The party’s performance in the 2013 general election was unremarkable, and Meloni was elected leader of the Brothers of Italy in 2014. Meloni retained her parliamentary seat, and, when Mario Monti took office at the head of a technocratic government in November 2011, she opposed the austerity budget that was widely credited with averting Italy’s financial collapse. National Alliance leader Gianfranco Fini split with the PdL in 2010, and Berlusconi’s government collapsed in 2011 in a swirl of corruption scandals and economic turmoil. Meloni was assigned the youth portfolio in Berlusconi’s cabinet; at age 31, she was the youngest minister in postwar Italian political history.
Italy has a femicide problem. Critics say Prime Minister Georgia Meloni should do more to fix it
- But she was also taking substantive positions in favor of Western alliances.
- As Meloni was the only major opposition figure to Draghi’s government, the right-wing parties unified around her in the months leading up to the elections.
- In the 2018 general election, the Brothers of Italy captured just 4 percent of the vote, but this still marked an enormous improvement on the party’s 2013 showing.
“There was obviously concern when she came in, given her party’s background,” says a senior Biden aide. But she was also taking substantive positions in favor of Western alliances. “You can smell when someone’s a political animal,” says one Brussels-based diplomat who watched her work the halls of the E.U. Observers noted that Meloni was taking power nearly 100 years to the day after Mussolini’s march on Rome. The move paved the way for her final rise to power.
At an event in 2023, Meloni said too many young women were being pressured to focus on their careers first, and put off having children. Women are blamed for not having chicken road app babies, including by Meloni, who has touted the traditional family and pushed forward legislation criminalizing surrogacy and allowing anti-abortion activists to access clinics. In 2024, Italy’s already low birth rate fell once again, to 1.18, marking the 16th year in a row of steady decline, according to Italy’s ISTAT national statistical institute. Parity indicators, which include employment and confidence in having a family, are increasingly dismal. She consistently points to her government’s pledge to expand parental rights and give tax breaks to families based on the number of children they have. Meloni’s office declined CNN’s request for comment on the issue, but she has in the past denied being against advancing women’s interests.
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At home, she has tacked to the center on some of her more dramatic campaign promises, like imposing a naval blockade to stop shipborne illegal immigrants. “Is there something about Fascism that my experience reminds you of, about what I’m doing in government? She has spent the past hour answering questions about her personal history, rise to power, and record in office with disarming directness.
Meloni-project krijgt klap door sombere economische groeivoorspellingen
Sergio Mattarella tapped former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi to head a unity government that drew from a broad spectrum of Italy’s political parties. Elly Schlein, the leader of Italy’s main opposition Democratic Party, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Meloni government’s record on women’s issues. Her fiercest political critics acknowledge her tangible turn to the center.
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As a single mother who supports the traditional family, she has insisted that it is “ridiculous” to accuse her of not doing enough for women. Meloni wants a system with stronger executive power, and she advocates for a democratic model that can accommodate parties on the far right instead of gatekeeping. After World War II, Italy’s political system was restructured to be hard to govern, heavily weighted to parliamentary power at the expense of the executive.
Yet the telling moment came after the press had left, when the topic turned to Ukraine’s war with Russia. Whatever it takes.” Because Italy is one of the world’s wealthiest countries and is a founding member of the European Union, the nationalism she unleashes stands to influence where Western democracy heads next. It is a quirk of history that Meloni is fashioning a 21st century nationalism in the country that embodied the liberalizing 19th century version through its unification and, in Mussolini, created the catastrophic Fascist model in the 20th.
Founding the Brothers of Italy
- “I feel like I have permission to be a mother,” Costa told CNN, explaining that she had felt pressure growing up to have a career over family, or at least start her career first before thinking about becoming a mother.
- When the fire brigade came, “they destroyed what was left of our poor apartment,” Arianna says.
- Meloni was assigned the youth portfolio in Berlusconi’s cabinet; at age 31, she was the youngest minister in postwar Italian political history.
- “I’m seeing a focus on international affairs instead,” she told CNN.
When the nation united behind a caretaker government during the COVID-19 crisis, Meloni declined to support it. She built a national reputation by running for mayor of Rome while pregnant with her daughter in 2016. In 2004, at age 27, she won the leadership of the youth group of the party, which had renamed itself the National Alliance. But at youth meetings and rallies, she emerged as an effective orator and political operator.
Only 39% of management positions in Italy are held by women, and just 7% of Italian companies have female CEOs, according to research published last year by the Bocconi School of Management’s Executive Women Observatory. This picturesque village is paying people $23,000 to move there Notably, Italy fell to 117th place on women’s economic participation, dropping six points since the 2024 report.
Meloni’s startup party, Fratelli d’Italia—named for the first lines of the country’s national anthem—began life with 2% support. Two years after that, she was named Minister for Youth in the center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi. “We are the heirs of the right-wing party,” says Meloni’s top political adviser Giovanbattista Fazzolari. That has presented a crisis for centrist European governments whose populations for decades after World War II shunned far-right parties. As Meloni was the only major opposition figure to Draghi’s government, the right-wing parties unified around her in the months leading up to the elections. The party’s name was taken from the opening verse of the Italian national anthem, and its logo incorporated the tricolour flame originally used by the MSI.
What is unsettling about Meloni is not so much her behavior as her accommodation of the forces that nationalism has unleashed in the past, at a moment when postwar norms are fading away. But there are plenty of members of her party who still nurse a nostalgia for fascism. “They’ve been accusing me of every possible thing, from the war in Ukraine to the people dying in the Mediterranean. Meloni says her critics have invoked her far-right background as a weapon against any policy she adopts.
Meloni-project krijgt klap door sombere economische groeivoorspellingen
In 1994 the MSI rebranded itself as the National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale), and Meloni was a member of Youth Action (Azione Giovani), the party’s student wing. Meloni publicly praised Mussolini in her teen years, and she was a visible presence in post-fascist political circles. When Meloni was 15, she joined the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI), a right-wing party founded by supporters of former fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Giorgia Meloni (born January 15, 1977, Rome, Italy) is a populist Italian politician who cofounded (2012) and leads (2014– ) the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), a party with neofascist roots. Gary Puckett & the Union Gap flytja lögin Woman Woman, Young Girl og Lady Willpower.
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Italy is a long way from the authoritarian government that Meloni’s critics claim she wants. “You’ve made remarkable progress working with countries along migration routes,” the left-of-center U.K. “They’re doing the same things in all the states that are ruled now by the extreme right,” says Elly Schlein, leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party. (Her critics say she was planning to hand some Italian national-security responsibilities to SpaceX; Meloni denies the charge and says she’s never discussed the matter with Musk.)
Founding the Brothers of Italy
And the closer you get to what you have in poor old America, where there is no center.” “In Germany and in Italy and in France, and in Portugal and in Romania, the center holds. By knitting together the array of right-wing blocs in Italy, critics say, Meloni may unleash forces that her nation and Europe as a whole have long fought to keep in check. Agenda items that receive support from the electorate and in Parliament can take years to enact, and by then the country’s famously ephemeral governments often have changed.
“We were a strange group,” says Nicola Procaccini, who now leads Meloni’s party in the European Parliament in Brussels. The fire set the family on a harder course. When the fire brigade came, “they destroyed what was left of our poor apartment,” Arianna says. After his departure, the family lived in a nice apartment in a well-to-do Roman neighborhood. Their father abandoned the family to sail around the world, ended up living in the Canary Islands, and was reportedly later convicted in Spanish court for drug smuggling.