His voice, grave and rocky, resounds in the open-air amphitheater, located in the middle of a former industrial site, a vestige of the time when Sicily supplied the world with sulphur. Giorgia Meloni is in Catania, this Monday, August 29, facing the late afternoon sun and the voters of this strange city, modern and ancient, alive and abandoned. Dressed in a sleeveless shirt and braided hair, the candidate for the general elections wanders, without notes and far from the desk, to explain her project for Italy. A mixture of harshness and charisma emanates from this little 45-year-old blonde, who screams into her microphone. On September 25, the president of Fratelli d’Italia (Fdl) could come out on top in the ballot and be called upon to govern the peninsula.
Two thousand admirers braved the heat to come and listen to him. Each, in their own way, explains the reasons for the recent breakthrough of their champion. Marco Celano and Giuliana Vergata are in their twenties; they return from honeymoon and will vote Meloni (“She does not change her mind, when many waver”). Nino Scarantino, 66, renounces Silvio Berlusconi’s center right for the first time (“Giorgia too is the moderate right”). As for Rovella Santa, a young 61-year-old retiree, she is one of those disappointed by Matteo Salvini, Meloni’s competitor on the far right, whose party participated in the government of national unity (“He hoped to weigh in when he entered the coalition, but in the end he didn’t have much influence”). At the time of writing, the right-wing coalition is 19 points ahead of the centre-left coalition in the polls. And, within the alliance which links Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini (Lega) and the Berlusconian center right (Forza Italia), the first weighs more than its two allies combined, with around 25% of the voting intentions.
If the opinion polls are true, Giorgia Meloni should recover, at the end of September, the mission to form a government, and consequently the possibility of occupying the chair of President of the Council. She would be the first woman to occupy this central position in Italy, but also the first issue of the far right. So, during this campaign as hard as it is brief, the candidate strives to reassure. “Excuse me, I got carried away,” she changes her mind after a few minutes of shouting against the left. “I try to be more collected and calm, but every once in a while I’m from Garbatella (a working-class neighborhood in Rome), and it comes out.” She resumes with a softer voice, like this campaign in which all her efforts are strained to reassure voters, the economic world and Italy’s European partners. However, Giorgia Meloni is not a centrist: the Roman has all the attributes of the far right, this word that is not used in the peninsula, for lack of a sanitary cordon. A woman with a radical background, gifted with politics, too, who embraced the margins long before aspiring to supreme power. Today, the forties threatens to make Europe take an authoritarian and conservative turn. First episode of our two-part investigation into the new Italian phenomenon.
A communist father
It is difficult to situate for a French reader Fratelli d’Italia. This political party was born in 2013 from the ashes of Alleanza nazionale, itself born of the Italian Social Movement, a post-fascist party founded after the war in line with the ideology of Benito Mussolini. In Catania, at the beginning of September, the three acronyms of the formations – MSI, AN, FdI – are moreover visible on the seat of Fratelli d’Italia: the party has erased nothing, including visually, of its heredity.
The facade of the headquarters of Fratelli d’Italia, in Catania, at the end of August 2022. We can see the acronym of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and of Alleanza nazionale (AN).
CVLC
These are the doors (those of the MSI) that Giorgia Meloni pushes through in Rome in 1992. The 15-year-old follows in the footsteps of her mother, a right-wing housewife who has been raising her two daughters alone since leaving the father, a communist sympathizer hardly present for his children. The young activist is fully involved in this party where those nostalgic for the Republic of Salò – the fascist state established by Mussolini in central and northern Italy between 1943 and 1945 – are numerous. “My second family”, she writes in her autobiography Io sono Giorgia (Rizzoli, 2021). It is there that she forges a political culture and meets many of those who still make up her inner circle. At the time, the young Giorgia had everything of an identity: resolutely anti-communist, passionate about fantasy literature and geek culture, she knew by heart the Lord of the Ringsmilitates day and night and mixes with ultra-radical profiles, such as the future bosses of Casa Pound (neofascist) or the Milanese far right Fare Fronte.
The 2000s are those of notabilisation. Giorgia Meloni was 27 when she took over the presidency of the Alleanza Nazionale youth movement; 29 years old when she was elected to Parliament and appointed vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies by her mentor, Gianfranco Fini (now shouted down for having diluted his training in a center right deemed soft). At 31, she became Silvio Berlusconi’s minister and received a very small portfolio with no budget (youth) but great media attention. At the time, she embodied in the eyes of all the conservative revival, far from the fascist tinsel.
