Giorgia Meloni, a nationalist, is predicted to be elected Italy’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini in Sunday’s election.
Despite a series of errors in her campaign, including suspending a party candidate for praising Hitler and a close friend accused of giving the Nazi salute, the head of the Brothers of Italy has been leading the polls.
The single mother of one also came under fire for inciting anti-immigrant frenzy by posting a video last month purportedly showing a Ukrainian refugee being sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker in the city of Piacenza.
The 45-year-old, who would be the first female prime minister in the history of the nation, has attracted the attention of the electorate with her campaign of “God, country, and family” and criticism of “woke ideology.”
“No to the LGBT lobby; yes to natural families!” No to gender ideology, yes to sexual identity! “No to the abyss of death, and yes to the culture of life!” Meloni sobbed inconsolably at a speech in June.
The neo-fascist organisation founded to carry on the dictator Mussolini’s legacy is where Brothers of Italy got its start.
Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, a great-grandson of Benito Mussolini, was announced by Meloni as one of her candidates for the European Parliament in 2019, albeit he ultimately lost.
The outcome of the election on Sunday will occur almost one hundred years to the day after Mussolini’s ascension to power in October 1922.
Right-wing League party leader Matteo Salvini, who promotes a similar anti-immigrant rhetoric and has defended Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban of Hungary, is Meloni’s key coalition partner.
Meloni praised Putin’s victory in the 2018 election and advocated for a blockade off the coast of North Africa to halt boats delivering migrants to Italy, but she now supports Western sanctions against Russia.
In Brussels, where the possibility of a eurosceptic, populist administration leading the third-largest economy in the eurozone has raised fears, the elections are being keenly monitored.
Prior to the polls’ suspension 15 days before the election, they showed Meloni’s party would get the most votes, narrowly beating out the center-left Democratic Party led by former premier Enrico Letta.
Last time we checked, Brothers of Italy was polling at roughly 24–25%, ahead of the center–left Democratic Party at 21–22% and Five Star at 13–15%.
Meloni’s alliance is on track to win between 45 and 55 percent of the available seats in parliament, with the League polling at about 12 percent and Berlusconi’s party at around 8%.
However, analysts caution that there is still opportunity for some shock in Italy, a nation known for its turbulent politics, with over 70 administrations since 1946, as 40% of Italians say they have not yet made up their minds or will not vote.
Letta had hoped in vain for a political partnership with the dominant party in the outgoing legislature, the populist 5-Star Movement, which has a left-leaning stance.
Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, is the leader of the departing administration. After the second governing coalition led by 5-Star leader Giuseppe Conte fell apart at the beginning of 2021, Italy’s president appointed Draghi to head a unity government.
Polls show that “most Italians favour Draghi and believe his administration did a good job,” which Pregliasco labelled a “apparent dichotomy.”
Meloni is polling the highest, despite being the only major party leader to reject Draghi’s alliance.
Meloni was the youth minister in Berlusconi’s last administration, which ended ten years ago.
She was up in a working-class area of Rome and joined the Italian Social Movement when she was 15 years old.
At age 31, she became the nation’s youngest-ever minister. She was still living at home with her mother and preferred to drive her Mini instead of the government’s chauffeured vehicle to the legislature.
When she was 11 years old, her father, a tax adviser, left the family and relocated to the Canary Islands. She claims that this experience left her feeling inadequate, which motivates her to put in a lot of effort.
According to her staff, she has high standards, only writes by hand in capital letters, and requires that every document she must read be printed on a single page in Segoe font size 12, according to Politico.
Abortion has become one of her campaign’s most contentious subjects when Meloni stated she wanted to offer women who were on the fence about ending pregnancies an option.
We’re not going to change the abortion legislation. She said, “We simply want (women) to know there are alternative possibilities.
According to Bonino, who served time in prison for her efforts to legalise abortion in the 1970s, Meloni is likely to follow her word about not doing so.
She worries that Meloni may, instead, “advocate for the legislation to be disregarded,” which will exacerbate a current issue—the difficulty in obtaining abortion pills or locating gynaecologists who will conduct terminations.
Others, though, are supporting the probable candidate due to her firm position on immigration and promise to slash taxes.
According to Margherita Conti, 21, who spoke to Reuters, “I will vote for Meloni because I think that immigration and taxation are the primary concerns that need to be addressed.”
However, I will also do it because I am glad that Giorgia will be our female prime minister.
Last night, she spoke in front of a sizable throng of supporters alongside Salvini and Berlusconi, who is ill and hardly appears in public owing to apparent mobility issues.
