congress,[55] where she said: "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!"[56][57] In February 2022, she spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida. She told the attending American conservative activists and officials they must defend their views against progressives.[58]
In a record-low voter turnout election,[72]exit polls projected that the centre-right coalition would win a majority of seats in the 2022 general election.[56][73][74] Meloni was projected to be the winner of the election with FdI receiving a plurality of seats,[75][76] and per agreement with the centre-right coalition, which held that the largest party in the coalition would nominate the next prime minister,[77] she is the frontrunner and would become the country's first female prime minister.[78][79] The PD, head of the centre-left coalition, conceded defeat shortly after the exit polls,[80] and Hungary's Orbán, Poland's Mateusz Morawiecki, United Kingdom's Liz Truss, and Marine Le Pen, former leader of National Rally (RN) in France, congratulated Meloni.[81] European radical right parties and leaders, such as Alternative for Germany and Vox, also celebrated Meloni's results.[82]
Meloni is supportive of the anti-gender movement and sceptical of what she calls "gender ideology",[113][114] a belief born in the mid-1990s in the circles of the Opus Dei in order to condemn any social position other than that approved by the Catholic Church, which oppose gender studies; she says it is being thought in schools,[115][116][117] and that it attacks female identity and motherhood.[118] She is supportive of changing the Constitution of Italy in order to make it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children.[119] In March 2018, Meloni criticized The Walt Disney Company for the decision to represent a gay couple in the musical fantasy movie Frozen II, writing on her social networks: "Enough! We are sick of it! Take your hands off the children."[120][121][122]
Immigration and multiculturalism
Meloni is opposed to the reception of non-European migrants and multiculturalism,[123][124] In August 2022, she reposted a pixelized video on Twitter that shows a woman being raped by an asylum seeker.[125] The victim of the violence decried the publication of the video and she declared she was recognized by the video posted.[126] After receiving backlash, Meloni defended herself by accusing other politicians of not having condemned the rape itself.[127][128] She has criticized Italy's approach towards illegal immigrants,[129] endorsing the Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory.[130][131]
Meloni has been accused of xenophobia,[132][133][134] as well as Islamophobia.[135][136] She believes there is a planned mass migration from Africa to Europe for the purpose of replacing and eliminating Italians.[137][138][139] She has also been criticized due to her statements on vaccines and COVID-19, such as not vaccinating her daughter,[140][141][142] and stating the probability of someone aged 0–19 dying from COVID-19 was the same as being struck by lightning.[143][144]
Foreign policy
Meloni voted in favour of the 2011 military intervention in Libya; in 2019, she criticized the French rationale for the intervention, stating it was because of Muammar Gaddafi's opposition to the CFA franc.[145][146] She is critical of Italian relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stating that these countries "systematically and deliberately spread fundamentalist theories that are the main causes of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism".[147] She opposed the decision to host the Supercoppa Italiana final in Saudi Arabia, and stated that Italy should actively raise the issue of human rights in Saudi Arabia.[148] Meloni advocated for the expulsion of the Indian Ambassador to Italy as a result of the Enrica Lexie case,[149] and she urged Alessandro Del Piero to refuse to play in the Indian Super League until the detained Italian marines were returned.[150] Following the Asia Bibi blasphemy case, Meloni criticized the "silence of the West" and advocated a stronger stance by the international community against human rights violations in Pakistan.[151]
Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meloni was in favour of better relations with Russia. In her 2021 biography book I am Giorgia, she wrote that Russia under Vladimir Putin defends European values and Christian identity.[152] She has since condemned the invasion and pledged to keep sending arms to Ukraine.[153] She is supportive of NATO,[154] although she maintains Eurosceptic views towards the European Union,[155] having also previously advocated a withdrawal from the eurozone.[156][157] She rejects the Eurosceptic label, favouring the Eurorealism of a confederal Europe of sovereign nations.[158] She is a supporter of closer ties between Italy and Taiwan.[159] Meloni is a controversial figure in Croatia due to her Italian irredentist statements in which she claimed the Croatian regions of Dalmatia and Istria, and for being opposed to Croatian entry into the European Union due to the unresolved dispute concerning properties of exiled Italians after World War II from Dalmatia and Istria.[160][161]
Relationship with fascism
