Tables turn for leader of Italy’s far-right party
Abandoned by her father and bullied by other children for being chubby, life was not rosy for Giorgia Meloni growing up in a scruffy working-class district of Rome.
Thirty years on, she is having the last laugh.
The leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy could, conceivably, become Italy’s first woman prime minister, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Brothers of Italy, the modern-day heir to Italy’s fascist movement, was then a fringe party commanding less than 4 per cent of the national vote. A recent Ipsos poll found it is now Italy’s second-most popular party, behind the centre-left Democrats.
Meloni, 44, has edged ahead of her main rival on the right, Matteo Salvini, 48, the leader of the anti-immigrant League party.
There is widespread speculation that Mario Draghi, the current prime minister, could resign and then become president, replacing the incumbent, Sergio Mattarella, who will retire in February.
That could trigger an election which would most likely be won by an alliance of parties on the right, including Brothers of Italy, the League and Silvio Berlusconi’s muchreduced Forza Italia party.
Salvini has said publicly that if Meloni takes just one more vote than him, then she should become prime minister.
“I’m getting ready to govern the nation,” Meloni said. “I’m ready to do whatever the Italian people ask me to do.”
The mother of one has come a long way from her childhood in Garbatella. Her father’s abandonment of her, her sister and her mother — he sailed away on a yacht and wound up in the Canary Islands — was deeply traumatic.
She was called “cicciona” — “fatty” — by the other kids and bullied. At the age of 15 she joined the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the post-war successor to Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement.
At 31, Meloni became the youngest minister in Italian history, serving in a government led by Berlusconi. She founded Brothers of Italy in 2012. It attracted just 3.5 per cent of the vote in in 2014 and 4 per cent in a 2018 general election. But policies including a naval blockade of the North African coast to stop migrants reaching Italy and incentives for couples to have more children, have seen its popularity surge.