Wang Yu, a special writer for The Paper
"We are proud of who we are and what it stands for!" Standing in front of the large screen of the Star-Spangled Banner, a blonde girl raised her arms and shouted. Despite her Italian accent, her English is fluent and crisp, and her voice is full of air.
"This is a time when everything that our identity stands for is under attack: our individual freedoms are under attack, our rights are under attack, our national sovereignty is under attack, the prosperity and well-being of our families are under attack, the education of our children is under attack... In the face of this situation, people understand that in this day and age, the only way to rebel is to defend our identity, and the only way to rebel is conservatism! ”
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in May this year, after the appearance of former US President Trump and other right-wing stars, the atmosphere was ignited by Georgia Meloni, a rising star of conservative politics from across the ocean.
Meloni speaks at the 2022 CPAC conference in Orlando, USA. The images in this article are from the Internet
With exquisite makeup and a sleek white waist-pinched suit, no one seems to be able to resist the Italian woman's glamour offensive — a figure who was not long ago outside the mainstream of Italian politics, who has repeatedly attended the CPAC conference as president of the European Union of Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and has been praised by Trump's "national teacher" Bannon.
"Like Thatcher, she's going to face opposition — but like Thatcher, she's going to win." In an interview with The Times a few days ago, Bannon unabashedly expressed his confidence in Meloni. In the Italian parliamentary elections on September 25, Meloni led the far-right Italian Brotherhood to victory, and she is also expected to become the first female prime minister in Italian history.
"For many years, I have said that Italy is the global laboratory of the populist nationalist revolution." The far-right "godfather" Bannon asserted, "The world needs to follow Méloni very closely and realize that she will transform Italy from a defeated, stagnant, bankrupt chaotic country into Europe's most powerful economy, providing jobs and prosperity for all." ”
The victory of the center-right coalition on the 25th focused the attention of the world's right-wing movement on Italy. There are many voices in the international media, especially in the British and American media, comparing Méloni to France's Marina Le Pen, and many headlines directly refer to her as "the Le Pen of Italy". Women in the same right-wing camp who carry the banner of conservative values, the two naturally arouse the association of observers. However, Meloni's rise to prominence was first and foremost rooted in Italy's own political soil.
"Family, God and the Motherland"
In Italy, Méloni's "popularity" is largely due to an "assist" by a left-wing political enemy.
It was a Sunday in October 2019 when Italy's right-wing parties held a public rally. Salvini, the leader of the Coalition Party, who had lost his post as interior minister, had hoped to revive his momentum and show that he was still the "backbone" of the Italian right. Another right-wing tycoon, former Prime Minister Berlusconi, is planning to integrate the traditional right-wing camp, and he also wants to compete for a voice.
Rome's Piazza Giovanni, where left-wing political events are often held, is home to tens of thousands of right-wing supporters. Unlike Salvini, who is regarded as the "Milanese", Rome is the home of Meloni. It was Meloni's turn to speak, and with a somewhat jerky smile on her face, she joked with the audience in a gentle and slow tone, trying to open the scene in such an affinity way.
Gradually, the conversation moved from attacking specific parties (the Five Star Movement) and other left-wing forces to a more general level of identity, and Meloni picked up her signature machine-gun political style, with a few short and concentrated sentences like bullets that pointed entirely to several points that right-wing supporters were collectively opposed:
"The family is their enemy, the national identity is their enemy, and the gender identity is their enemy. They want to turn us into parent 1, parent 2, same-sex parents, citizen X, in short, a string of codes. But we're not a line of numbers, we're people, so we protect our identity. I, Georgia, am a woman, a mother, an Italian, and a Christian! You don't want to take away these identities!" ”
Not only the choice and use of short and powerful sentences, her appearance is also part of the careful preparation. In the memory of Luciano Ceres, a professor at the University of Grenoble in France, in 2008, Meloni was a young minister in Berlusconi's government, when she was still a somewhat fat, unadorned young woman. Now, however, the 45-year-old has lost weight, dyed her brown hair golden, and changed into a colorful suit that is not heavy in Merkel's style.
"On the far right, if women are young and beautiful, they are appreciated – they are impressed by superficial beauty." Cheres, author of Political Portraits: Leadership, Image and Power, told New European, "So she had to improve her appearance." ”
At that rally, few mainstream, serious political commentators and the media noticed Meloni's confession. After a day or two, it was some left-wing political party background self-media users and UP owners who intervened, so that the video achieved "phenomenon-level dissemination". To satirize Meloni, they paired the speech with comical background music and the headline "I Am Georgia" and began various retweets.
Subsequently, the Meloni camp began to adhere to the "black powder is also powder" attitude, because this may be conducive to shaping the image of Meloni grounded. Instead of rebuttaling, its supporters continued to spread the video, eventually making it widely known on various platforms.
