Meloni Wins the 2022 Italian Election

Andrew Medichini/Associated Press via CTV News

Giorgia Meloni and the Fratelli d’Italia, known in English as the Brothers of Italy, won the 2022 Italian general election on Sept. 25. Meloni and the Brothers of Italy claimed a majority of the vote and now lead a right-wing coalition with ally parties the League, Forza Italia, and the Moderates.

Fratelli d’Italia won a plurality, with 26 per cent of the vote, and the coalition overall holding 44 per cent.

As the leader of the coalition, Meloni was the poised candidate to ascend to the role of prime minister of Italy. The allies attended meetings with President Sergio Mattarella on Oct. 21 to discuss the new government.

The President must mandate any new government, and he offered Meloni the mandate to form a government after deliberation on Oct. 21. According to a spokesperson for the president’s office, Meloni accepted the mandate unconditionally.

Giorgia Meloni is the first female prime minister in Italy’s history. However, she has also been accredited with being the far thest right candidate since Mussolini by many western media sources, including Reuters, The Washington Post, and the BBC.

Since the start of the election, Meloni and her party have drawn international controversy over their conservative ideology and political roots.

“Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies!”, she exclaimed at a rally in Spain for the Vox party, in June 2022. The Vox party is a nationalist-conservative party in Spain.

In the same speech, she said ‘no’ to ‘Islamist violence’, and called for secure borders and a stop to massive migration.

Dr. Gianluca Passarelli, professor of political science at Sapienza University, told the BBC, “Meloni is not a danger to democracy, but a danger to the European Union.”

Dr. Passarelli goes on to explain that he believes Meloni wants a ‘Europe of nations’ and, in undermining European Union solidarity on key issues, she could indirectly benefit leaders like Putin.

In Meloni’s first speech to parliament on Oct. 25, she commented on the European Union, “We do not conceive of the European Union as an elitist club with first-class and second-class members, or worse, as a joint stock company run by a board of directors with the sole task of keeping the accounts in order.”

Dr. Passarelli explained in his interview with BBC, that Fratelli d’Italia is not a fascist party, but there are wings within the party that have been linked to neo-fascism.

In the past, there have been right-winged parties in Italy that have historical connections to post-WWII neo-facism, with the Italian Social Movement or MSI being the most prominent example, which was founded by Mussolini’s supporters.

The Fratelli d’Italia share the symbol of the MSI in their logo, the tri-coloured flame. This may be a nod to Meloni’s youth, as she joined the youth wing of the MSI at 15, and later became the president of the student branch of the National Alliance, the successor of the MSI.

Despite this, Meloni passionately rejects the links between fascism and her party. In a video message released on Aug. 10, Meloni said that the political right in Italy had “handed fascism over to history for decades now”, and stated that the right had unambiguously con- demned anti-Jewish policy and democratic suppression.

In 1996, at age 19, while campaign- ing for the National Alliance party, Meloni told French reporters, “Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy.”

This was a stark difference from Meloni’s first speech to the Italian Parliament, where she said, “I have never felt any sympathy or closeness to anti-democratic regimes. For no regimes, fascism included. In the same way, I have always considered the racial laws of 1938 the lowest point of Italian history, a shame that will taint our people forever.”

The video was released on Giorgia Meloni’s Facebook page and is called ‘My response to the international press to explain who we are and what we want to do’, where she speaks in French, English, and Spanish, and introduces herself and her party’s ideology.

She also critiques the Italian left for not condemning communism, ‘the totalitarian ideology of the 20th century that still is in power in some countries’, and accuses them of receiving generous funding from the Soviet Union for decades.

In her book I Am Giorgia, Meloni insistently separates herself from what she describes as ‘the cult of fascism’.