Despite early campaign losses, the gathering demonstrated the right-wing candidate’s tsunami of popularity.
After posting comments on social media endorsing Hitler, a Brothers of Italy candidate in Sicily was expelled by his party.
Separately, during a funeral for a relative, the brother of one of Meloni’s co-founders was seen doing what seemed to be the fascist salute. The brother disagreed.
After tens of thousands of migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean Sea or transported there by smugglers’ boats, the right wing has been fighting unchecked immigration for years.
Both Meloni and Salvini have railed against what they see as a foreign invasion that does not share what they refer to as the “Christian” spirit of Italy.
Letta has also exploited the fear card in her efforts to make it easier for children of legal immigrants to get citizenship. In the bus campaign commercials for his party, half the graphic shows a somber-appearing Letta with his slogan, “Choose,” while the other half shows a menacing-appearing Putin.
Both Salvini and Berlusconi have praised the Russian president. Meloni supports giving Ukraine weapons so that it can defend itself.
How to safeguard workers’ employment is a top concern for Italian voters, who are concerned about energy costs that are up to ten times greater than they were a year ago.
But apart from Salvini, who wants to restart Italy’s shut-down nuclear power reactors, contenders have mainly fallen flat when it comes to outlining their plans to address the energy situation. Almost everyone is advocating for a gas price ceiling in the EU.
The risks posed by climate change did not dominate the Italian campaign. Letta’s campaign partner, the minuscule Greens party in Italy, is predicted to win a meagre number of seats in parliament.
After being fired, Letta moved to Paris to teach at the renowned Sciences Po institution. He went back to Italy to retake control of the Democrats in March 2021 because of the party’s ongoing internal strife.
When the populist 5-Star Movement, the biggest party in the outgoing Parliament, assisted in toppling Draghi’s administration this summer, Letta’s attempts to forge a strong center-left electoral coalition to oppose Meloni and her supporters were thwarted.
Steve Salvini
Prior to the rise of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party, Salvini, the 49-year-old League party leader, had been the undisputed face of right-wing leadership in Italy.
His party’s origins are in the industrial north of Italy. Even after mocking the populist movements, he struck a surprising agreement to rule with the 5-Star Movement in 2018.
A little over a year later, he manipulated events to remove 5-Star leader Giuseppe Conte from the position of premier in order to claim it for himself.
However, Conte outsmarted Salvini and struck a deal of his own with the Democratic Party, forging a coalition government and pushing the League into opposition.
Salvini promoted his harsh position against migrants while serving as interior minister in Conte’s first administration, notably those who arrived in their hundreds aboard smugglers’ boats that were launched from Libya.
Under his leadership, migrants rescued by humanitarian ships were detained on board the crammed ships for days or weeks because he wouldn’t allow them to rapidly exit.
He was charged with abduction by Sicilian prosecutors due to his policies. In one instance, he was declared innocent; a another trial is currently pending in Palermo.
Mr. Berlusconi
When Berlusconi founded his own party in the 1990s and gave it the moniker Forza Italia—a soccer stadium chant—he helped popularise populist politics in Italy.
The former three-time premier is not aiming for a fourth term but rather seeking a Senate seat since he turns 86 on September 29 and Forza Italia’s popularity has decreased recently.
He was kicked out of the Senate over ten years ago due to a tax fraud conviction resulting from his media conglomerate.
Meloni and Salvini’s two larger parties, which make up the right-wing coalition, are expected to be moderated by Berlusconi.
When financial markets lost faith in the wealthy media mogul’s ability to oversee his nation’s finances amid Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, Berlusconi’s previous administration came to an abrupt end in 2011.
Giovanni Conte
The populist, euroskeptic 5-Star Movement, which Conte now leads, shocked Italy’s establishment by winning nearly 33% of the vote to become the Parliament’s largest party in 2018.
Conte, 58, a lawyer with experience in mediation, was propelled from political obscurity to become prime minister in 2018. Conte was chosen as prime minister after neither the then-head of the 5-Star movement, Luigi Di Maio, nor the right-wing leader, Matteo Salvini, changed their minds.
About 15 months later, Salvini’s failed attempt to seize the premiership for himself caused Conte’s cabinet to fall. But Conte outsmarted Salvini by forging a new administration in which the Democratic Party, a center-left party, took the place of the League.
Italy was the first Western country to be hit by the COVID-19 epidemic early in his second term as premier. Conte imposed one of the harshest coronavirus lockdowns in history. But 16 months into Conte’s second term as prime minister, in January 2021, the alliance fell apart after former premier Matteo Renzi expelled his little centrist party.