In Italy, where politics is fragmented and voters have long held grudges against politics, the electoral prominence certainly won't rely on just one public speech or one popularity on TikTok.
For many years, Italy's right-wing dominant force was either Berlusconi's "Power of Italy" party, which represented the traditional middle-aged, white, affluent class of men, middle-aged, white, and wealthy, and the latter, which was partly rooted in northern Italy's regionalism, and then added an anti-immigrant color to the right-wing tide in Europe. They all seem to be struggling to properly represent the "right-wing basic disk" of Italy as a whole. In contrast, the "Italian Brotherhood" party with the color of fascist mass mobilization and the personal style of "close to the people", and Meloni, who had experience in Berlusconi's cabinet, became a more effective combination.
Grassroots roots, groundedness, a mixture of political perspectives and personal early years are the very impressions Meloni left on readers in his autobiography "I Am Georgia," published last year. The book sold 150,000 copies after its launch, making it a best-selling product of its kind in Italy.
In the book, Meloni talks about how his childhood experiences have influenced his political views, as if there were no secrets in his personal experiences that the public could see. At the same time, it conveys another meaning: as a female politician, she never clearly separates political ideology from her family, feelings, and spiritual (religious) life, but instead shapes and achieves each other. Therefore, the family, God, and the motherland were always closely linked to her.
Left-wing family background
Meloni was born in Rome in 1977 to parents from Sardinia and Sicily. Although born in a well-known wealthy district in northern Rome, her family moved to Garbatella, a then-impoverished neighborhood in the south of the city, when she was only three years old. In recent years, it has gradually become considered an area of bourgeois gathering, but in the year Garbatella was still a place of popular life, with a large number of pre-World War II buildings still in use, and the Italian Communist Party and other left-wing organizations frequently active here.
The left-leaning Méloni father was a senior accountant, and soon he left his wife and two children to work in the field. This experience was of course also repeatedly rendered in Meloni's autobiography, stimulating her to "keep working" ever since. The young Meloni was gradually attracted by his father's opposing political views and began to participate in activities organized by the "Italian Social Movement" (ISM). It was a political movement with fascist overtones, with some founding members directly supporting Mussolini's regime during World War II, and even firmly siding with Mussolini after Italy's surrender in 1943.
It was in the youth organization "Youth Front" of the "Italian Social Movement" that Meloni gradually accumulated political capital, growing from various political "playing tickets" activities in secondary schools to becoming a real politician. In 1996, at the age of 19, Meloni gave a television interview to French media and declared that he admired Mussolini because he "did everything for Italy." By 1998, just upon turning 21, Meloni had become a regional councillor in Rome.
At that time, the "Italian social movement" was undergoing a slow but well-directed process of "moderation", beginning to distance itself from its fascist ideological sources in order to integrate into the Italian mainstream. Meloni is naturally in this context. She first approached Berlusconi and then became a member of his government, and then in 2012 decided to form a new party of her own, forming the "Italian Brotherhood" party.
Meloni (front row, first from right) served in the Berlusconi government.
In the years that followed, the Italian Brothers were merely a marginal opposition party in the opposition and not mainstream in the far-right camp. However, the Italian Brotherhood under Meloni was intent on fostering close ties with the Catholic Church and conservatives in the United States.
Bannon, a "discerning eye", has long supported Meloni and the Italian fraternal party. In recent years, Bannon has passed through Rome almost every time he travels to Europe, and every time he stops in Rome, he has to arrange a meeting with Meloni.
In 2018, Bannon described to The Guardian how he worked with Italy's fraternal party — one of the oldest fascist parties he called it. At that time, he predicted that over time, the party led by Meloni would "join one of the mainstream far-right movements."
Bannon announced in 2017 that he would launch a "The Movement" plan to try to unite right-wing fronts across Europe and build a populist "super-organization." Figures on his target list include Brexit activist Farach, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán and, of course, Meloni.
Bannon was photographed with Meloni at the events of the Italian Brotherhood Youth Branch in 2018
In a 2018 interview with The Daily Beast, Meloni described Bannon as an "ally" in her career. "Because we share a common ideal, we need to hear what he has to say." Meloni was unabashed about revealing her close ties to Bannon, and even though Bannon's "Great Movement" eventually collapsed, some European parties were unwilling to "make peace" with political forces from the United States.
In 2020, Meloni was elected president of the European Union of Conservatives and Reformists, a coalition made up of dozens of European far-right parties, including Poland's Law and Justice Party (PiS). Despite his populist background and grassroots self-style, Meloni has succeeded in creating an "international face" for himself. She slammed Mexican immigrants in English for "invading" the United States, comparing it to Africans in Italy. Last year, in Spain, she was invited to a congress of the far-right party Vox, where she described herself in fluent Spanish as "the mother and woman who defends Europe from globalist elites".
