The shapeshifter: who is the real Giorgia Meloni?

In mid-June, Giorgia Meloni was in an exultant mood while hosting the G7 summit, a gathering of the world’s most powerful nations, in the southern Italian region of Apulia. After days in which she presided over meetings speaking English, French and Spanish along with her native Italian, one evening she danced the pizzica – a traditional Apulian dance – twirling and hopping to the trance-like rhythmic folk music often played at local weddings at a contagious 100 beats per minute. Meloni’s uninhibited performance expressed the self-confidence of an emerging political star, who, after a strong showing in the European elections just a few days earlier, was the hottest political leader in Europe. She took a selfie with Indian strongman Narendra Modi, which she posted on Instagram to her 3.5 million followers with the caption “Hello from the MELODI team.” For a politician who only a few years ago was stuck at the margins of Italian politics as the head of a small rightwing party, Brothers of Italy, Meloni, at 47, appeared to be on top of the world.

Meloni has worked hard to achieve the respectability that has eluded other rightwing parties such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. She was received at the White House by Joe Biden and has been accepted by centrist parties within the EU. This is all the more surprising given the openly neo-fascist origins of her career. (Just before she was elected prime minister in late 2022, author Roberto Saviano wrote in the Guardian: “Giorgia Meloni is a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe.”) But in two years, she has surprised many people by her political pragmatism and shrewd ability.

The head of a party traditionally hostile to the European Union, Meloni instead has worked closely with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and made necessary concessions to obtain EU funding for her domestic agenda. She has emerged as one of Ukraine’s most reliable supporters – surprising given the strain of pro-Putin sentiment traditional on the European right – and convinced her ideological compatriot, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to finally approve EU military aid to Ukraine. She managed to move the EU towards her own position on immigration, greatly expanding a programme to pay north African countries to stop the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean. With her hard-earned credibility, Meloni has worked her way out of the neo-fascist pigeonhole in which her critics tried to confine her.

After that joyful dance in June, the unstoppable rise of Meloni and the European right seemed to stall. In France, where the National Rally appeared ready to assume power, the left won a surprising victory. The rightwing Vox in Spain quit the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) – the centre-right coalition that Meloni heads – to join a new grouping of rightwing parties called Patriots for Europe. Von der Leyen returned to the presidency of the European Commission without Meloni’s help.

On the domestic front, Meloni has had to grapple with the embarrassing publication of clandestine videos showing members of her party’s youth group chanting fascist slogans, and making racist and antisemitic remarks. Meloni condemned the views expressed, saying they were “completely incompatible with Brothers of Italy – and with the political line we have articulated for years”. Several of those featured in the videos were forced to resign.

For some, the incident unmasked “the true face” of Brothers of Italy, as Giuseppe Provenzano, a member of parliament for the main opposition Democratic party, said. Others, even in the opposition, felt this was grossly unfair. “What these young people said and did is a serious matter, but I don’t believe for a minute that Meloni and her government are fascist,” said Roberto Giachetti, a member of parliament for the centre-left Italia Viva party. He said the debate threatened to distract from the important issue: new laws that, he said, take Italy in an illiberal direction.

One of Brothers of Italy’s campaign slogans declared: “We defend God, Fatherland and Family.” The slogan was part of Mussolini’s propaganda, and greeted with dismay by Italy’s leftwing press. But Meloni is careful to point out that the slogan was coined by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of Italy’s founding fathers in the time of 19th-century unification. The fact that it can be read two ways – either as an expression of democratic nationalism or as an echo of fascism – is typical of a certain ambiguity that Meloni likes to maintain. The term some of her critics use is “doppiezza” or doubleness. At the moment, Meloni is having it both ways: a moderate in economic and foreign policy, and a rightwinger on issues such as immigration and family policy, working hard to shut down illegal immigration and cracking down on gay couples trying to adopt children.

Rather than worry at the question of whether Brothers of Italy are fascists, it is more to the point to see Meloni as a rightwing populist responding to 21st-century problems. She sees herself as defending Italy against the corrosive and homogenising effects of global capitalism, a hyperactive EU bureaucracy, secular values and chaotic immigration. Her record on tackling illegal immigration brought UK prime minister Keir Starmer (to the dismay of his Labour party backbenchers) to Italy this week, to get her advice.

