If you haven’t seen episode 1 of our survey dedicated to Giorgia Meloni’s trajectory, it is available here
In this last episode, you will discover how the favorite of the general elections in Italy on September 25th threatens to take Europe on an authoritarian and conservative turn. Second part of our investigation into the new Italian phenomenon.
Viktor Orban, a model from which she wishes to draw inspiration
The Italian accent is pronounced, his French hesitant, sometimes choppy. Giorgia Meloni had to try ten times this summer before managing to record a video in the language of Molière. Published on August 11, it is intended for its transalpine neighbors. A graduate in foreign languages, the Roman manages better in English or Spanish, which she speaks fluently, than in French, even if she can hold a conversation. For a little over six minutes, sitting at her desk, she unfolds her argument: “For several days, I have been reading articles in the international press (…) in which I am described as a danger to democracy, to Italian, European and international stability. I have read that the victory of Fratelli d’Italia would lead to disaster, to an authoritarian turn and the exit from the euro and other such nonsense. None of this is true”. Yet another attempt at “normalization”, this time aimed at reassuring European chancelleries.
Despite her efforts, the six letters of her name are scary in Brussels, where the Italian is no stranger. MEP since 2019, she has chaired the Conservative political party (ECR) since 2020. She rubs shoulders with the extreme right Spanish (Vox), Swedish (DS) and Polish ultra-conservatives (Pis).
Everyone knows that the forty-year-old took as a model a strong man from the Union, Viktor Orban, the authoritarian president of Hungary, forced to leave the European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021, because of his anti-democratic excesses. With him, Giorgia Meloni shares more than a sovereignist ambition for the EU, which she wishes to transform into a “Europe of the people”. The two leaders find themselves on a vision of the world, in particular when it comes to the family – pronatalist policy and access to abortion – or on the rights of sexual minorities, which they only approach under the prism “of LGBT propaganda”. “We have made connections [avec Orban] which will continue when we are in government. I would like Italy to work with the countries of the Visegrad group – Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – which, since 1993, have been working to safeguard the national interests of the single thought and homogeneity that Brussels seeks to impose on us”, declared Giorgia Meloni in 2018, during a trip to Budapest during which she did not hide her fascination for the authoritarian leader. The president of Fratelli then affirmed that she wanted to import from Hungary several measures, among which “the walls against the ‘clandestine immigration, the defense of Christian identity’ and its family policy. In Italy, women no longer have children: 400,000 births per year only, twice less than in France. A demographic decline that Giorgia Meloni wants to curb it by promoting the traditional, white, Catholic family.
All Italians heard her 2019 speech, in Rome, when she uttered this sentence, which has gone viral, from the podium: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian”. The speech, remixed by a DJ who wanted to parody it, will be a hit on the Internet. The sequence will paradoxically contribute to the popularity of the interested party, who will take up the title slogan of her autobiography, Io sono Giorgiaa best-selling book.
A profession of faith that she reiterated, in June 2022, in Madrid, at the invitation of her partners in Vox, the far-right neo-Franco party. “No to the LGBT lobby! No to Islamist violence! No to immigration! No to big international finance. Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology , yes to the culture of life, no to that of death, yes to universal Christian values”, she shouts in Spanish.
Access to abortion already restricted in regions where his party governs
Should we expect an open conflict with the European Union over civil rights? Italy has already been condemned twice by the Council of Europe on the issue of effective access to abortion. The situation should not improve under Giorgia Meloni, a fierce “pro-life” activist. In the regions where his party governs, in the Marches, in Abruzzo, in Piedmont or in Umbria, “economic incentives” (i.e. a check of up to 4,000 euros) have been put in place for those who give up abortion. . Access to the abortion pill has also been reduced. In some places, it has become almost impossible to terminate a pregnancy: more than 80% of doctors there declare themselves “conscientious objectors” and refuse to perform an abortion…
During the campaign, the candidate did her best to reassure. “A chameleon strategy, it embraces all the colors of moderation, avoids all divisive proposals and hides its extremist positions. For the moment, it’s flawless”, analyzes Claudio Cerasa, director of the center-right newspaper liberal Il Foglio. Rather than her Spanish-Polish-Hungarian friendships, Meloni prefers to emphasize her “Atlanticism” (she has a long-standing relationship with the most right-wing of American Republicans, including, for a time, Trump strategist Steve Bannon), and forcefully recall that she has always condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and supported the sanctions against Moscow. A position to put into perspective, because it is a minority within its coalition: its two allies have both had pro-Kremlin positions.
