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.
The budding partnership has led to speculation that Meloni and her far-right allies may eventually usurp power from the more traditional conservative bloc in Brussels, just as she has united the center and far-right parties in Italy. The Belt and Road move, the aide says, was “very welcome.” Across the West, left-of-center leaders concluded that in power, she had become a traditional European conservative. Meloni lost, but by 2018 the party had won dozens of seats in Parliament and rejoined a center-right alliance. “We were seen sometimes as a sort of danger, sort of communist group inside the right-wing party.” At night, they regularly went out around Rome to put up posters, often confronting opposing groups from the political left doing the same thing. The party was not popular, least of all with young people from a left-leaning section of Rome. The remaining major parties failed to coalesce into any kind of meaningful coalition; the centre-left Democratic Party explicitly ruled out an alliance with the Five Star Movement, and Matteo Renzi’s moderate Third Pole struggled to keep the Draghi agenda alive.
Even many on the Italian left acknowledge that 80 years after the fall of Fascism, it is time for reform. This is her political strength in European terms. Meloni has also forged an alliance with von der Leyen, who leaned on Meloni to stabilize Europe’s relations with Trump after his opening trade-war salvos. She has tried to expand the Prime Minister’s powers and passed a security bill that limits some kinds of protest and expands punishment for others.
It’s late afternoon on July 4 in Rome’s Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Italian government, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is walking the marble-floored halls. The following day Meloni became Italy’s first female prime minister, and she led Italy’s first far-right government since World War II. In the weeks following the elections, Meloni finalized the composition of her cabinet, and on October 21, 2022, Mattarella officially invited her to form a government. Under the motto “Italy and Italians first,” Meloni became the face of a political bloc that included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s League. Draghi led Italy out of the worst days of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but traditional political rivalries soon reasserted themselves, and his fragile coalition imploded.
Meloni-project krijgt klap door sombere economische groeivoorspellingen
She held that post until 2002, when her political fortunes were buoyed by the return to power of media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. Meloni’s father left her family when she was a child, and Meloni was raised by her mother in the working-class neighborhood of Garbatella in central Rome. “The pressure not to have children is strong, the pressure to work outside the home, to give up the dream of having a family, to just get a dog instead, is hard to fight.” “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.
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.
Italy has a femicide problem. Critics say Prime Minister Georgia Meloni should do more to fix it
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 chicken road app weapon against any policy she adopts.
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.
Where Giorgia Meloni Is Leading Europe
” Meloni’s rising political stature was recognized by other European populist parties in 2020, when she was named president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a Euroskeptic bloc within the European Parliament. Other populist parties boasted strong performances, and a government was eventually formed under Giuseppe Conte by the left-leaning Euroskeptic Five Star Movement and the right-wing formerly secessionist League. When you cut welfare, schools, and funding for services for people with disabilities, the burden of care falls on families, and within families, on women.” The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report ranks Italy 85th out of 148 countries on issues like economic participation and opportunity, education, health, and political empowerment. Ariana Ricci, a 32-year-old human resources manager, voted for Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy party in 2022, hoping she would prioritize efforts to tackle wage disparity, reproductive rights, and women’s safety. Her critics say, however, that she has done little to help provide affordable child care options, despite campaign promises ahead of the 2022 election that launched her to power.
Founding the Brothers of Italy
The National Alliance and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia formalized their coalition under the banner of the People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà; PdL) in 2007, and the PdL swept into power in snap elections held in April 2008. The National Alliance would serve as a coalition partner in several Berlusconi governments in the 2000s, and Meloni was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian parliament, in 2006. In 1998 Meloni was elected as a councillor to the provincial government of Rome. She held a variety of leadership positions in Youth Action before being elected president of the group in 2004.
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- Yet the telling moment came after the press had left, when the topic turned to Ukraine’s war with Russia.
- From Portugal to Romania, once ostracized extremists on the far right are overtaking traditional conservative parties, much like the MAGA movement in the U.S.
- Instead, proposed plans to build day-care centers were slashed from her first budget.
“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.
But opposition groups argue that denying young people exposure to basic sex education keeps the country grounded in its patriarchal past. The live-streamed murder of two women and a girl has shocked Argentina Official figures show that birth rates dropped by 6.3% in the first seven months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, and that some Italian women earn up to 40% less than men in the same jobs. Critics question whether she has done enough since to tackle increasing rates of violence against women in the country, or challenge persistent inequality in the workplace. Four more women have been killed since Genini, according to the group, including Luciana Ronchi, 62, and 80-year-old Vanda Venditti.
“I’m seeing a focus on international affairs instead,” she told CNN. She had hoped a female leader would see the bind many young, employable women seem to be in. “If I were to start a family on a temporary contract, I wouldn’t get my maternity leave paid, I wouldn’t get my job back, and I couldn’t afford childcare even if I did have a job to go back to,” she said. New York became ‘too crazy’ so she moved to an Italian village, met her husband and started a family Ricci, who graduated from the prestigious Bocconi University in Milan, also studied overseas but says she wants to stay in Italy and be successful there, raise a family and own her own home. Instead, proposed plans to build day-care centers were slashed from her first budget.
- 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.
- Under the motto “Italy and Italians first,” Meloni became the face of a political bloc that included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s League.
- (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.)
- ” Meloni’s rising political stature was recognized by other European populist parties in 2020, when she was named president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a Euroskeptic bloc within the European Parliament.
- But opposition groups argue that denying young people exposure to basic sex education keeps the country grounded in its patriarchal past.
- The fire set the family on a harder course.
Founding the Brothers of Italy
Meloni, with an eye on elections that were scheduled for 2023, tried to distance the party from its fascist origins. Again, the Brothers of Italy opted to remain in opposition; they were the only major party to do so. Although the Brothers of Italy were part of a coalition with the League, they did not join the Conte government. 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.
“If you look at the way other authoritarian leaders behave, they are incremental,” says Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna. From Portugal to Romania, once ostracized extremists on the far right are overtaking traditional conservative parties, much like the MAGA movement in the U.S. On the international stage, she has behaved less like a right-wing revolutionary than a pragmatic conservative.
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 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.
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.
