Giorgia Meloni’s quote of the day: “If I were a fascist, I would say I am a fascist. I never hide’
Just before she became Prime Minister of Italy. Georgia Meloni answered this question head-on. Why her party is labeled “far right” rather than “fascist”. In a 2022 interview with The Spectator. Meloni, who is about to become prime minister and is well-known in Europe, said that if she were a fascist, she would declare it.“I don’t have any problem facing this,” Maloney said. “When we founded the Italian Brotherhood, we founded it as center-right, with our heads held high. When I make a difference, I declare it. I never hide it. If I were a fascist, I would say I am a fascist. On the contrary, I never talk about fascism because I am not a fascist.”“This is a statement I made in 2006, almost 20 years ago, to an Italian journalist, a left-wing journalist, and I told him: ‘Mussolini made all kinds of mistakes: racial laws against the Jews, declaration of war, dictatorship. He did other good things historically, but that doesn’t save him,” Meloni said in the same interview.“In the DNA of the Italian Brotherhood there is no nostalgia for fascism, racism or anti-Semitism. On the contrary, they reject every dictatorship: past, present and future.” Meloni said: “I always tell my party leaders, even in memoranda, to take the harshest stance against any silly manifestations of nostalgia, because those who are nostalgic for fascism are of no use to us. They are just useful idiots of the left.”
What are Italian Brothers?
The Brothers of Italy is a nationally conservative, right-wing populist party that will become the largest party in the 2022 general election and is currently the ruling party in Italy. Georgia Meloni is the current leader of the party.Although the Fratelli d’Italia, or FdI, was officially born in 2012, its political lineage can be traced back to the 1946 founding of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded by former followers of Benito Mussolini. In the 1990s, the MSI changed its name to the National Alliance (AN), a moderate “post-fascist” conservative party that publicly renounced fascism. The FdI inherits the leadership core and official symbol of this lineage – the fiamma tricolore (tricolor flame), although modern party leaders describe the FdI as a mainstream Conservative party.
- In the 2013 election, it received only 1.9% of the vote.
- In 2014, Giorgia Meloni took over as official party leader, focusing on social conservatism, Euroscepticism, anti-immigration policies and traditional family values.
- In the 2018 general election, the party made slight gains, receiving 4.3% of the vote, mainly as a junior partner in the right-wing coalition.
- In the general election in September 2022, the Italian Brotherhood shocked Europe with 26% of the vote, becoming the largest single political party in Italy.
Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood and entered politics at 15
Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood after being abandoned by her father. She didn’t go to college and started working as a nanny, waitress, and bartender. At the age of 15, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth organization of the Italian Social Movement (MSI). She later said she entered politics out of a desire for law and order, deeply influenced by the 1992 Mafia assassinations of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.She rose quickly through the ranks, founding a student movement called “Gli Antenati” (The Ancestors) to protest educational reforms, and eventually became the leader of the “National Union Student Action” (MSI’s moderate successor).In 1998, at the age of 21, she won her first election and became a local councilor in the province of Rome. At the age of 29, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian parliament) and was immediately appointed the youngest vice-president ever. She also qualified and worked as a journalist.In 2008, when media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi returned to power with a right-wing alliance, he appointed 31-year-old Meloni as youth minister. She became the youngest minister in the history of unified Italy.In 2011, when Berlusconi’s government collapsed due to the financial crisis, Meloni refused to support the European-led technocratic government that followed. Seeing traditional right-wing parties undermine her own values, she took a high-stakes gamble in 2012 by co-founding the Brothers of Italy.Her fringe party struggled to stay above 4% in national polls for nearly a decade, but her political persistence paid off when her party emerged as the largest party in the 2022 election.
