Giorgia Meloni — The Shapeshifter

In mid-June, Giorgia Meloni was in an exultant mood while hosting theG7 summit, a gathering of the world’s most powerful nations, in thesouthern Italian region of Apulia. After days in which she presided overmeetings speaking English, French and Spanish along with her nativeItalian, one evening she danced the pizzica – a traditional Apulian dance –twirling and hopping to the trance-like rhythmic folk music often played atlocal weddings at a contagious 100 beats per minute. Meloni’s uninhibitedperformance expressed the self-confidence of an emerging political star,who, after a strong showing in the European elections just a few days earlier,was the hottest political leader in Europe. She took a selfie with Indianstrongman Narendra Modi, which she posted on Instagram to her 3.5 millionfollowers with the caption “Hello from the MELODI team.” For a politicianwho only a few years ago was stuck at the margins of Italian politics as thehead of a small rightwing party, Brothers of Italy, Meloni, at 47, appeared tobe on top of the world.

Meloni has worked hard to achieve the respectability that has eluded otherrightwing parties such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. She was received atthe White House by Joe Biden and has been accepted by centrist partieswithin the EU. This is all the more surprising given the openly neo-fascistorigins of her career. (Just before she was elected prime minister in late 2022,author Roberto Saviano wrote in the Guardian: “Giorgia Meloni is a danger toItaly and the rest of Europe.”) But in two years, she has surprised manypeople by her political pragmatism and shrewd ability.

The head of a party traditionally hostile to the European Union, Meloniinstead has worked closely with the European Commission president, Ursulavon der Leyen, and made necessary concessions to obtain EU funding for herdomestic agenda. She has emerged as one of Ukraine’s most reliablesupporters – surprising given the strain of pro-Putin sentiment traditional onthe European right – and convinced her ideological compatriot, Hungary’sViktor Orbán, to finally approve EU military aid to Ukraine. She managed tomove the EU towards her own position on immigration, greatly expanding aprogramme to pay north African countries to stop the flow of migrants acrossthe Mediterranean. With her hard-earned credibility, Meloni has worked herway out of the neo-fascist pigeonhole in which her critics tried to confineher.

After that joyful dance in June, the unstoppable rise of Meloni and theEuropean right seemed to stall. In France, where the National Rally appearedready to assume power, the left won a surprising victory. The rightwing Voxin Spain quit the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) – the centre-right coalition that Meloni heads – to join a new grouping of rightwing partiescalled Patriots for Europe. Von der Leyen returned to the presidency of theEuropean Commission without Meloni’s help.

On the domestic front, Meloni has had to grapple with the embarrassingpublication of clandestine videos showing members of her party’s youthgroup chanting fascist slogans, and making racist and antisemitic remarks.Meloni condemned the views expressed, saying they were “completely

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incompatible with Brothers of Italy – and with the political line we havearticulated for years”. Several of those featured in the videos were forced toresign.

For some, the incident unmasked “the true face” of Brothers of Italy, asGiuseppe Provenzano, a member of parliament for the main oppositionDemocratic party, said. Others, even in the opposition, felt this was grosslyunfair. “What these young people said and did is a serious matter, but I don’tbelieve for a minute that Meloni and her government are fascist,” saidRoberto Giachetti, a member of parliament for the centre-left Italia Vivaparty. He said the debate threatened to distract from the important issue:new laws that, he said, take Italy in an illiberal direction.

One of Brothers of Italy’s campaign slogans declared: “We defend God,Fatherland and Family.” The slogan was part of Mussolini’s propaganda, andgreeted with dismay by Italy’s leftwing press. But Meloni is careful to pointout that the slogan was coined by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of Italy’s foundingfathers in the time of 19th-century unification. The fact that it can be readtwo ways – either as an expression of democratic nationalism or as an echo offascism – is typical of a certain ambiguity that Meloni likes to maintain. Theterm some of her critics use is “doppiezza” or doubleness. At the moment,Meloni is having it both ways: a moderate in economic and foreign policy,and a rightwinger on issues such as immigration and family policy, workinghard to shut down illegal immigration and cracking down on gay couplestrying to adopt children.

