The world is already beginning to look closely at the ambitious leader of the influential Brothers of Italy party, Georgia Meloni, who is predicted to win the elections. Analysts compare her to Angela Merkel. But will the likely future prime minister of Italy repeat the mistakes of the ex-Chancellor of Germany and what will happen to Ukraine's support?
4 years ago, the British newspaper The Guardian called Georgia Meloni “the sweet face of the extreme right.” At that time, she had already been a deputy for 12 years, the leader of the party, and she also managed to be the youngest minister in the history of Italy.
Not just a “nice face”
Georgia Meloni is not only the “pretty face” of Italian politics. She is a strategic player. Her chance came in January 2021, when the parliamentary faction (6% of the total parliamentary composition) became the only one that did not join the broad coalition of 94% of deputies.
Then, exhausted by Covid-19 brought from China, Italy resorted to a desperate step – the unification of the right and the left. The broad coalition handed over power not to a politician, but to an economist, appointing Mario Draghi as prime minister.
During the broad coalition, television worked into Meloni's hands. In Italy, political programs are shows where there is conflict and there is an alternative point of view, which is voiced by odious personalities and populists of various stripes.
Curious! Italy is the only Western country where there is a current for conflict shows invite Putin's agents of influence who have an “alternative” false propaganda point of view. Often such alternative and conflicting personalities act as a laughingstock.
But in the case of Meloni, her messages, attractiveness and persuasiveness increased the rating 4 times – from 6 to 24%. The broad coalition collapsed in July 2022 due to infighting within populists over arms support for Ukraine.
Poll cited by the Washington-based Politico proves that half of Italian voters do not support an increase in arms supplies to Ukraine. Following this current, some left and right populists began to maneuver between support for Ukraine and the theses of Rospropaganda. But Meloni's “Brothers of Italy” party showed integrity, emphasizing that they are for the independence of Italy, including from Putin and his energy sources.
Meloni is Merkel on the fast track
Both Merkel and Meloni came early into politics dominated by Balzac men. Merkel became Youth Minister at 34 in 1990, and Meloni at 30 in 2008.
Merkel was born to a Protestant priest in then impoverished West Germany, 4 years after the end of the occupation.
< p>Her father took up a priesthood in East Germany when it had been known for several years that unification with West Germany would not take place.
Angela is a chemical engineer, like the star of British conservative politics, Margaret Thatcher. In the 1980s, when Thatcher was prime minister, Merkel studied in graduate school and then worked there at the university in Berlin. Angela was an active young man – secretary of the East German Komsomol, at 32 she went to a language course in Donetsk in 1986 for several weeks, not yet knowing that this place would become a symbol of war when she was 60 in 2014.
< p>Angela was underestimated in politics, and it was to her advantage. During Merkel's appointment as minister in 1990, she was called a dairy farm girl – all because of the blush on her face and the rustic appearance of an East German girl. But when her boss, the East German premier, got into a scandal in 1990, Merkel was one of the first to join in the criticism. In 1999, Merkel also leaked her boss in reunified Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was the longest-serving chancellor in modern history. Only Otto von Bismarck sat longer than him. Kohl left ingloriously over a campaign finance scandal, clearing the way for the leader of the EU and the free world, Angela Merkel's first female chancellor.
The young Merkel had ambitious plans
Meloni's career is like Merkel's career on a fast track. Meloni became a member of the Rome city council in 1998, when she was only 21.
She wanted to study linguistics and journalism, but these specialties were only in private educational institutions, for which her family could not pay. She had good grades at the public educational institution in Rome, the Amerigo Vespucci Technical School of Hotel Business. But Georgia did not even dream of combining postgraduate studies in chemistry with the “Komsomol”, but immediately went into politics – into right-wing youth organizations.
Using the City Council as a springboard, at the age of 23, Georgia joined the right-wing political structures of Silvio Berlusconi at the national level. In 2006, at the age of 29, she becomes a deputy – the youngest in her parliamentary convocation on the regional party list. And 2 years later, 71-year-old Prime Minister Berlusconi invites her to his, as it turns out, the last 4th government.
Georgia Meloni/video screenshot
Youth Minister Meloni arbitrarily comes out with an initiative to boycott the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics over human rights abuses in Tibet, a mountainous region twice the size of Italy. Other notables who have criticized the PRC as a place of play have included Prince Charles, who is now King of Great Britain, and the American director Steven Spielberg.
The Italian government and athletes did not support Georgia, forcing Georgia to make excuses that it only wanted to attract attention to the territory occupied by the PRC, where active sinization is carried out.
Meloni also criticized the government when, in 2019, Italy became the first major industrialized country to join China's Belt and Road Initiative.