Does she feel orphaned by a more radical right? In 2013, she founded Fratelli d’Italia. Return to a hard right, summarized by the triptych “God, Fatherland, Family”. Three words she cherishes. “Not a political slogan, but the most beautiful manifesto of love that spans the centuries”, according to Meloni. The young woman captures the spirit of the times and adopts a hybrid strategy: seducing those nostalgic for fascism with a clever ambiguity and at the same time embodying a modern right, openly claiming to be Viktor Orban’s Fidez or the Israeli Likud. The beginnings are difficult, but a dynamic engages. In 2013, Giorgia Meloni recorded 1.96% of the vote, 4.35% five years later… Today, it is five times more, according to voting intentions.
No one had seen her so high. In 2020, when The Times the class among the 20 “rising stars” of the year, L’Express devotes a first portrait to him. Since then, Fratelli d’Italia has largely overtaken the center right (whose electoral narrowing is identical to that of the French Republicans) and even capped Matteo Salvini’s League, nibbling political market share at each election.
Meloni takes advantage of Salvini’s weakening
It must be said that the latter made his work easier. The “Captain” has emerged weakened from the past four years, where his formation has participated successively in two government coalitions (with the 5-star Movement first, then within the technical government of national unity of Mario Draghi), contributing to blurring his image. His positions on Russia – opposed to sanctions, the Milanese is a fervent admirer of Vladimir Putin – and his successive reversals since the start of the war have contributed to eroding his credibility, including among his supporters.
Giorgia Meloni remained in opposition. It avoided the Russian trap by immediately and firmly condemning the invasion of Ukraine, and can count on a territorial network (inherited from Alleanza nazionale) that is more heterogeneous than its rival: Fdi records victories everywhere, including in the South, when the Lega still relies in part on the entrepreneurial middle class of northern Italy.
For a few months now, Matteo has been chasing Giorgia. Even on the migration issue, her rival has managed to steal her populist spotlight: Meloni proposes a naval blockade, with the army to prohibit migrant boats from docking on the coast, despite all international rules. A proposal that appeals to some Italians, tired of having the feeling of keeping the gates of the Mediterranean to themselves. Before his meeting in Catania, the two candidates met in Messina, east of Sicily. Time for a brief hug and a smile for social networks. But in private, the two allies hate each other. The first finds it vulgar and provocative, he finds it old-fashioned. Salvini would have liked her to promise him the post of Minister of the Interior, which he occupied between June 2018 and September 2019. Meloni refuses to commit to it, and, in secret, is working on a government in which his rival would be kept away.
Screenshot of Matteo Salvini’s August 29 Instagram post with Giorgia Meloni, in Sicily.
CVLC
In her race for power, Giorgia Meloni advances alone, surrounded by a very small circle of relatives. Her adversaries only talk about her. A question has monopolized the debate, historians and the political and media world in recent weeks: what is left of fascist in Giorgia Meloni? On the tails side, the question is anachronistic: the MEP was born thirty-two years after the death of the Duce. On the front side, there remains a symbol, that of the tricolor flame present on Mussolini’s tomb, which the candidate refuses to remove, including when the drawing becomes the subject of controversy during the campaign. There are also many nostalgic people in its ranks, regularly singled out by the press for having shown too much enthusiasm for such and such a dark figure in history or raised their arm in a Roman salute. For the rest, the candidate cultivates a subtle ambiguity with regard to the Mussolini regime. On the one hand, by repeatedly declaring that “there is no place for those nostalgic for fascism” in his training and, on the other, by refusing to strongly condemn the authoritarian experience. “Mussolini is a character who must be contextualized”, still affirmed the person concerned in 2006.
The debate monopolized the two months of campaigning, obscuring the other aspects of his program and their dangers. “Giorgia Meloni represents above all a populist radical right. Her party presents itself as respectful of the democratic game, but it is structurally nationalist, authoritarian and ethnocentric [NDLR : rejet des étrangers hors de la nation]“, recalls Caterina Froio, researcher at Sciences Po on extremist movements in Europe. The risk, the real one, therefore lies elsewhere. That of an “illiberal” Italy, which would sit on rights and freedoms, in particular those of women, sexual minorities and foreigners, that of a strengthened conservative axis, at European level, between Poland, Hungary and Italy, and of an authoritarian surge.
>> Discover the second part of our investigation, Thursday, at 6 p.m.