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Giorgia Meloni has successfully rebranded her Brothers of Italy party as the country’s dominant conservative force, without fully expunging its post-fascist roots. Her right-wing coalition is forecast to glide into power after Sunday’s general election, making her the favourite to become Italy’s first female prime minister – and its first far-right premier of the postwar era.
The new darling of the Italian right summed up her personal brand in a now-famous tirade at a rally in 2019, which went viral after it was remixed into a dance music track.
“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian,” a fired-up Meloni told supporters in central Rome. “No one will take that away from me.”
The phrase has become a leitmotif of Meloni’s astonishing rise from the leader of a fringe party with roots in Italy’s post-fascist right wing to the country’s likely next leader.
It captures the apparent paradox at the heart of Italy’s looming election, a high-stakes vote that could usher in the most momentous change in decades – a first female PM – while also handing power to the most conservative government since World War II.
Pollsters predict Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party will emerge as Italy’s largest, taking a quarter of the vote – a more than five-fold increase from its score at the last general election in 2018. She is set to leapfrog her better-known right-wing allies Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, easily surpassing their combined tallies.
With Italy’s convoluted electoral law favouring broad coalitions, the three right-wing parties are on course to trounce the fractured centre-left, potentially handing a Meloni-led government a majority large enough to change Italy’s constitution.
Europe under siege
The coda to Meloni’s “Christian mother” harangue, which she repeated word for word in Spanish at a…
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Source : france24
