Meet Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s First Female Prime Minister!
Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s first female prime minister, leading the country’s first far-right government since World War II. Her party, Brothers of Italy, won big, with various agencies estimating that it received approximately 25% of the vote.
Who is Giorgia Meloni?
Giorgia Meloni was raised by a single mother after her father abandoned the family shortly after her birth. She joined a local youth section of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) at the age of 15, which was founded by supporters of the ousted fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
In the mid-1990s, the MSI joined the National Alliance (AN), which later merged with a mainstream conservative group founded by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Meloni and other AN members left the group in 2012 to form Brothers of Italy, which was named after the first lines of the national anthem.
Meloni compared her party to the Republican Party in the United States and the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom in an interview with Reuters. Patriotism and nationalism are important to the party. She made her formal political debut at the age of 21, when she won her first local election. She was also Italy’s youngest ever minister when she was appointed to the youth portfolio in Berlusconi’s government in 2008.
Meloni’s iconic image was cemented by a speech she delivered in 2019. “I am Giorgia, a woman, a mother, an Italian, a Christian, and you cannot take that away from me,” she told cheering supporters.
In a speech to the Vox party in Spain earlier this year, Meloni summarized her pro-life and pro-family platform: “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death.”
“No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people, no to major international finance,” she added.
Meloni stated earlier this year that she opposes such policies not because she is “homophobic,” but because she believes that every child has the right to a mother and a father for “stability.”
“I lived [in] a family condition that [made] me see this,” she said of her personal experience growing up in a single-parent home.
Meloni has also made it known that she disapproves of the habit of migrants sailing to the Italian coast from regions like North Africa. According to NPR, Meloni announced in an August social media video that she would establish a naval blockade to patrol the Mediterranean and send migrants back to their home countries.
Meloni is chair of the right-wing European Conservative and Reformist group in the European Parliament, which includes her Brothers of Italy, Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice Party, Spain’s far-right Vox and the right-wing Sweden Democrats.
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