The economist Fabrizio Barca places Meloni as part of a neo-authoritarian turn in Europe and elsewhere that he says 40 years of neoliberal policies have produced. The loss of manufacturing jobs, the paring back of social protections and growing inequality have created high levels of anxiety and insecurity, which have made the idea of a strong leader – a “Caesar” who will take things in hand – appealing to millions of people. Since these leaders, whether Trump or Meloni, are unlikely to challenge the economic status quo, what they mainly offer is a defence of traditional forms of identity.

Is the real Giorgia Meloni a closet fascist or a conservative democrat? It may not matter. Meloni is, above all, a skilled and disciplined politician who has risen to power by staking out territory on the centre-right. She and her party have grown their vote share from 2% to 26% in a few years – and it wasn’t by appealing to the far right or promising an authoritarian adventure. She has avoided teaming up with Alternative for Germany and the National Rally. She let Matteo Salvini’s Lega leapfrog her on the right, using much cruder xenophobic and racist language than Brothers of Italy – and she has stolen the Lega’s more moderate voters.

Her top advisers – some of whom I interviewed at length – are intelligent and thoughtful people, very conservative politically, but far less extreme than the people around Trump, for example. At the same time, Meloni the shapeshifter presents different sides to different audiences. She is scrupulously moderate when addressing the EU and international audiences, but a populist firebrand on the campaign trail. When addressing a rally of the Spanish rightwing party Vox, she denounced the threat from “the secularism of the left and Islamic radicalisation”, and called for a defence of “our civilisation” against “those who want to destroy it”.

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Establishing herself as a tough but relatable figure has been central to Meloni’s political persona. In the run-up to June’s European elections, she asked voters to simply write her Christian name on the ballot. “I am proud that most people continue to call me Giorgia. That’s very important and precious to me. For years, people made fun of me because of my popular roots: they called me a fishmonger, a fruit seller, a street kid because they’re so educated. What they never understood is that I am proud of being a woman of the people.”

According to her autobiography, when her parents’ marriage ended, Meloni’s mother moved her and her older sister, Arianna, from a fashionable Rome neighbourhood to a small apartment in the working-class area of Garbatella, where most people spoke Roman dialect. Her resourceful mother, Anna Paratore, supported the family by churning out romance novels. Her father, Francesco, moved to the Canary Islands. Giorgia and her sister would spend summers with him, but she had no contact with him after she turned 12. (He later spent several years in a Spanish prison after getting caught smuggling hashish from north Africa. He died in 2012.)

Meloni is also a single parent, having chosen to have a child with TV presenter Andrea Giambruno while remaining unmarried and living separately. Last October, when Giambruno was caught on camera propositioning other women – “Can I touch my package while I talk to you?” – Meloni dropped him that same day. Despite being a single mother and the child of a single mother, Meloni is deeply committed to promoting the traditional family, consistent with Catholic religious values.

Along with being the first female prime minister of Italy, Meloni is the first not to have attended university. Her real schooling came as a young rightwing political activist. At 15, she joined the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a political party founded by a group of diehard former fascists after the second world war.

To understand what it meant to belong to the MSI in 1992, I met with Gianfranco Fini, who was the party’s chairman at the time and guided it through a period of transformation from a neo-fascist or post-fascist party into a “modern and democratic rightwing party”, which formally changed its name in 1995 to The National Alliance. I met Fini at his favourite cafe in downtown Rome. He appeared younger than his 72 years, tanned and elegantly dressed, wearing a pressed long-sleeve shirt and sports jacket despite the fierce summer heat. His sartorial style was always part of his political image. (Back in the 1980s his critics called him “a fascist in a double-breasted suit”.)

The MSI, at the time Meloni joined, was divided between older members nostalgic for fascism and a younger generation who, after the cold war, were looking to find another way of being rightwing that was anti-Communist and critical of capitalism; a way of restoring national pride. Meloni’s mentors were members of this second generation of the MSI who came of age during the 1970s, when political struggle in Italy lurched towards terrorism. Youth culture was dominated by the far left, and members of the MSI were often targeted for beatings. “We would wear motorcycle helmets when we went out to put up posters or distribute flyers,” Fini told me.

