Just before becoming the Prime Minister of Italy. Giorgia Meloni answered the question directly. Why was his party labeled not ‘fascist’ but ‘far right’? In an interview with The Spectator in 2022. Meloni, who would soon become prime minister and a formidable name in Europe, said that if she were a fascist, she would declare it.“I have no problem dealing with it,” Maloney said. “When we founded Brothers of Italy, we founded it as center-right, with its head held high. When I am something, I announce it. I never hide. If I were a fascist, I would say I am a fascist. Instead, I have never talked about fascism because I am not a fascist.”“Here’s an announcement I made in 2006, almost 20 years ago, which was published by an Italian journalist, a leftist journalist – and I said to him: ‘Mussolini made many mistakes: racial laws against the Jews, declarations of war, an authoritarian regime. Historically he also did other things that were good, but that doesn’t save him,'” Meloni said in the same interview.“There is no nostalgia for fascism, racism or anti-Semitism in the DNA of the Brothers of Italy. Instead there is a rejection of every dictatorship: past, present and future.” Meloni said, “I have always told my party bosses, even in memos, to take maximum seriousness at any expression of idiotic indifference because people who are indifferent to fascism are of no use to us. They are merely the useful idiots of the left.”
What is Brothers of Italy?
Brothers of Italy is a national-conservative and right-wing populist political party that is now the ruling party of Italy, after becoming the largest party in the 2022 general election. Giorgia Meloni is the current leader of the party.While the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, or FDI) was officially born in 2012, its political lineage goes back to 1946 with the formation of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded by former followers of Benito Mussolini. In the 1990s, the MSI was rebranded as the National Alliance (AN), a moderate “post-fascism” conservative party that publicly renounced fascism. The FdI inherited both its leadership origins and its official symbol, the Fiamma Tricolore (tricolor flame) from this lineage, although modern party leaders describe the FdI as a mainstream conservative party.
- In the 2013 general elections it got only 1.9% votes.
- In 2014, Giorgia Meloni took over as official party leader, focusing on social conservatism, euroskepticism, anti-immigration policies, and traditional family values.
- In the 2018 general election, the party improved slightly, gaining 4.3% of the vote, acting as a junior partner in a mainly right-wing coalition.
- In the September 2022 general election, Brothers of Italy shocked Europe by winning 26% of the vote, becoming Italy’s largest single party.
Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood, entered politics at the age of 15
Abandoned by her father, Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood. She did not go to university and started working as a nanny, waitress, bartender. At the age of 15, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI). She later said that she was motivated to join politics by a desire for law and order, greatly influenced by the 1992 Mafia murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.She quickly rose to prominence, founding a student movement called Gli Antenati (Ancients) to oppose education reforms and eventually becoming leader of Student Action for the National Alliance (the liberal successor to the MSI).At the age of 21, she won her first election in 1998 and became a local councilor of the Rome province. At the age of 29, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian Parliament) and was immediately named its youngest vice-president. He also qualified and worked as a journalist.When media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi returned to power with a right-wing coalition, he appointed 31-year-old Meloni as youth minister in 2008. She became the youngest minister in the history of unified Italy.When Berlusconi’s government collapsed in 2011 due to the financial crisis, Meloni refused to support the subsequent technocratic European-led government. Seeing traditional right-wing parties compromising their values, they took a big gamble in 2012 and co-founded Brothers of Italy.For almost a decade, he ran a marginal party that struggled to stay above 4% in national elections, but he was ultimately rewarded for his political tenacity as his party became the largest party in the 2022 elections.