‘She plays the moderate but winks at those who are not’: the many faces of Giorgia Meloni

 ‘She plays the moderate but winks at those who are not’: the many faces of Giorgia Meloni

 

After almost a year in power Italy’s PM has won plaudits even among the left – but critics say no one should be fooled

 

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Thu 21 Sep 2023 10.00 BST

 

It used to be difficult to find an Italian who admitted to liking Giorgia Meloni.

 

Even after her Brothers of Italy party triumphed in last September’s general elections, giving rise to the country’s most hard-right government since the second world war, the trepidation was such that some of those who voted for her were too embarrassed to openly confess it.

 

One year on, that veil of shame has lifted. Meloni, who initially depicted herself as the “underdog” who had fought against the odds to become Italy’s first female prime minister, has morphed into one of Europe’s most powerful politicians.

 

Ask many Italians what they think of her now, and gone are the references to her past links with neofascism or her vitriol towards immigrants, LGBTQ+ people or anyone else who sullied her self-declared Christian, patriotic vision of Italy.

 

“She has softened over time,” said Matilde Palazzo, a small business owner in Rome. “Yes, she is surrounded by some questionable characters but people have noticed something else – after years of useless governments they are seeing some stability. I even have leftwing customers who tell me: ‘All in all, I quite like her.’”

 

Still, as her popularity transcends the borders of her far-right base, Meloni’s apparent metamorphosis has not been clearcut, leaving many struggling to decipher who she really is.

 

Meloni, 46, has struck a reassuring, pragmatic tone in the rest of Europe and beyond. She has been unwavering in her support for Ukraine, while positioning herself as an advocate of large deals in Africa, be it on energy or, more controversially, immigration.

 

A one-time fan of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Meloni has found new friends in Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy. She has bonded with Rishi Sunak, is on a more cordial footing with Emmanuel Macron and is often seen working alongside Ursula von der Leyen.

 

 

At the same time, however, Meloni has been forging deeper relations with her far-right allies in Europe. She rallied the Vox party before the Spanish elections in July (“the time for the patriots has come,” she said). Last week, she met her Hungarian counterpart and ally, Viktor Orbán, in Budapest, where she spoke about defending the “traditional” family and God for the sake of humankind.

 

At home, Meloni’s ruling coalition has cut benefits to people on low incomes or unemployed, enacted tough rules against NGO rescue ships and same-sex parents, and extended a ban on surrogacy to criminalise Italians who seek the arrangement abroad.

 

Luisa Rizzitelli, a feminist and LGBTQ+ activist, said Meloni’s “change of face” had lured people into forgetting her more extreme past.

 

“She has a way of doing things very astutely, even if she remains loyal to her natural instincts,” said Rizzitelli. “But the impact of her policies is dangerous as she is normalising things. Her style has completely changed, appearing less aggressive and more like a soft rightwinger – this gives her the power to influence public opinion over policies which are really dangerous.”

 

Sandro Gozi, an MEP and Italy’s former Europe minister, said Meloni came to power with two significant “lifelines”. The first was a budget structure mostly crafted by the former prime minister Mario Draghi, which calmed the financial markets, at least for 2023. The second was her support for Ukraine, a position that has reassured the US despite divisions over the subject with her coalition partners.

 

Furthermore, Meloni needs to tread carefully with Brussels to ensure Italy receives the billions of euros from the EU post-Covid recovery fund. Italy secured the largest share of the pot in 2020, despite strong opposition from member states in northern Europe.

 

Gozi said: “Meloni is a very shrewd politician, but also very proud. She needs recognition on the international scene but she acts like a world leader only when she has to. This is window-dressing. Any other time she shows who she really is – an ideological, very extreme-right leader.”

 

‘She applies herself totally to everything’

Born in Rome in 1977, Meloni charted her political course from the traditionally leftwing, working-class Garbatella district, where aged 15 she joined the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neofascist party formed in 1946 by lingering supporters of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

 

She wrote in her biography, Io Sono Giorgia (I am Giorgia), that she was instinctively drawn to the group, where she found solidarity in a close-knit, if marginalised, community of militants often depicted as evil or violent, and who dedicated all their time to politics rather than going clubbing or shopping like their peers.

 

There she met Nicola Procaccini, now an MEP for Brothers of Italy and her deputy in the European Conservatives and Reformists party (ECR).

 

“I’ve never known anyone who studies so hard – we jokingly call her the geek,” he said. “She applies herself totally to everything, there’s always a feeling as if it’s the night before an exam. This is the secret of her success. She is a person who has her feet firmly on the ground – she overcomes one challenge, but is always aware of the greater challenges to come.”

 

Meloni later led the youth wing of National Alliance, the party that emerged from MSI and an ally in Silvio Berlusconi’s three governments. Two years later she became the youngest ever deputy vice-president of the chamber of deputies, and in 2008 was appointed youth minister in Berlusconi’s last government. Meloni founded Brothers of Italy in 2012, taking the party from less than 4% in the 2018 general elections to Italy’s biggest political force, polling at about 30%.

 

In her book, Meloni described herself as an irascible, defensive child, whose determination to fend off enemies was spurred by a group of boys who would not allow her to participate in a game of beach volleyball because she was “too fat”.

 

Among the attributes that impresses Procaccini most about Meloni’s leadership is “the fairness with which she treats her opponents”. He cited the almost “fatherly” figure she found in Fausto Bertinotti, who led the Communist Refoundation party and was president of the chamber of deputies when she was vice-president.