Rather than worry at the question of whether Brothers of Italy are fascists, itis more to the point to see Meloni as a rightwing populist responding to 21st-century problems. She sees herself as defending Italy against the corrosiveand homogenising effects of global capitalism, a hyperactive EU bureaucracy,secular values and chaotic immigration. Her record on tackling illegalimmigration brought UK prime minister Keir Starmer (to the dismay of hisLabour party backbenchers) to Italy this week, to get her advice.Keir Starmer with Meloni in Rome earlier this week. Photograph: Fotia/AGF/Rex/Shutterstock

The economist Fabrizio Barca places Meloni as part of a neo-authoritarianturn in Europe and elsewhere that he says 40 years of neoliberal policieshave produced. The loss of manufacturing jobs, the paring back of socialprotections and growing inequality have created high levels of anxiety andinsecurity, which have made the idea of a strong leader – a “Caesar” who willtake things in hand – appealing to millions of people. Since these leaders,whether Trump or Meloni, are unlikely to challenge the economic status quo,what they mainly offer is a defence of traditional forms of identity.

Is the real Giorgia Meloni a closet fascist or a conservative democrat? It maynot matter. Meloni is, above all, a skilled and disciplined politician who hasrisen to power by staking out territory on the centre-right. She and her partyhave grown their vote share from 2% to 26% in a few years – and it wasn’t byappealing to the far right or promising an authoritarian adventure. She hasavoided teaming up with Alternative for Germany and the National Rally. Shelet Matteo Salvini’s Lega leapfrog her on the right, using much cruderxenophobic and racist language than Brothers of Italy – and she has stolenthe Lega’s more moderate voters.

Her top advisers – some of whom I interviewed at length – are intelligent andthoughtful people, very conservative politically, but far less extreme thanthe people around Trump, for example. At the same time, Meloni theshapeshifter presents different sides to different audiences. She isscrupulously moderate when addressing the EU and international audiences,but a populist firebrand on the campaign trail. When addressing a rally of theSpanish rightwing party Vox, she denounced the threat from “the secularismof the left and Islamic radicalisation”, and called for a defence of “ourcivilisation” against “those who want to destroy it”.

Establishing herself as a tough but relatable figure has been central toMeloni’s political persona. In the run-up to June’s Europeanelections, she asked voters to simply write her Christian name onthe ballot. “I am proud that most people continue to call meGiorgia. That’s very important and precious to me. For years, people madefun of me because of my popular roots: they called me a fishmonger, a fruitseller, a street kid because they’re so educated. What they never understoodis that I am proud of being a woman of the people.”

According to her autobiography, when her parents’ marriage ended, Meloni’smother moved her and her older sister, Arianna, from a fashionable Romeneighbourhood to a small apartment in the working-class area of Garbatella,where most people spoke Roman dialect. Her resourceful mother, AnnaParatore, supported the family by churning out romance novels. Her father,Francesco, moved to the Canary Islands. Giorgia and her sister would spendsummers with him, but she had no contact with him after she turned 12. (Helater spent several years in a Spanish prison after getting caught smugglinghashish from north Africa. He died in 2012.)

Meloni is also a single parent, having chosen to have a child with TVpresenter Andrea Giambruno while remaining unmarried and livingseparately. Last October, when Giambruno was caught on camera

propositioning other women – “Can I touch my package while I talk to you?”– Meloni dropped him that same day. Despite being a single mother and thechild of a single mother, Meloni is deeply committed to promoting thetraditional family, consistent with Catholic religious values.

Along with being the first female prime minister of Italy, Meloni is the firstnot to have attended university. Her real schooling came as a youngrightwing political activist. At 15, she joined the Movimento Sociale Italiano(MSI), a political party founded by a group of diehard former fascists afterthe second world war.

To understand what it meant to belong to the MSI in 1992, I met withGianfranco Fini, who was the party’s chairman at the time and guided itthrough a period of transformation from a neo-fascist or post-fascist partyinto a “modern and democratic rightwing party”, which formally changed itsname in 1995 to The National Alliance. I met Fini at his favourite cafe indowntown Rome. He appeared younger than his 72 years, tanned andelegantly dressed, wearing a pressed long-sleeve shirt and sports jacketdespite the fierce summer heat. His sartorial style was always part of hispolitical image. (Back in the 1980s his critics called him “a fascist in a double-breasted suit”.)

