If some witnesses are to be believed, when she entered the overwhelmingly solemn Palazzo Chigi on October 23, 2022, to replace Mario Draghi, a technocrat with a European-wide stature, Giorgia Meloni was more than intimidated. She was petrified. In any case, the images of this handover of power – the first in Italy between a man and a woman – have preserved the trace of her black-clad silhouette, short and stiff, moving hesitantly beneath these far too high walls, more than 400 years of testimony to Rome’s past power.
Indeed, she had been in politics since the summer of her 15th birthday, in 1992. She became the youngest vice president of the Chamber of Deputies in 2006, then the youngest minister in Italian history in 2008. And on this day in October 2022, she became the first female council president and, above all, the first representative of her camp, which had emerged from the distant fascist fold, to accede to power in Italy.
But the world from which this professional activist who presents loyalty to the past as one of her cardinal values came, her “minority world” as she likes to describe it, was shaped by marginality, inhabited by fantasies of persecution, obsessed by the aesthetics of noble defeat and despised and then feared by the elites. Now, and with it, she was to occupy the halls of power. In five years, the share of the vote won by her party, Fratelli d’Italia, the latest incarnation of a long political genealogy dating back to Benito Mussolini’s regime, rose from 4.35% to 26%.
Solid coalition
Two years on, Meloni no longer needs to be intimidated. She has conquered her place in Europe and beyond. Her coalition is holding firm, despite occasional skirmishes between her allies in the far-right Lega and the center-right Forza Italia. Neither has any interest in seriously rocking the government, and their skirmishes never reach the prime minister. For their part, the opposition has proved incapable of presenting a serious alternative.
Barring a cataclysmic event – unpredictable but never impossible – Meloni can concentrate on her fundamental objective: staying put. She intends to break for good the cycle of political reversals, dramatic turns of events, fall-outs and majority recompositions that Italian democracy has long been accustomed to. “Giorgia Meloni has stabilized the electorate and ended the populist turbulence of the 2010s,” said Giovanni Orsina, head of the political scientist department at Luiss Guido Carli University.
Against a backdrop of high abstention rates, her party won 28.8% of the vote in June’s European elections, more than in the 2022 legislative elections. With security and conservative policies, conflicts with the media and more than ever with a legal system accused of being politicized, she intends to continue her race toward a new era, even if it means moving away from the image of moderation initially projected.
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Publish date : 2024-10-23 20:00:00
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