Meloni joined an MSI section called Colle Oppio (Oppian Hill), which functioned as a debating society, reading group and political party. Colle Oppio occupies a very particular place in the history of the Italian right. Its headquarters were in an ancient ruin on the Oppian Hill in Rome. In 1978, one of its members was beaten to death by leftwing extremists carrying metal wrenches. From then on, the section would hold an annual commemoration for the young man, and others who died in those years. This sense of belonging to an embattled minority fighting against a dominant, increasingly intolerant and sometimes violent leftwing youth culture left their imprint on Meloni. She was joining a kind of counter-counterculture.

The MSI youth wore jackets and ties and kept their hair short while leftwing youth wore long hair and jeans. They opposed the legalisation of divorce and abortion, and pushed the “war on drugs” and the reintroduction of the death penalty (abolished in 1948) for terrorists convicted of murder. “The MSI,” Fini stated at a party congress in 1987, “is antagonistic, transgressive, and anti-conformist, in complete contrast with the parties that make a business out of politics.”

Colle Oppio became, beginning in the late 1980s, something of a maverick group within the MSI. They delivered a letter to the chief rabbi of Rome apologising for the fascist antisemitic laws of 1938, held a conference on racism after skinheads attacked a young African in the Oppian Park and defended a Catholic hospital against older members of the MSI who wanted to get rid of a ward for Aids patients. “There was a standoff between a right that wanted to rid itself of fascist nostalgia and a right that wanted to play on people’s worst instincts,” said Fabio Rampelli, who ran Colle Oppio and is now a member of parliament and founding member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

Meloni was, at least initially, on the nostalgic side. In 1996, aged 19, she gave an interview on French TV in which she stated: “Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for the good of the country, unlike the politicians of the last 50 years.” She has chosen her words more carefully since then.

Meloni has inherited from Fini a party that has explicitly renounced fascism. And yet, when we spoke, he could not help noting that she could barely bring herself to pronounce the word “antifascist” – an important omission, since the birth of Italian democracy was defined in opposition to fascism. When he asked her why, a few years ago, Meloni replied: “Because for me antifascist means the slogan ‘Killing a fascist is not a crime’.” What is paradoxical about this, Fini said, is phrases like that were not common during the 1990s when Meloni was becoming active in rightwing politics. “She has taken on the battles of her older brothers who had direct experience of the terrorism period,” he said. Meloni, whenever she says the word “left” (la sinistra), cannot help but pronounce it with a tone of contempt.

“I am not afraid to repeat for the umpteenth time that I have no nostalgia for fascism,” Meloni writes. “On the other hand, I know the name and the story of every one of the young people who were sacrificed during the 1970s on the altar of antifascism.”

This May she made an important step, honouring Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist leader who was murdered by henchmen of Mussolini, on the 100th anniversary of Matteotti’s death, referring to Matteotti as a “free and courageous man killed by fascist thugs” – without, however, mentioning Mussolini.

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Part of the search for a non-fascist identity led Meloni and other MSI youth into the world of fantasy literature, in particular JRR Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings novels. There is a photograph of Meloni in her early days as an MSI militant, in the costume of Samwise Gamgee, the faithful companion of Frodo Baggins. The MSI youth group started holding Hobbit Camps in the 1970s, which have been described as a kind of Woodstock of the far right. The camps were revived in the 1990s and Tolkien’s vision took on new meaning: Middle-earth resembled a pre-capitalist, medieval Europe of tribal groups fighting courageously against powerful enemies. It seemed a perfect metaphor for Italy contending with the forces of globalisation, a newly empowered EU bureaucracy in Brussels and boatloads of foreigners suddenly arriving on Italy’s shores. “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy,” Meloni has said.

In 1997, Meloni, aged 20, became the head of the Rome section of the MSI’s youth organisation. In 1998, she started a political festival called Atreju, named after a hero in a bestselling fantasy novel, The Neverending Story, by the German writer Michael Ende. Atreju is a young boy who must use the power of imagination and storytelling to build a new world of values and defeat the nothingness that is spreading. “A symbol of the struggle against nihilism, perfect for our vision,” Meloni writes. The festival, under Meloni’s leadership, has hosted rightwing figures including Viktor Orbán and Steve Bannon, as well as politicians from the left. Last year, Elon Musk was a surprise guest.