The MSI, at the time Meloni joined, was divided between older membersnostalgic for fascism and a younger generation who, after the cold war, werelooking to find another way of being rightwing that was anti-Communist andcritical of capitalism; a way of restoring national pride. Meloni’s mentorswere members of this second generation of the MSI who came of age duringthe 1970s, when political struggle in Italy lurched towards terrorism. Youthculture was dominated by the far left, and members of the MSI were oftentargeted for beatings. “We would wear motorcycle helmets when we wentout to put up posters or distribute flyers,” Fini told me.

Meloni joined an MSI section called Colle Oppio (Oppian Hill), whichfunctioned as a debating society, reading group and political party. ColleOppio occupies a very particular place in the history of the Italian right. Itsheadquarters were in an ancient ruin on the Oppian Hill in Rome. In 1978,one of its members was beaten to death by leftwing extremists carryingmetal wrenches. From then on, the section would hold an annualcommemoration for the young man, and others who died in those years. Thissense of belonging to an embattled minority fighting against a dominant,increasingly intolerant and sometimes violent leftwing youth culture lefttheir imprint on Meloni. She was joining a kind of counter-counterculture.

The MSI youth wore jackets and ties and kept their hair short while leftwingyouth wore long hair and jeans. They opposed the legalisation of divorce andabortion, and pushed the “war on drugs” and the reintroduction of the deathpenalty (abolished in 1948) for terrorists convicted of murder. “The MSI,”Fini stated at a party congress in 1987, “is antagonistic, transgressive, andanti-conformist, in complete contrast with the parties that make a businessout of politics.”

Colle Oppio became, beginning in the late 1980s, something of a maverickgroup within the MSI. They delivered a letter to the chief rabbi of Rome

apologising for the fascist antisemitic laws of 1938, held a conference onracism after skinheads attacked a young African in the Oppian Park anddefended a Catholic hospital against older members of the MSI who wantedto get rid of a ward for Aids patients. “There was a standoffbetween a rightthat wanted to rid itself of fascist nostalgia and a right that wanted to play onpeople’s worst instincts,” said Fabio Rampelli, who ran Colle Oppio and isnow a member of parliament and founding member of Meloni’s Brothers ofItaly.

Meloni was, at least initially, on the nostalgic side. In 1996, aged 19, she gavean interview on French TV in which she stated: “Mussolini was a goodpolitician. Everything he did, he did for the good of the country, unlike thepoliticians of the last 50 years.” She has chosen her words more carefullysince then.

Meloni has inherited from Fini a party that has explicitly renounced fascism.And yet, when we spoke, he could not help noting that she could barely bringherself to pronounce the word “antifascist” – an important omission, sincethe birth of Italian democracy was defined in opposition to fascism. When heasked her why, a few years ago, Meloni replied: “Because for me antifascistmeans the slogan ‘Killing a fascist is not a crime’.” What is paradoxical aboutthis, Fini said, is phrases like that were not common during the 1990s whenMeloni was becoming active in rightwing politics. “She has taken on thebattles of her older brothers who had direct experience of the terrorismperiod,” he said. Meloni, whenever she says the word “left” (la sinistra),cannot help but pronounce it with a tone of contempt.

“I am not afraid to repeat for the umpteenth time that I have no nostalgia forfascism,” Meloni writes. “On the other hand, I know the name and the storyof every one of the young people who were sacrificed during the 1970s on thealtar of antifascism.”

This May she made an important step, honouring Giacomo Matteotti, asocialist leader who was murdered by henchmen of Mussolini, on the 100thanniversary of Matteotti’s death, referring to Matteotti as a “free andcourageous man killed by fascist thugs” – without, however, mentioningMussolini.