Meloni has expressed statements that generated controversy.[162] In an interview to the French newscast Soir 3 when she was 19,[163] she praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy",[164][165][166] and as the best politician of the last 50 years.[167] In January 2020, there was some controversy after she and the comune of Verona supported naming a street after Giorgio Almirante, the co-founder of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), who was a Nazi wartime collaborator as a civil minister of the Italian Social Republic (RSI) and editor-in-chief of the antisemitic and racist magazine La Difesa della Razza, which published the "Manifesto of Race" in 1938.[112][168][169] Meloni and the comune also supported giving Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor, honorary citizenship.[170][171] In May 2020, Meloni praised Almirante as a "great politician" and "a patriot".[172][173][174] As a minister in 2009, Meloni visited Yad Vashem in Israel,[57] and she has also said as FdI party leader that her party "handed fascism over to history for decades now" and she "unambiguously condemns the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws".[175]
The independent journalistic TV program Report revealed through an investigative report published in December 2020 that her party "has reached the negative record of arrests for mafia group 'Ndrangheta",[176] and also having among her ranks Mussolini's descendants,[177] as well as fascist nostalgics,[178][179][180] according to a 2021 investigative report by Fanpage.it.[181][182] In November 2018, Meloni declared that the celebration of the Liberation Day, also known as the Anniversary of Italy's Liberation from Nazi-Fascism on 25 April, and Festa della Repubblica, which celebrates the birth of the Italian Republic on 2 June, should be substituted with the National Unity and Armed Forces Day on 4 November, which commemorates Italy's victory in World War I. She said that Liberation Day and Festa della Repubblica are "two controversial celebrations".[183] Meloni has tried to distance herself from her close ties to Roberto Jonghi Lavarini,[184] a far-right Milanese politician and entrepreneur known as the "Black Baron".[185][186][187]
After the formation of FdI in 2012, she decided to add the tricolour flame to the party flag, a symbol associated with MSI, which derived its name and ideals from the RSI as a "violent, socializing, and revolutionary republican" variant of Italian Fascism established as a Nazi German puppet state by Mussolini in 1943.[188] The tricolour flame represents Mussolini's remains, where a flame is always burning on his tomb in Predappio.[189] Observers, including historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat, David Broder, and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac,[62][131][190] said that Meloni and FdI have been ambiguous about their fascist past, at times rejecting it and at other times minimizing it, and that this has helped to rebrand both herself and her party.[191] Responding to the 2021 Fanpage report, she minimized the investigation and refused to remove openly neo-fascist members of FdI.[192] In December 2021, FdI's Alfredo Catapano and Luigi Rispoli were among former MSI members who did a Roman salute, which was condemned by the ANPI. Rispoli told Fanpage: "I believe in the new right and in the efforts Giorgia Meloni is making in Brothers of Italy. It makes me wonder, frankly, this clamour."[193] Shortly before the 2022 general election, she sacked a member that openly praised Adolf Hitler.[69] FdI had also distanced itself from the Ascoli Piceno party section after it celebrated the anniversary of the March on Rome in 2019.[194]
Personal life
Meloni has a daughter, Ginevra, with her partner Andrea Giambruno,[195][196] a journalist who works for Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset TV channel.[197] She has said that she is a Christian and has used her religious identity in part to help build her national brand. In a 2019 speech to a rally in Rome, she said: "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I'm Christian."[102][198][199] In September 2022, she reportedly continued to embrace the old Italian Fascist slogan "God, fatherland and family". She said she resents being linked to Italy's Fascist past.[200]
Meloni, Giorgia (2011). Noi crediamo [We believe]. Saggi (in Italian). Podda, Stefano (curator) (paperback ed.). Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, Mondadori. pp. XXVII, 164. ISBN978-8-8200-4932-4. OCLC898518765. Archived from the original on 25 August 2019. Retrieved 14 August 2022 – via Google Books.
^ ab"Biografia del ministro Giorgia Meloni" [Biography of Minister Giorgia Meloni] (in Italian). Palazzo Chigi. November 2011. Archived from the original on 31 March 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
^"Carta de Madrid" [Madrid Charter]. Fundación Disenso (in Spanish). 26 October 2020. Archived from the original on 25 December 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
^Drago, Giovanni (7 October 2016). "Giorgia Meloni contro il terribile Piano Kalergi" [Giorgia Meloni against the terrible Kalergi Plan]. nextQuotidiano (in Italian). Archived from the original on 1 September 2022. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
^"Covid, Meloni: 'Non vaccino mia figlia'" [Covid, Meloni: 'I do not vaccinate my daughter']. Adnkronos (in Italian). 8 February 2022. Archived from the original on 17 June 2022. Retrieved 17 June 2022.
^Sondel-Cedarmas, Joanna. "Giorgia Meloni's New Europe: Europe of Sovereign Nations in the Brothers of Italy Party Manifestos". In Berti, Francesco; Sondel-Cedarmas, Joanna (eds.). The Right-Wing Critique of Europe. London: Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781003226123-8. ISBN978-1-0005-2042-2.
^Bonamoneta, Giorgia (27 June 2021). "'Chi è Andrea Giambruno compagno di Giorgia Meloni" ['Who is Andrea Giambruno companion of Giorgia Meloni]. Money.it (in Italian). Archived from the original on 11 August 2022. Retrieved 14 August 2022. Updated 12 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)