In 2004, at 27, Meloni was elected president of the National Alliance’s youth group. She entered parliament at 29, and became minister of youth as a deputy president of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in 2008, the youngest in Italy’s history. She assumed a leadership role as a result of a crisis on the right. In 2009, Fini decided to dissolve The National Alliance and fold it into the larger coalition that Silvio Berlusconi was creating, known as The People of Liberty. In effect, Fini killed off the party he had created by bringing the outcasts of the far right into government. In 2012, when Berlusconi refused to hold primaries to select a new leader, Meloni and several colleagues took the audacious step of leaving the coalition and forming a new party, which in many ways recouped the symbol, the headquarters and many of the members of Fini’s National Alliance.

Meloni originally wanted to call the party “We Italians”, but Fabio Rampelli came up with Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), which is also the name by which the Italian national anthem is known. Using the opening words of the anthem made a claim to be the party of national unity, much as Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (“Go Italy”), had done, launched in a World Cup year.

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One way to understand Italian politics in the past 30 years is as a desperate, convulsive search for a populist saviour to cure the country’s ills. In the early 1990s, Italy entered a period of stagnation, becoming one of the slowest-growing economies in the world. The financial crisis of 2008 hit Italy especially hard, and by 2022, Italy’s standard of living for the average Italian household was 12% lower than it was before the crisis began.

In this time, Italy has turned to one populist leader after another who promised – and failed – to deliver radical change: Berlusconi vowed to be the Margaret Thatcher of Italy and make everyone rich; former prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro promised to root out corruption; the comedian Beppe Grillo and his Five-Star Movement literally lifted a middle finger to Italy’s political class by staging a national “Fuck you” day; Matteo Renzi, a left-of-centre populist leader, promised to clear out Italy’s old political class – hence his nickname “il rottamatore”, or the demolition man. Then there was Salvini, who declared in 2018 that “for the clandestine immigrants, the party’s over, start packing your suitcases”.

Italy has the highest level of political volatility in Europe, with up to half the electorate changing party from one election to the next. Meloni’s party got 4.4% in Italy’s 2018 election, and 6.4% in the 2019 European elections. But by 2022 Brothers of Italy was Italy’s largest party, with 26%, propelling Meloni into the role of prime minister. What was behind this sudden leap in fortunes? The short answer is that Meloni’s was the only party to remain consistently in opposition during a decade in which Italy tried to work itself out of a period of protracted economic crisis. Meloni’s aides pointed out that the pressure on her to join a “government of unity” with 12 other parties across the ideological spectrum was enormous. But she held back, which put her in a perfect position to profit from pent-up popular discontent.

As Five Star found, being anti-establishment and channelling popular dissatisfaction works much better in opposition. Meloni’s challenge is to maintain the outsider energy while in power.

The Meloni government must contend with a national debt at 137% of GDP, and a deficit of 7.2%. One of their first moves was to axe a guaranteed minimum income programme created by the Five Star Movement in 2019. Today, about 5.6 million Italians live below the poverty line – nearly 10% of the population – and the Reddito di Cittadinanza (citizenship income) gave a small monthly minimum income, averaging about €580 a month, to 1.3 million poorer Italian families.

Meloni’s people believe the guaranteed income is a handout that encourages people not to work, and “offers citizens no real prospect of a better future”, one of her chief ministers told me. Barca says that Meloni dislikes “universalist programmes”, preferring policies that benefit particular favoured groups. The government has given tax breaks and subsidies to businesses and startups, to families with children, to working women and to businesses hiring younger and/or female workers. Officials insist these policies are working, since unemployment has gone down from about 8.1% in 2022, when Meloni was elected, to 6.8% today.

Meloni opposes the introduction of a minimum wage. More and more younger Italians work in short-term jobs and internships that often pay as little as €1,000 (£840) a month. As a result, roughly 550,000 young people left Italy between 2014 and 2023, according to the national statistics bureau ISTAT, about a third of them with university degrees. Italy is facing deep structural problems – lack of investment in R&D, failure to fund programmes for training graduates – that would require considerable investments to tackle.