Part of the search for a non-fascist identity led Meloni and other MSIyouth into the world of fantasy literature, in particular JRRTolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings novels. There is aphotograph of Meloni in her early days as an MSI militant, in thecostume of Samwise Gamgee, the faithful companion of Frodo Baggins. TheMSI youth group started holding Hobbit Camps in the 1970s, which havebeen described as a kind of Woodstock of the far right. The camps wererevived in the 1990s and Tolkien’s vision took on new meaning: Middle-earthresembled a pre-capitalist, medieval Europe of tribal groups fightingcourageously against powerful enemies. It seemed a perfect metaphor forItaly contending with the forces of globalisation, a newly empowered EUbureaucracy in Brussels and boatloads of foreigners suddenly arriving on

Italy’s shores. “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy,” Meloni hassaid.Meloni reading Lord of the Rings. Photograph:Instagram

In 1997, Meloni, aged 20, became thehead of the Rome section of theMSI’s youth organisation. In 1998,she started a political festival calledAtreju, named after a hero in abestselling fantasy novel, TheNeverending Story, by the Germanwriter Michael Ende. Atreju is ayoung boy who must use the powerof imagination and storytelling tobuild a new world of values anddefeat the nothingness that is spreading. “A symbol of the struggle againstnihilism, perfect for our vision,” Meloni writes. The festival, under Meloni’sleadership, has hosted rightwing figures including Viktor Orbán and SteveBannon, as well as politicians from the left. Last year, Elon Musk was asurprise guest.

In 2004, at 27, Meloni was elected president of the National Alliance’s youthgroup. She entered parliament at 29, and became minister of youth as adeputy president of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in 2008, the youngest inItaly’s history. She assumed a leadership role as a result of a crisis on theright. In 2009, Fini decided to dissolve The National Alliance and fold it intothe larger coalition that Silvio Berlusconi was creating, known as The Peopleof Liberty. In effect, Fini killed offthe party he had created by bringing theoutcasts of the far right into government. In 2012, when Berlusconi refusedto hold primaries to select a new leader, Meloni and several colleagues tookthe audacious step of leaving the coalition and forming a new party, which inmany ways recouped the symbol, the headquarters and many of themembers of Fini’s National Alliance.

Meloni originally wanted to call the party “We Italians”, but Fabio Rampellicame up with Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), which is also the name bywhich the Italian national anthem is known. Using the opening words of theanthem made a claim to be the party of national unity, much as Berlusconi’sForza Italia (“Go Italy”), had done, launched in a World Cup year.

One way to understand Italian politics in the past 30 years is as adesperate, convulsive search for a populist saviour to cure thecountry’s ills. In the early 1990s, Italy entered a period ofstagnation, becoming one of the slowest-growing economies inthe world. The financial crisis of 2008 hit Italy especially hard, and by 2022,Italy’s standard of living for the average Italian household was 12% lowerthan it was before the crisis began.

In this time, Italy has turned to one populist leader after another whopromised – and failed – to deliver radical change: Berlusconi vowed to be theMargaret Thatcher of Italy and make everyone rich; former prosecutorAntonio Di Pietro promised to root out corruption; the comedian Beppe

Grillo and his Five-Star Movement literally lifted a middle finger to Italy’spolitical class by staging a national “Fuck you” day; Matteo Renzi, a left-of-centre populist leader, promised to clear out Italy’s old political class – hencehis nickname “il rottamatore”, or the demolition man. Then there wasSalvini, who declared in 2018 that “for the clandestine immigrants, theparty’s over, start packing your suitcases”.

Italy has the highest level of political volatility in Europe, with up to half theelectorate changing party from one election to the next. Meloni’s party got4.4% in Italy’s 2018 election, and 6.4% in the 2019 European elections. But by2022 Brothers of Italy was Italy’s largest party, with 26%, propelling Meloniinto the role of prime minister. What was behind this sudden leap infortunes? The short answer is that Meloni’s was the only party to remainconsistently in opposition during a decade in which Italy tried to work itselfout of a period of protracted economic crisis. Meloni’s aides pointed out thatthe pressure on her to join a “government of unity” with 12 other partiesacross the ideological spectrum was enormous. But she held back, which puther in a perfect position to profit from pent-up popular discontent.