Now, in the context of a new wave of refugees triggered by the Ukraine crisis, Meloni is naturally not absent, once again making immigration and identity a major issue in the election campaign. However, in her current discourse, the issue of immigration management has been overshadowed with a layer of civilization, and the distinction between the original North African refugees and the current Ukrainian refugees has been further argued by her to further argue the "European" and Catholic nature of Italy.
"Let the Navy bring the migrants back to Africa"
The small coastal town of Ventimiglia in northern Italy is popular with tourists, but at the same time, the town has been a "waiting room" for immigrants for more than a decade – most of them smuggled from the Middle East and Africa to Europe by boat and trekked all the way from southern Italy to France, waiting to cross the border to France. With Meloni's conservative coalition pledging to crack down on illegal immigrants on a massive scale, there are fears of a new humanitarian crisis in Ventimiglia.
According to the Guardian, local philanthropists say about 100 migrants have arrived homeless every day since a committee of Italy's Brotherhood, Alliance and Force Italia party fulfilled its pledge to voters to close Ventimiglia's only shelter (Roja's sanctuary), according to the Guardian. Mayor Cateno Sculino, backed by a tripartisan party, even ordered the closure of fountains used for cleaning by migrants and homeless. Although Sculino was forced to resign in June after failing to win a vote of confidence, the trend has become irreversible with Méloni's strong rise.
Father Rito Alvarez was deeply aware of the changes in the political climate in recent years, he had provided shelter to hundreds of people through the local church of San Antonio, but later, the church was shut down by the Italian government. "We helped many vulnerable people, but we were forced to shut down for political reasons." Rito told the outlet, "People had no choice but to Roa Sanctuary, but it was also later shut down and people were abandoned. ”
Reto is concerned about the situation in this year's elections. He recalled the tough measures Salvini took during his 2018-2019 tenure as interior minister, including the blockade of migrant rescue boats, the closure of shelters and the deprivation of work permits for migrants. At the same time, Meloni, who may become prime minister, said: "Let the navy bring the migrants back to Africa!" ”
On August 22, Meloni tweeted a video of police stopping a 27-year-old Guinean asylum seeker from raping a Ukrainian woman. "One cannot remain silent in the face of the brutal sexual violence perpetrated by an asylum seeker against Ukrainian women in Piacenza in broad daylight." Meloni wrote, "Embrace this woman and I will do everything I can to restore safety to our city." ”
The tweet caused an uproar in Italian public opinion. Cultural celebrities accuse Meloni of "exploiting victims of sexual violence," while her political opponents have slammed the "indecent means" for "dirty electoral ends." Finally, the video was deleted by Twitter.
"We have to manage immigration to protect those who host migrants and those who really need us to welcome them." In a speech in Rome, the last leg of the campaign, Méloni promised voters aloud that it was clear that in Méloni's narrative, Ukrainian talent was "the one who really needs to be welcomed", and that immigrants from the Middle East and Africa could only pose security risks and cultural erosion to Italy.
The graffiti of Roman street artist Harry Greb criticizes Italian politicians such as Meloni and Salvini on the issue of immigration.
Although Méloni's political platform incorporates populist rhetoric familiar to the far right about immigration, patriotism, and cultural boundaries, her pro-Ukrainian stance on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has set her apart from other European nationalists.
In fact, there are about 250,000 Ukrainians in Italy working in professions such as nursing and nanny, and they have close personal ties with many Italians. The Italian Brotherhood clearly saw this signal: many ordinary Italians were sympathetic to the Ukrainians.
It is impossible to know whether Méloni's moderate stance of sympathy for Ukrainians was tactical or motivated by moral principles from the perspective of a "Christian mother", but Méloni's "gentle blow" on Ukraine put Salvini, an ally who had "started" on the refugee issue, into a dilemma. To avoid putting himself on the far right side of the political spectrum, he began to change his rhetoric, even allowing coalition party minibus convoys to "go and meet Ukrainian families."
But on the fight against Mediterranean migration, the right-wing coalition has reached an agreement. According to Italy's "Evening Post" report, in the recent election campaign, Méloni has become increasingly cautious about immigration issues. She said the EU should reach an agreement with the governments of North African countries to open refugee application centres on the ground to promote the legal entry of refugees into Europe.
Once Meloni comes to power, the right-wing coalition is expected to ask Brussels to set up a migrant reception center outside the European border and stop asylum applications. At the same time, a steady stream of Ukrainian immigrants will provide Italy with a new workforce facing demographic problems.
Source: The Paper