‘Mother, Italian, Christian’: Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s far-right leader on the cusp of power

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 was on course to win a majority of seats 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 neo-fascist right wing to the country’s likely next leader.

It captures the apparent paradox at the heart of Sunday’s election, a high-stakes vote likely to 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.

Projections based on a partial vote count suggested Meloni’s Brothers of Italy would win some 25% 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 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, securing a clear majority in both chambers of parliament.

Europe under siege

The coda to Meloni’s “Christian mother” harangue, which she repeated word for word in Spanish at a rally in support of Spain’s extreme-right party last year, underscores the fears of an arch-conservative camp that feels under siege in a globalised, fast-changing world.

In Meloni’s mind, the besieging forces include immigration, Islam, European integration, “woke ideologies” and what she describes as “LGBT lobbies”. It’s a view she shares with the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, whom she has strenuously defended in his tussles with Brussels over democracy and the rule of law.

Until recently, her ideological models also included Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom she praised for “defending European values and Christian identity” in her 2021 book, “I am Giorgia”. But she has since distanced herself from the man in the Kremlin, unequivocally condemning his invasion of Ukraine and supporting Western sanctions on Moscow.

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