At the same time, Meloni did not call for a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, where Italy finished 13th. 10 countries, including the US and India, did not send official delegations to visit these games, citing the same arguments as Meloni in 2008. The games were also controversial because the New York Times published a report that China had asked Russia to delay a full-scale invasion of Ukraine until after the Olympics to avoid damaging the public image of the games.
In August 2022, Meloni pledged to challenge Chinese and Russian expansionist ambitions. In particular, Meloni explained that she did not intend to give up support for Ukraine and that she wanted to do away with the stereotyped image of Italy as a frivolous “spaghetti and mandolin” nation, that is, she tied support for Ukraine to Italian independence.
Angela Merkel looked at Germany's independence (for example, energy) as something that could be traded. Merkel negotiated cheaper gas prices from Putin, thinking she was paying with the sovereignty of Poland, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. Prior to that, she traded with the United States and China for Germany's participation in anti-terrorist activities, human rights activities in the Uighur and Tibet Autonomous Regions of the PRC, etc. But 2022 is only the beginning of a disruption in the sovereignty trading business model.
Therefore, Georgia Meloni has more chances to become the leader of the free world than Angela Merkel, despite the fact that the muscles of the German economy stood behind her.
Meloni and her political alliances
If at home in Italy Meloni was the only oppositionist, then at the EU level she built alliances. So, since 2020, she has been heading the Party of European Conservatives and Reformists, in which there are 64 deputies (9%) in the European Parliament. The faction's backbone is made up of Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party, as well as conservative MPs from the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries. This European party was created with the participation of the British Conservatives in Brexit, as an alternative to the conservative centrist European People's Party. And if the EPP was the establishment 10 years ago, now its national participating parties have remained on the sidelines of the domestic politics of Germany and France.
Silvio Berlusconi and Georgia Meloni/ANSA
In Meloni, you can see a symbol of the consolidation of the European right, which came on the wave of populism and access to new channels for supplying information to elections through blogs and social networks, but now matured and ready for serious steps.Inside Italy are its two main political allies, Matteo Salvini and the head of Forward Italy! Silvio Berlusconi questioned the decision of Rome to send weapons to Ukraine. This position is more opportunistic – a reaction to the unwillingness to accept new realities and the illusion that everything can be returned to the year 2000, when Russian oligarchs scattered money in Milan, Nice, Monte Carlo and throughout the Mediterranean. Both Salvini in their 50s and Berlusconi in their almost 90s realize that it is impossible to step into the same river twice.
Italy will have to deal with the established coalition of dictators led by Putin, who is surreptitiously supported by Iran, North Korea and China.
Post script
Meloni's entry into politics began with a series of resonant statements. In 2012, at a Brothers of Italy rally, she positioned herself as a defender of conservative values and proudly announced that she was pregnant and did not want her child to be gay. Her daughter is a child growing up in the family of the politician Meloni and her partner, a talented journalist from the Berlusconi media group. Life makes adjustments to the idealistic conservative perception of the institution of marriage and the importance of having children in marriage. But the fact that Meloni did not arrange a wedding like the former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, who, taking advantage of her official position, invited Putin to the wedding in order to get into the tabloid press, is also indicative.
Among the Italian right, there is sometimes an opinion that Mussolini was not so bad, but against the backdrop of the general tragedy of the Second World War and the crimes of Nazism, historians consider him biased. In 2018, Meloni responded that she and her millennial peers should move towards unity for the future, and not bring history into the present. The choice of rhetoric to join forces for common achievements is a sign of growing up.
If the comment about sexual minorities was intended to position itself in society, then the comment about Mussolini was intended to look for formulas that are acceptable to society, and not to its segment. This is very important for a European leader, where history is a source of segmentation and division of society. This understanding has come to Meloni, and this can be seen from the 2022 election campaign. And therefore, she has more support from voters who, a few years ago, preferred other candidates. Therefore, it is very likely that Italy will soon join the club of women prime ministers of Europe. Although the left doesn't like it.
You can only compare political stars of this weight up to a point. Merkel made almost no tactical blunders in her career, but made a big strategic mistake – losing some of Germany's sovereignty. This is a very important lesson for Meloni.
Confirmation of this thesis is an important step for the future leader of Italy – Giorgia Meloni sent her trusted colleague, Adolfo Urso, head of the parliamentary security committee, on a visit to Kyiv three weeks before the elections. It is known that after the mission to Kyiv, Urso will go on a business trip to Washington.
It seems that Meloni consciously and pragmatically chooses to support Ukraine, a free and united Europe, refusing to flirt with Putin. Perhaps because she understands that the victory of Ukraine is a geopolitical victory for Europe.