Along with stagnating wages, in the past 30 years Italy has also become one of the more unequal countries in Europe, according to the economist Salvatore Morelli of the University of Rome. At the same time, it has virtually eliminated inheritance tax. Before 2000, Italy taxed large estates at a rate of 8%. Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in the country, reduced the rate to zero. The subsequent government raised it to a modest 0.8%, and Meloni has no plans to increase them, insisting that Italians already pay enough taxes.

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If Meloni’s economic policies are fairly traditional centre-right, her government is much more hard-line when it comes to immigration, after a tumultuous decade in which boats carrying 1 million migrants reached Italian shores and an estimated 28,000 died at sea.

In June, a Sikh agricultural worker named Satnam Singh had his arm torn off by a piece of farm equipment on a farm outside Rome. Because Singh was employed illegally, his employer, rather than calling an ambulance, left him by the side of the road with his severed arm in a vegetable box. Singh died not long after. The horrifying death opened a window on to an especially brutal aspect of the Italian economy: an estimated 230,000 farm workers in the “black economy”, living essentially like modern slaves.

Several days later, Meloni stood up in the Italian parliament and denounced Singh’s “horrible and inhumane death” and “the disgusting behaviour of his employer … we must say it: this is the worst of Italy.” She called for a moment of silence, and when two of her ministers remained seated, she said, very audibly, in Roman dialect: “Raga’ arzatevi pure voi.” (“Guys, you stand up, too.”) It was a clever piece of political theatre. Rather than face criticism for the deplorable conditions of foreign agricultural labour, Meloni decided to show that, despite her fierce opposition to illegal immigration, she had compassion for the individuals toiling in the underground world of “lavoro nero” (black work). In practice, however, Meloni’s government has made it much less likely for asylum seekers to have their claims accepted, and taken protections away from many people who already had them.

Meloni has made a tougher stand on illegal immigration a staple of her campaign speeches. Between 2016 and 2018, Meloni often spoke of “ethnic substitution”, the conspiracy theory also known as the “great replacement” in which obscure forces were imposing immigration on Italy to replace its native population with a low-wage foreign labour force.

Since becoming prime minister, Meloni has toned down her rhetoric. But, as head of government, she has proceeded on two separate tracks – publicly working to stop illegal immigration on the one hand, while on the other, tripling the number of foreign workers Italian employers can hire. Her government has also made it much harder to obtain asylum, driving more people into the underground economy.

Meloni has worked to get the EU to follow her lead on immigration. In 2023, Meloni and von der Leyen flew to Tunis to sign an agreement with Tunisia’s strongman president Kais Saied that gives Tunisia €105m for “border management” and about €1bn in loans and financial support. In 2024, Meloni and von der Leyen worked out similar deals with Mauritania and Egypt, hoping to close off the main departure points.

The deals build on an agreement the Italian government reached with Libya in 2016 under a left-of-centre government. The EU has been paying and training Libya’s coastguard to intercept migrant boats, and paying them to house migrants indefinitely in brutal private Libyan prisons controlled by armed militia groups. In Tunisia, Al Jazeera reports, “Migrants and asylum seekers are bussed out to Tunisia’s desert borderlands with Libya or Algeria and abandoned with no money, mobile phones, food or water – in stark violation of international humanitarian law.”

The Meloni government believes that their policies are beginning to work: the number of illegal immigrants reaching Italy by ship during the first seven months of 2024 is down by about 62% compared with the previous year, although critics say the flow of immigration is simply returning to the level it was at in 2021. While Meloni’s policy of paying north African countries to stop illegal immigration is not new, it is a far more comprehensive effort to “externalise Italy’s borders”.

What is new and more radical is the Meloni government’s plan to outsource the detention of illegal migrants to Albania. The Italian government is building a facility in Albania to house immigrants who are unlikely to qualify for asylum status, from where they can be returned to their countries of origin. “At the moment in which people are rescued at sea, we will make a distinction,” a high-level aide to Meloni explained to me. “Fragile individuals – women, children or people who are fleeing persecution – Syrians, Afghans – will not be sent to Albania. Adult males who come from a list of what we call ‘safe countries’ – Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh – people immigrating for economic reasons – in most cases, will be returned to their country of origin.”