As Five Star found, being anti-establishment and channelling populardissatisfaction works much better in opposition. Meloni’s challenge is tomaintain the outsider energy while in power.Meloni looking at boats used by migrants in Lampedusa in September 2023. Photograph: FilippoAttili/EPA

The Meloni government must contend with a national debt at 137% of GDP,and a deficit of 7.2%. One of their first moves was to axe a guaranteedminimum income programme created by the Five Star Movement in 2019.Today, about 5.6 million Italians live below the poverty line – nearly 10% ofthe population – and the Reddito di Cittadinanza (citizenship income) gave a

small monthly minimum income, averaging about €580 a month, to 1.3million poorer Italian families.

Meloni’s people believe the guaranteed income is a handout that encouragespeople not to work, and “offers citizens no real prospect of a better future”,one of her chief ministers told me. Barca says that Meloni dislikes“universalist programmes”, preferring policies that benefit particularfavoured groups. The government has given tax breaks and subsidies tobusinesses and startups, to families with children, to working women and tobusinesses hiring younger and/or female workers. Officials insist thesepolicies are working, since unemployment has gone down from about 8.1%in 2022, when Meloni was elected, to 6.8% today.

Meloni opposes the introduction of a minimum wage. More and moreyounger Italians work in short-term jobs and internships that often pay aslittle as €1,000 (£840) a month. As a result, roughly 550,000 young peopleleft Italy between 2014 and 2023, according to the national statistics bureauISTAT, about a third of them with university degrees. Italy is facing deepstructural problems – lack of investment in R&D, failure to fund programmesfor training graduates – that would require considerable investments totackle.

Along with stagnating wages, in the past 30 years Italy has also become oneof the more unequal countries in Europe, according to the economistSalvatore Morelli of the University of Rome. At the same time, it has virtuallyeliminated inheritance tax. Before 2000, Italy taxed large estates at a rate of8%. Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in the country, reduced the rate tozero. The subsequent government raised it to a modest 0.8%, and Meloni hasno plans to increase them, insisting that Italians already pay enough taxes.

If Meloni’s economic policies are fairly traditional centre-right, hergovernment is much more hard-line when it comes to immigration,after a tumultuous decade in which boats carrying 1 million migrantsreached Italian shores and an estimated 28,000 died at sea.

In June, a Sikh agricultural worker named Satnam Singh had his arm torn offby a piece of farm equipment on a farm outside Rome. Because Singh wasemployed illegally, his employer, rather than calling an ambulance, left himby the side of the road with his severed arm in a vegetable box. Singh diednot long after. The horrifying death opened a window on to an especiallybrutal aspect of the Italian economy: an estimated 230,000 farm workers inthe “black economy”, living essentially like modern slaves.

Several days later, Meloni stood up in the Italian parliament and denouncedSingh’s “horrible and inhumane death” and “the disgusting behaviour of hisemployer … we must say it: this is the worst of Italy.” She called for amoment of silence, and when two of her ministers remained seated, she said,very audibly, in Roman dialect: “Raga’ arzatevi pure voi.” (“Guys, you standup, too.”) It was a clever piece of political theatre. Rather than face criticismfor the deplorable conditions of foreign agricultural labour, Meloni decidedto show that, despite her fierce opposition to illegal immigration, she had

compassion for the individuals toiling in the underground world of “lavoronero” (black work). In practice, however, Meloni’s government has made itmuch less likely for asylum seekers to have their claims accepted, and takenprotections away from many people who already had them.

Meloni has made a tougher stand on illegal immigration a staple of hercampaign speeches. Between 2016 and 2018, Meloni often spoke of “ethnicsubstitution”, the conspiracy theory also known as the “great replacement”in which obscure forces were imposing immigration on Italy to replace itsnative population with a low-wage foreign labour force.

Since becoming prime minister, Meloni has toned down her rhetoric. But, ashead of government, she has proceeded on two separate tracks – publiclyworking to stop illegal immigration on the one hand, while on the other,tripling the number of foreign workers Italian employers can hire. Hergovernment has also made it much harder to obtain asylum, driving morepeople into the underground economy.

