Giorgia Meloni has a strong penchant for self-exposure, especially for an aspiring politician. The other day the head of the Italian post-fascists said to the magazine sette, her problem is serotonin, the hormone. “I have far too little of it, and that’s why I’m never relaxed.” It always seems to her that she is not up to the task. “I feel like I’m taking the Abitur exam – all the time.” On another occasion, she said she was full of fears. And force yourself to overcome your fears.
Scared? She rarely comes across like that. When Giorgia Meloni talks herself into a rage in public, which happens quite often, in parliament and at election events, her face distorts, her deep voice overdrives, and a torrential cascade of rants break out: against the “bureaucrats from Brussels”, against the “mass invasion of migrants” of course, against the “LGBT lobby”, against the “Islamization of our Christian identity”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/meinung/.”Okay, I have my style and my way”, she says. “But who can seriously think that I am a threat to democracy?”
Meloni would be Italy’s first female prime minister. But she of all people?
Well, the concern is justified, maybe even urgent. If the polls are to be believed, Giorgia Melonis Fratelli d’Italia and the entire right are poised to win the general elections on September 25th. She personally shows ambitions to become prime minister. It would be a first in Italian history: never before has a woman made it to the head of government. But “la Meloni” of all places?, right-wing intellectuals also ask. But that has very little to do with her being a woman, although her party claims that.
Meloni would not argue with gender either, she was never a feminist. “I’m not a panda,” she says of the quota system, as if support programs for women worked like animal welfare. The problem is their ideas, their longing for a presidential system, their proximity to Viktor Orbán and the neo-Francoist Vox party in Spain. Black shadows still hang around their party, they are the shadows of fascism.
Meloni grew up in Garbatella, a left-wing working class neighborhood in Rome. At 15 she joined the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, apparently because she wanted to get even with her communist father, as she suggests in her autobiography “Io sono Giorgia”. He left the family when she was little. Soon she was head of the radical youth department. At 29, when the party was already called Alleanza Nazionale, she became a member of parliament. At 31, Silvio Berlusconi made her Minister for Youth. So she’s been on stage for a while. But nobody would have thought it possible that she would be at the top at 45, about to make the leap into the history books.
In the 2018 general election, Meloni won just over four percent, a mini-power. It owes its rapid rise to a tactical decision: its brothers in Italy were the only party that was never in power during this legislative period. For many Italians, this is proof of coherence. Meloni capitalizes on all displeasure: In the most recent surveys, it stands at 25 percent.
She stole most of it from Matteo Salvini, her rival from the Lega. It is then he who wants to prevent them as prime minister. Along with Berlusconi. Both think that Meloni is unsuitable for the job, that she is jeopardizing the victory of the right because she is feared abroad – especially in Brussels. “Fuoco amico,” say the Italians, friendly fire. But Meloni prefers to complain about the “establishment”, the “foreign press” and the “all the mud against us”. The victim role has always worked well in Italy. Even if it is conceivably grotesque that the fascists are making the sacrifices.