Emmanuel Macron’s fears
In Paris, the relatives of Emmanuel Macron do not hide a serious apprehension. “The subject is naturally a concern of the president”, underlines an interlocutor. His ex-close adviser Stéphane Séjourné, head of the Renew group in the European Parliament, was publicly alarmed at the risks of “a brown autumn” in Europe. “The prospect of seeing a representative of the far right come to power is undoubtedly very worrying,” concedes to L’Express the former Minister for European Affairs Nathalie Loiseau.
Because a victory for Meloni would not be without consequences for relations with our second economic partner. It is not certain that the Franco-Italian friendship, regularly crossed by storms, resists the arrival of the extreme right. Especially since Giorgia Meloni likes to use France as a scarecrow. In her speeches, she regularly accuses France of giving moral lessons on the subject of migrants, of threatening Italian interests in Libya, of conducting a neo-colonialist policy in Africa or of having wanted, with Germany, to put the Italy under trusteeship. About Paris, she affirms that “entire districts are governed according to Koranic law”, and is surprised that the French have chosen as their symbol the Eiffel Tower, “a heap of iron”, rather than Notre-Dame… Only the decadent poets – Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud – find favor in his eyes.
Emmanuel Macron, whose relationship with Mario Draghi was excellent, will therefore, in the event of a changeover, have to deal with a rival with software opposed to his. The enhanced cooperation treaty, signed on November 26, 2021, could remain a dead letter. “The other scenario is that, classic, of the reason of State. Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni would bury their quarrels of the past and would seek a few rare points of agreement, in a realistic way”, analyzes Marc Lazar, specialist in Franco-French relations Italian, in La Repubblica. Be that as it may, divided, the two countries would lose influence.
Giorgia Meloni distanced herself from Marine Le Pen…
From the National Assembly, Marine Le Pen and those close to her are carefully observing this transalpine election and the composition of the future government. “It can be the new starting point for a European movement, we are watching this election very closely,” Jordan Bardella told L’Express. Between the two blondes, the relationship is however complicated. If the deputy of Pas-de-Calais admires her trajectory and shares a certain number of proposals on sovereignty or immigration, the boss of the National Rally is less identity-based, less conservative than her Italian twin. It did not escape him, either, that Giorgia Meloni had refrained from sending him a message of support in 2022, unlike in 2017. De-demonization did not cross the Alps, and the label “friend of Le Pen “is difficult to bear. Today, Giorgia Meloni proclaims loud and clear that she has nothing to do with the National Rally, with which she is not allied at European level. She willingly pours out her differences of opinion on Russia with the RN, and rightly recalls that she caused the failure of the constitution of a large group at European level (which would bring together the ultra-conservatives of ECR and the far right of ID, an old Lepenist obsession). Forgetting in passing to specify that if she refused alliances between the two groups, it was above all so as not to find herself in the same formation as the Italian MEPs of the League, her rivals.
… But secretly meets the executives of Reconquête
In reality, with us, Giorgia Meloni would be more on the line of Eric Zemmour. A meeting took place with an emissary, in an undisclosed location, in the spring of 2022. Giorgia Meloni, his right-hand man in the European Parliament, Carlo Fidanza, and the European deputy Nicolas Bay (vice-president of Reconquest), have mentioned, far from the microphones, the possibility of bringing the Reconquest MEPs into the ECR group (today on the uncomfortable bench of the non-registered, after their departure from the RN). They were accompanied by Vincenzo Sofo, the husband of Marion Maréchal, also a parliamentarian, and unofficial intermediary between the two parties. “An interview to get to know each other”, we elude on the Italian side, where we do not wish to give more details. Eric Zemmour openly dreams of a Meloni-like trajectory for his training. The ex-journalist knows that when it comes to populism or the far right, Italy is often a precursor.