Meloni has worked to get the EU to follow her lead on immigration. In 2023,Meloni and von der Leyen flew to Tunis to sign an agreement with Tunisia’sstrongman president Kais Saied that gives Tunisia €105m for “bordermanagement” and about €1bn in loans and financial support. In 2024,Meloni and von der Leyen worked out similar deals with Mauritania andEgypt, hoping to close offthe main departure points.Silvio Berlusconi, Meloni and Matteo Salvini at a rally in Rome in 2019. Photograph: AndrewMedichini/AP

The deals build on an agreement the Italian government reached with Libyain 2016 under a left-of-centre government. The EU has been paying andtraining Libya’s coastguard to intercept migrant boats, and paying them tohouse migrants indefinitely in brutal private Libyan prisons controlled byarmed militia groups. In Tunisia, Al Jazeera reports, “Migrants and asylumseekers are bussed out to Tunisia’s desert borderlands with Libya or Algeria

and abandoned with no money, mobile phones, food or water – in starkviolation of international humanitarian law.”

The Meloni government believes that their policies are beginning to work:the number of illegal immigrants reaching Italy by ship during the first sevenmonths of 2024 is down by about 62% compared with the previous year,although critics say the flow of immigration is simply returning to the level itwas at in 2021. While Meloni’s policy of paying north African countries tostop illegal immigration is not new, it is a far more comprehensive effort to“externalise Italy’s borders”.

What is new and more radical is the Meloni government’s plan to outsourcethe detention of illegal migrants to Albania. The Italian government isbuilding a facility in Albania to house immigrants who are unlikely to qualifyfor asylum status, from where they can be returned to their countries oforigin. “At the moment in which people are rescued at sea, we will make adistinction,” a high-level aide to Meloni explained to me. “Fragile individuals– women, children or people who are fleeing persecution – Syrians, Afghans –will not be sent to Albania. Adult males who come from a list of what we call‘safe countries’ – Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh – people immigratingfor economic reasons – in most cases, will be returned to their country oforigin.”

Having ditched the previous government’s unpopular Rwanda deportationscheme, Keir Starmer wanted to discuss the Albania programme with Meloni,and figure out how he might replicate it.

The Italian opposition spokesman for foreign affairs calls the Albania plan“useless, expensive and cruel”. It will house at most 3,000 people, many ofwhom will almost certainly be sent back to Italy. Its initial cost is estimated at€653m – far more than housing them in Italy. It is cruel, he said, because youare “breaking up families, based on an arbitrary criterion (young adultmales), and prolonging the suffering of people who deserve to be helped”.

One of Meloni’s senior advisers replied that the Albania facility will send asignal to potential migrants that illegal immigration will not be tolerated.

And yet Italy needs immigration. With an ageing population declining by400,000 per year, employers are pressing the government to let them hiremore foreign workers. Behind the scenes, the Meloni government has agreedto allow Italian employers to hire 450,000 foreign workers over the nextthree years, almost all of whom will be people who entered the countryillegally years before – the very people Meloni is trying to keep out.

What remains unspoken is something that Meloni has articulated in the past:that Italy does not want immigrants from Africa, especially those who areMuslim. “Every nation,” Meloni has said, “has the right to choose animmigration that is more compatible with its own culture. In Venezuela,there are millions of people starving – they are Christian – often of Italianorigin. So, if we need immigrants, let’s take them from Venezuela.”

Salvatore Fachile, an immigration lawyer in Rome, offers a cynicalinterpretation of Italy’s immigration policy, which he blames equally on theleft and the right: it is convenient for Italy to have a shadow army of millions

of foreign workers in a legally tenuous position. They may feel obliged towork longer hours at lower pay and put up with dangerous workingconditions. “You have 500,000 illegal workers who are completelyvulnerable and blackmailable by their employers and another at least 2million foreigners who are in a legally fragile position. This has, in turn,weakened the bargaining power of Italian workers, who now must competewith foreign workers to accept lower pay and longer hours.”

Meloni’s government has set about removing asylum status from those whohave already been granted international protection. Foreigners with legalwork contracts who are paying taxes have been made illegal immigrantsovernight.

Meloni’s immigration policy, in short, is a tangle of contradictions: tornbetween the desire to prevent foreigners from arriving and a desperate needto replenish the declining workforce; between its stated goal of restoringlegality to immigration and a drive to remove legal status from many foreignworkers while refusing to relax Italy’s highly restrictive citizenship rules.