 

Procaccini said: “It taught me even more about Giorgia’s ability to go beyond ideological fences, to make herself be appreciated for what she is, even by those whose political ideas are far removed from hers.”

 

During her government’s early months, Meloni was even praised by a leftwing rival, Enrico Letta, the former prime minister and ex-leader of the Democratic party (PD), who summed her up as “better than expected”. Stefano Bonaccini, the president of the Emilia-Romagna region, was criticised by PD members after crediting Meloni for being “capable”.

 

Bonaccini got first-hand experience of working with Meloni when his region, one of the few in Italy still under leftwing rule, was devastated by flooding in May. “We built a very frank, cordial, and, moreover, respectful relationship,” he said.

 

But, he added, the government had “wasted” two months in appointing a commissioner to oversee the region’s reconstruction while there was a severe delay in funding needed for the work. And, while Bonaccini acknowledges Meloni’s leadership capacity, he is sceptical about the overall competence of her government.

 

In addition, those within her close circle are a cause for concern. Last year, as she teetered on the brink of power, Meloni declared her party had “handed fascism over to history decades ago”.

 

But in an echo of Mussolini’s fascist regime, Francesco Lollobrigida, Italy’s agriculture minister and Meloni’s brother-in-law, was accused of white supremacy this year when he said Italians were at risk of “ethnic substitution”. The comments were made within the context of a discussion about immigration and Italy’s declining birthrate.

 

Ignazio La Russa, Italy’s senate speaker, is a collector of fascist relics, while a host of other party officials hail from Meloni’s time as an MSI youth militant. Brothers of Italy’s logo includes the fascist tricoloured flame of the MSI.

 

Bonaccini said: “I don’t think that she is a fascist. The problem is with a faction of her party – too few take a distance from that history.”

 

He believes the danger lies more with the government’s authoritarian streak, seen most prominently in its influence over the state broadcaster Rai, where sources have claimed Meloni’s administration wants to “take control” and “change the narrative to their way of thinking”.

 

Journalists who criticise the government have been targeted with legal action. Meloni has hardly given any press conferences since early March, days after at least 94 people died in a shipwreck off Cutro, Calabria. Instead, she dodges media interrogation by mostly communicating through videos.

 

Eleonora Camilli, a journalist and immigration expert, said: “The press conference in Cutro was a disaster in terms of communication because she was unprepared for the direct questions from local journalists. She found herself in a quandary, and didn’t come across as the ‘prepared’ politician that everyone had been talking about.”

 

Meloni came to power pledging to “stop the invasion” of people via a naval blockade in the Mediterranean. Instead, the number of people arriving in Italy more than doubled between January and September compared with the same period in 2022. She said she would not allow Italy to become “Europe’s refugee camp” following a surge in arrivals on the southern island of Lampedusa last week.

 

Camilli said: “We are at more than 127,000 arrivals – this hasn’t happened in years. Yet we don’t hear her thundering about the ‘invasion’ any more. If politicians don’t talk about it, people don’t notice.”

 

The Italian government’s veneer of stability is, in part, because it has a large majority in parliament, and also because the opposition is weak. But little of worth has so far been achieved. The government is failing on its immigration pledges. The economy is slowing while nothing, say critics, is being done on enacting changes that would lead to growth. There is deep scepticism in Brussels over Italy’s ability to competently spend its share of the Covid recovery fund. The government has no clear strategy on tackling the climate crisis, despite Italy being among the most vulnerable in Europe to extreme weather events.

 

The return of a hardcore, nationalist stance?

In a 2019 speech that subsequently went viral, Meloni hit all the notes of what was then her political soundtrack. “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian,” she bellowed. “You can’t take that away from me.”

 

As attention switches to the European elections next year, it may well be that the world sees a return of this belligerent brand of rhetoric in the coming months. Meloni has been president of the ECR since 2020, a position she has used to nurture a more moderate image, even if the group is mostly made up of rightwing extremists.

 

Francesco Giubilei, the author of the book Giorgia Meloni: The Revolution of the Conservatives, and a friend, said she had a vision of a “different, more conservative Europe” that was “neither close to the Europe of Macron or the Europe of Orbán”.

 

Nathalie Tocci, the director of the Rome-based thinktank the International Affairs Institute, disagrees. “She [Meloni] sees the defeat of Vox in Spain as a temporary setback,” Tocci said. “And if she’s vindicated in the autumn with elections in Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands, I think she’ll campaign on a hardcore, nationalist position.”

 

Many have cause to fear the return of such positioning.

 

“Meloni plays the moderate but winks at those who are not moderate at all,” said Alessandra Laterza, the owner Le Torri, a bookshop in Tor Bella Monaca, a poor district in the outskirts of Rome.

 

Laterza is living under police protection after being hit by a deluge of aggressive online threats for refusing to sell Meloni’s book.

 

“Meloni never condemned this behaviour,” she said. “This is the fear … While Brothers of Italy will continue to do what Europe asks of us, they will campaign in a way that authorises people to bring out their hatred, and this is what gets them through.”

 

Giubilei said Meloni’s government was enjoying a longer honeymoon period than usual, but that “shouldn’t be taken for granted”.

 

Her popularity, however, can also be explained by Italians’ reverence towards power, Tocci said. “The Italian establishment is fickle in this regard. It fell in love with [the former premiers] Matteo Renzi and Giuseppe Conte, with whatever prime minister. On top of that there is this aspect of ‘it’s all relative in life’ – so compared to most in her government, Meloni is Einstein.