Having ditched the previous government’s unpopular Rwanda deportation scheme, Keir Starmer wanted to discuss the Albania programme with Meloni, and figure out how he might replicate it.

The Italian opposition spokesman for foreign affairs calls the Albania plan “useless, expensive and cruel”. It will house at most 3,000 people, many of whom will almost certainly be sent back to Italy. Its initial cost is estimated at €653m – far more than housing them in Italy. It is cruel, he said, because you are “breaking up families, based on an arbitrary criterion (young adult males), and prolonging the suffering of people who deserve to be helped”.

One of Meloni’s senior advisers replied that the Albania facility will send a signal to potential migrants that illegal immigration will not be tolerated.

And yet Italy needs immigration. With an ageing population declining by 400,000 per year, employers are pressing the government to let them hire more foreign workers. Behind the scenes, the Meloni government has agreed to allow Italian employers to hire 450,000 foreign workers over the next three years, almost all of whom will be people who entered the country illegally years before – the very people Meloni is trying to keep out.

What remains unspoken is something that Meloni has articulated in the past: that Italy does not want immigrants from Africa, especially those who are Muslim. “Every nation,” Meloni has said, “has the right to choose an immigration that is more compatible with its own culture. In Venezuela, there are millions of people starving – they are Christian – often of Italian origin. So, if we need immigrants, let’s take them from Venezuela.”

Salvatore Fachile, an immigration lawyer in Rome, offers a cynical interpretation of Italy’s immigration policy, which he blames equally on the left and the right: it is convenient for Italy to have a shadow army of millions of foreign workers in a legally tenuous position. They may feel obliged to work longer hours at lower pay and put up with dangerous working conditions. “You have 500,000 illegal workers who are completely vulnerable and blackmailable by their employers and another at least 2 million foreigners who are in a legally fragile position. This has, in turn, weakened the bargaining power of Italian workers, who now must compete with foreign workers to accept lower pay and longer hours.”

Meloni’s government has set about removing asylum status from those who have already been granted international protection. Foreigners with legal work contracts who are paying taxes have been made illegal immigrants overnight.

Meloni’s immigration policy, in short, is a tangle of contradictions: torn between the desire to prevent foreigners from arriving and a desperate need to replenish the declining workforce; between its stated goal of restoring legality to immigration and a drive to remove legal status from many foreign workers while refusing to relax Italy’s highly restrictive citizenship rules.

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Since the budget crunch and the EU straitjacket make it difficult for Meloni to undertake ambitious domestic policies, passing new laws is an inexpensive way for her to establish her government’s rightwing identity.

The first law Meloni’s government passed was one punishing the organisers of illegal raves in warehouses or abandoned factories. The new law would send rave organisers to prison for three to six years. When asked why her government was cracking down on a phenomenon not widely seen as a threat to public safety, Meloni replied: “It’s a signal I want to send: that the days are over in Italy for people who refuse to respect the rules.”

Along with the law against raves, there was a law severely punishing anyone who steered a boat bringing migrants to Italy. (Intended to punish the smugglers, the law ignores the fact that they generally force the migrants to steer the boats.) A law against encouraging anorexia. A couple of laws directed at the Roma: one aimed at parents keeping their children out of school and another punishing adults for encouraging children to beg. There were laws to punish popular forms of protest: occupying buildings and trying to block major public works projects – a strategy sometimes used by environmental groups.

Another new law made surrogacy a “universal crime”, meaning that Italian couples who travel overseas to adopt children through a surrogate mother can be prosecuted and jailed when they return. The Meloni government refers to surrogacy as “utero in affitto” (rent-a-womb). “For a mother to sell her own child is a crime anywhere in the world – a universal crime – so why is it not a crime if a mother sells her child before it’s born?” says Meloni’s minister of the family, of natality and equal opportunity, Eugenia Roccella.

In Roccella, Meloni has found a sharp-tongued advocate who is unafraid to take highly provocative positions in defence of the traditional family. She is against gay marriage, and proposed getting rid of civil unions, which were introduced in 2016 and grant gay couples some legal protection. “I think the civil unions law is … a lockpick for the progressive destruction of the family, of parenthood and defined sexual identity,” she said in 2017.