Since the budget crunch and the EU straitjacket make it difficult forMeloni to undertake ambitious domestic policies, passing new lawsis an inexpensive way for her to establish her government’srightwing identity.

The first law Meloni’s government passed was one punishing the organisersof illegal raves in warehouses or abandoned factories. The new law wouldsend rave organisers to prison for three to six years. When asked why hergovernment was cracking down on a phenomenon not widely seen as athreat to public safety, Meloni replied: “It’s a signal I want to send: that thedays are over in Italy for people who refuse to respect the rules.”

Along with the law against raves, there was a law severely punishing anyonewho steered a boat bringing migrants to Italy. (Intended to punish thesmugglers, the law ignores the fact that they generally force the migrants tosteer the boats.) A law against encouraging anorexia. A couple of lawsdirected at the Roma: one aimed at parents keeping their children out ofschool and another punishing adults for encouraging children to beg. Therewere laws to punish popular forms of protest: occupying buildings and tryingto block major public works projects – a strategy sometimes used byenvironmental groups.

Another new law made surrogacy a “universal crime”, meaning that Italiancouples who travel overseas to adopt children through a surrogate mothercan be prosecuted and jailed when they return. The Meloni governmentrefers to surrogacy as “utero in affitto” (rent-a-womb). “For a mother to sellher own child is a crime anywhere in the world – a universal crime – so why isit not a crime if a mother sells her child before it’s born?” says Meloni’sminister of the family, of natality and equal opportunity, Eugenia Roccella.

In Roccella, Meloni has found a sharp-tongued advocate who is unafraid totake highly provocative positions in defence of the traditional family. She isagainst gay marriage, and proposed getting rid of civil unions, which were

introduced in 2016 and grant gay couples some legal protection. “I think thecivil unions law is … a lockpick for the progressive destruction of the family,of parenthood and defined sexual identity,” she said in 2017.

Roccella defends her rightwing government’s position using the traditionallanguage of the left: the language of freedom, of rights and of feminism. Sheinsists that the law against surrogacy is meant to protect women againstexploitation and reducing life to a monetised commodity. She insists that herresistance to adding homophobia to a bill designed to punish hate crimes is amatter of freedom of expression: mightn’t a vigorous defence of thetraditional family be construed as homophobic? Anyone is free to love whomthey like, she says, but her efforts are focused on helping what she sees as anembattled and vulnerable minority: mothers and couples with children.

The Meloni government has increased the number of daycare centres andcreated economic benefits for families with children and working mothers.Roccella points with pride to a small but significant uptick in femaleemployment. While it is hard to object to efforts to help families withchildren, it is also hard not to see Italy’s family law as discriminating againsteveryone else. Adoption is limited to heterosexual couples who are marriedor have lived together for three years. IVF is essentially banned, with anexception for heterosexual couples who can demonstrate infertilityproblems. Italian women who decide to have a child on their own routinelyleave the country to have the procedure.

Most of these policies – greatly influenced by the Vatican – were on the booksbefore Meloni took office. But the Meloni government has taken thingsfurther by forbidding mayors (who carry out civic duties and used to have adegree of autonomy) to issue birth certificates to children born of surrogatemothers, and to children born to lesbian couples who used artificialinsemination – a move that seems positively punitive.

To Meloni, the defence of the boundaries of gender and family are like thenational boundaries she is trying to defend against bureaucratic overreachfrom Brussels and the homogenising forces of globalisation. As she said in a2019 speech that has become extremely famous: “Now they want to removethe words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ from our identity documents. Because thefamily is an enemy, national identity is an enemy, sexual identity is an enemy… [But] we will defend our identity. I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am amother, I am Italian and I am Christian. You will never take that from me!You will never take that from me!”

In early September, Meloni faced a crisis of what used to be called familyvalues, when her culture minister resigned in what was almost acliched case of an old-fashioned sex scandal. Gennaro Sangiuliano, 62and married, was at the centre of a media storm when it came out thathe had made his mistress, Maria Rosaria Boccia, an unpaid consultant for“major events” at his ministry. Meloni initially dismissed the scandal as mere“gossip” but then accepted Sangiuliano’s resignation when it came outBoccia was recording conversations and even making secret videos inside theparliament building with Ray-Ban spyglasses.

