Giorgia Meloni - Can She Completely Shake Off Her Mussolini Heritage?

Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s prime minister in October 2022 at age 45, is the only head of government Europe’s far right has. To the surprise of many, to date she has operated in a surprisingly nimble fashion.

Umbilical cords

While the umbilical cord that connects her to the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini is indisputable, umbilical cords always get cut. If Meloni indeed has a project to rehabilitate Mussolini, she is keeping it under wraps for the time being.

Meloni focuses on small-dog whistles to the nationalist right. Catholic nationalist slogans like “God, nation, family” appeared in her speeches as she toured the global alt-right before becoming Prime Minister. 

Not a traditional Italian Mama

True, Italy’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1867. However, Meloni is an unmarried mother of one daughter which hardly conforms to the Italian Catholic Mama presiding over a large number of children.

She also opposes immigration which other countries like Switzerland and Germany have accepted to keep up their population levels.

Meloni diverts attention from her own failure to give birth to more Italians with anti-gay proposals like making it illegal for gays to register surrogate children as their own. 

Meloni has also ranted about the “LGBTQ lobby” as a threat to the Italian way of life. These attacks on gay parents is a vicious assault on children’s access to schools or medical services.

A language purist?

The Italian Prime Minister is also reviving a 1932 Mussolini decree banning the use of English and foreign words in Italian. Meloni proposes a fine of €100,000 to be imposed on a business or anyone who uses English words like “manager,” “CEO” or “business.” 

Someone has actually number-crunched and found use of foreign, mainly English, words in Italian official or commercial communications. That number has apparently gone up 773% since 2000.

Meloni, whose Engish is excellent, wants to imitate the Duce and purify Italian. By 1940, Mussolini was proposing imprisonment of up to six months for anyone heard speaking English or French. 

Food fascism?

It is not clear if Meloni will go that far, but her admiration for Mussolini’s more batty ideas seems limitless.

For example, she has installed her brother-in-law, Francesco Lollobrigida, whose great aunt was the film-star Gina Lollobrigida, as Minister for Agriculture and Food Sovereignty. The oddly named ministry has now banned vegan food like imitation meats or bacon made from plants.

This food fascism is hardly high politics, but Meloni is the latest in a long line of populist rightists, including Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini. 

They all emerged from the ruins of the politically, morally and financially corrupted Christian Democracy party that maintained de facto one-party rule in Italy for four decades after the end of the First World War. 

A nimble player of political games

Like Mussolini, who made and broke alliances with different parties before winning a majority in Parliament (which he then used to pass laws similar to Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933 to establish one-person rule), Giorgia Meloni has been flexible in using her Fratelli d’Italia party in parliamentary games. 

To become Prime Minister, she assured Mario Draghi, the then prime minister of an Italian cross-party government that she would drop all her anti-EU, anti-Euro rhetoric and fully support NATO and U.S.-led military support for Ukraine after the Putin invasion.

Desperately needing EU financial help

Meloni is a political realist. She knows that she desperately needs EU financial help from the new funds set up to rebuild EU nations whose economies were ruined by the COVID pandemic. 

She knows that, to her north, Germany is ruled by a social democratic-led alliance. Across the Mediterranean Sea, in Spain, the left is (still) in power, although elections are looming that may change that. 

In France, President Macron obviously does not share her politics. Nor does U.S. President Joe Biden. And the UK will soon shed its rightist and increasingly racist government. 

So Meloni keeps her Mussolini heritage firmly in the locker, providing just a few nods to the Duce on gay or trans rights as well as hostility to immigrants and refugees. 

Meloni’s stance on refugees takes hold in the EU

Opposition to accepting more refugees, other than from Ukraine, is now fast becoming an EU-wide phenomenon, including in some traditionally left-of-center Scandinavian countries. 

The only exception is the German government which is still feigning to hope for what it labels as a “European solution.”

But the willingness to accept more refugees is vanishing everywhere. That explains why the European Commission is building 2,000 km of frontier barriers and increasing its FRONTEX operations. 

The goal is to try and stem mass arrivals of migrants from or via the failed states of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – all states destroyed by U.S.-UK-French interventionism.

Schein vs. Meloni 

Italy’s main opposition center-left Partito Democratica (PD) has recently moved on from old-guard reformist leftist male intellectuals and political fixers.

As its new leader, it has picked a 37-year-old woman who is the very antithesis of Meloni or Mussolini heritage politics. She is Elly Schein, a gay, Jewish-American-Italian who grew up in Ticino, the Swiss Italian canton, and was educated in the United States. 

Her first political campaign was to help Barack Obama in 2008. Her influences seem to be progressive American democratic left thinking and practice. 

Her mentors are mainstream Euro Atlanticists like Romano Prodi, the former center-left European Commission president and Italian prime minister as well as Georges Soros, the number one target for latter-day anti-semitic anti-globalists in Hungary or Poland.

After her surprise win over a more established PD regional chieftain in March, her party saw an immediate lift in polling numbers. 

The duel of the two women

Meanwhile, Silvio Berlusconi, Meloni’s mentor, has been hospitalised with what appears to be terminal leukemia. In political terms, that means that Meloni’s position as unchallenged leader of the Italian right is secure.

The duel between these two women both under 50 is now one of the most fascinating in European politics. Mussolini’s political heiress versus a Jewish Swiss U.S.-formed lesbian leftist. 

Conclusion

Italians love glamour in their political leaders who are required to cut a bella figura. In Giorgia Meloni and Elly Schlein Italy has two of the most interesting political leaders in the democratic world.