Meloni, the outsider who has forged ahead: who is the first female prime minister of the government to the far right ever

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It had never happened that leading Italy was a member of the right. It had never happened that in Italy a woman was leading a government. Giorgia Meloni has broken both taboos. Indeed there is another: it had never happened that a party passed from one election to another from 4 to 26%. Much has been said about her complicated childhood. Her father escaping to the Canaries, the bourgeois house in the Roman quarter in the Camilluccia that burns her, forcing her, her older sister Arianna and her mother to move to Garbatella, a popular district, once red.

The fulminating career: from Garbatella to Fratelli d’Italia

It is there that he becomes a teenager, there he decides to enroll in a professional institute where he can study languages. Politics also arrived in those years. “The boys who were most dedicated to political commitment were looking for references, their own dimension, they wanted to belong to something”, he writes in his autobiography (“I am Giorgia. My roots, my ideas”, Rizzoli). On the right there is still the MSI but the turning point of Fiuggi is imminent together with the birth of the National Alliance and the progressive removal wanted by Gianfranco Fini from the nostalgic post-fascist paraphernalia. Meloni chooses the section of Colle Oppio, that of the “Gabbiani” by Fabio Rampelli, who has just been re-elected as Vice President of the Chamber. Her career was lightning-fast: at 21 she was elected provincial councilor, at 27 she was president of Youth Action, at 29 deputy and vice-president of the Chamber and two years later, in 2008, Minister of Youth.

Then comes the end of An, the birth of the PDL, the break first with Fini and then in 2012 with Berlusconi’s party to give life to Brothers of Italy together with the former blue, the “giant” Guido Crosetto, and an exponent historian first of the MSI and then of An as Ignazio La Russa. With her, however, there are also her old militant companions: from Rampelli to Marsilio, from Fazzolari to Acquaroli and Lollobrigida who years earlier married his sister Arianna and then Donzelli. Raffaele Fitto also arrives, he too has returned from the break with Berlusconi and above all very active in Strasbourg. It will be Fitto to suggest that she join the group he was part of, that of the Conservatives who kept her at a distance (unlike Matteo Salvini) from the most extreme right of Identity and Democracy where there are Le Pen and also Adf.

Pragmatic approach

Nobody bets on her. “You don’t leave the ring road,” was the most benevolent comment. And instead, from that from 1.96 percent to the debut in 2013 politics passed to 4.35 five years later we arrive at the 26% achieved a month ago together with the leadership of the center-right and now at the helm of the country. A success due to a pragmatic approach, where the economic and fiscal policy are aimed at enhancing and protecting the productive system and work, and where “the interest of the Nation” is supported without winking too much at demagoguery.

This is how Fratelli d’Italia begins to attract exponents who certainly cannot be considered close to the nostalgic right: from Giulio Tremonti to Marcelo Pera, from Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata to Carlo Nordio. The programmatic conference in Milan last April is its seal. The choice of the economic capital is not accidental. Meloni decides to play in what both Forza Italia and the Lega still consider their home. But it is an illusion that the September 25 verdict will wipe out for good. But now comes the most difficult test for Meloni in perhaps the most complicated moment since the war. The expectation is very high and disappointing it is very easy. At least this is what his opponents hope and, probably, even some of him who are allies of him.