Meloni’s relationship with the mainstream press has been contentious andcombative, leading to concerns about press freedom. In April, threejournalists of the daily newspaper Domani were placed under investigationby prosecutors in Perugia for a piece published in 2022 revealing that GuidoCrossetto, a co-founder of Brothers of Italy, had received millions of euros asa consultant to Italian arms manufacturers, representing a possible conflictof interest in his job as Minister of Defence.

“The minister threatened to sue the journalists but never did,” Domani’seditor commented. “He couldn’t because the information we published wastrue … instead he preferred to ask prosecutors to identify Domani’s sources.”For having published confidential information, the journalists could risk upto nine years in prison, according to the National Press Association.

In mid-July, the European Commission issued a report on the rule of law inItaly. It took the Meloni government to task on a number of fronts, andexpressed concern over the independence of the press. “Cases of physicalattacks, death threats and other forms of intimidation have been reported …75 incidents in the first six months of 2024.” This summer, four members ofthe far-right group Casa Pound were arrested for beating up a youngjournalist who tried to film a gathering of their group. Meloni and othermembers of her government have made use of Italy’s defamation laws topursue their critics. Meloni sued and won damages from a journalist whomockingly described her as being four feet tall. (She is 5ft 2in.) She also suedthe writer Roberto Saviano for calling her and one of her ministers “bastards”over their immigration policies.

The scholar Antonio Scurati was prevented from reading a text he hadprepared on the anniversary of the end of the second world war in which hecriticised Meloni’s reluctance to “repudiate her neo-fascist past” and hergovernment’s efforts to “rewrite history”. The host of a programme on Raistate TV who had invited Scurati on had her airtime drastically cut back.Political parties exerting control of state TV is nothing new in Italy, but manyjournalists insist that Brothers of Italy has taken things to a new level,referring to it as Telemeloni.

Perhaps of greater concern in the light of worries about Meloni’s tendency toauthoritarianism are two major constitutional changes her government ispursuing. The first is a judicial reform that would mean governmentprosecutors could not become judges and vice versa. This reform, Meloni’sgovernment insists, prevents cosy collegiality between prosecutors andjudges, and is the only way to guarantee a truly impartial trial. It continues alongstanding battle begun by Berlusconi, who waged war against the Italianmagistrature, accusing it of leftist bias. Italian magistrates fear this is a firststep toward placing prosecutors under the control of the executive branch.Nicola Gratteri, a prominent anti-mafia prosecutor, noted in a recenttelevision interview that the proposed reform “was a solution to a problemthat doesn’t exist”.

The mother of all reforms, however, which concerns von der Leyen and theEuropean Commission, is a proposed revision of the Italian constitution topermit the direct election of the prime minister. Under the Italian

constitution, the president of the Republic appoints the prime minister inconsultation with the parties who have won the most votes. Usually thisresults in the leader of the largest party becoming prime minister, but whenmembers of the governing coalition fall out with one another, the presidentmay appoint someone else and cobble together a majority with a differentlineup.

Meloni insists that this system is anti-democratic and acause of Italy’s political instability: there have been 69 governments since1945. If prime ministers were directly elected, she argues, they wouldgenerally last the full five years of each legislature, and be able to carry outtheir agenda.

Given Italy’s proportional electoral system, in which the largest party rarelygets more than 25-30% of the vote, proposals being discussed include a“bonus” in which the winning party would receive an extra share of seats toachieve a more stable majority. These reforms make many people, includingmany in the European Commission, nervous. Viktor Orbán has used “winnercompensation mechanisms”, similar to the one Meloni is proposing, tomaintain a supermajority in the Hungarian parliament, even when his partyreceives less than half the vote. Meloni – almost certain not to obtain thetwo-thirds majority in parliament required to revise the constitution – willneed to call for a national referendum to make Italy a presidential republic.Given their experience with fascism, Italians have generally resisted greaterconcentration of power, but Meloni’s popularity, and public frustration overa series of ineffective governments, make the outcome of a referendum farfrom clear.

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