Roccella defends her rightwing government’s position using the traditional language of the left: the language of freedom, of rights and of feminism. She insists that the law against surrogacy is meant to protect women against exploitation and reducing life to a monetised commodity. She insists that her resistance to adding homophobia to a bill designed to punish hate crimes is a matter of freedom of expression: mightn’t a vigorous defence of the traditional family be construed as homophobic? Anyone is free to love whom they like, she says, but her efforts are focused on helping what she sees as an embattled and vulnerable minority: mothers and couples with children.

The Meloni government has increased the number of daycare centres and created economic benefits for families with children and working mothers. Roccella points with pride to a small but significant uptick in female employment. While it is hard to object to efforts to help families with children, it is also hard not to see Italy’s family law as discriminating against everyone else. Adoption is limited to heterosexual couples who are married or have lived together for three years. IVF is essentially banned, with an exception for heterosexual couples who can demonstrate infertility problems. Italian women who decide to have a child on their own routinely leave the country to have the procedure.

Most of these policies – greatly influenced by the Vatican – were on the books before Meloni took office. But the Meloni government has taken things further by forbidding mayors (who carry out civic duties and used to have a degree of autonomy) to issue birth certificates to children born of surrogate mothers, and to children born to lesbian couples who used artificial insemination – a move that seems positively punitive.

To Meloni, the defence of the boundaries of gender and family are like the national boundaries she is trying to defend against bureaucratic overreach from Brussels and the homogenising forces of globalisation. As she said in a 2019 speech that has become extremely famous: “Now they want to remove the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ from our identity documents. Because the family is an enemy, national identity is an enemy, sexual identity is an enemy … [But] we will defend our identity. I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian and I am Christian. You will never take that from me! You will never take that from me!”

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In early September, Meloni faced a crisis of what used to be called family values, when her culture minister resigned in what was almost a cliched case of an old-fashioned sex scandal. Gennaro Sangiuliano, 62 and married, was at the centre of a media storm when it came out that he had made his mistress, Maria Rosaria Boccia, an unpaid consultant for “major events” at his ministry. Meloni initially dismissed the scandal as mere “gossip” but then accepted Sangiuliano’s resignation when it came out Boccia was recording conversations and even making secret videos inside the parliament building with Ray-Ban spyglasses.

Meloni’s relationship with the mainstream press has been contentious and combative, leading to concerns about press freedom. In April, three journalists of the daily newspaper Domani were placed under investigation by prosecutors in Perugia for a piece published in 2022 revealing that Guido Crossetto, a co-founder of Brothers of Italy, had received millions of euros as a consultant to Italian arms manufacturers, representing a possible conflict of interest in his job as Minister of Defence.

“The minister threatened to sue the journalists but never did,” Domani’s editor commented. “He couldn’t because the information we published was true … instead he preferred to ask prosecutors to identify Domani’s sources.” For having published confidential information, the journalists could risk up to nine years in prison, according to the National Press Association.

In mid-July, the European Commission issued a report on the rule of law in Italy. It took the Meloni government to task on a number of fronts, and expressed concern over the independence of the press. “Cases of physical attacks, death threats and other forms of intimidation have been reported … 75 incidents in the first six months of 2024.” This summer, four members of the far-right group Casa Pound were arrested for beating up a young journalist who tried to film a gathering of their group. Meloni and other members of her government have made use of Italy’s defamation laws to pursue their critics. Meloni sued and won damages from a journalist who mockingly described her as being four feet tall. (She is 5ft 2in.) She also sued the writer Roberto Saviano for calling her and one of her ministers “bastards” over their immigration policies.

The scholar Antonio Scurati was prevented from reading a text he had prepared on the anniversary of the end of the second world war in which he criticised Meloni’s reluctance to “repudiate her neo-fascist past” and her government’s efforts to “rewrite history”. The host of a programme on Rai state TV who had invited Scurati on had her airtime drastically cut back. Political parties exerting control of state TV is nothing new in Italy, but many journalists insist that Brothers of Italy has taken things to a new level, referring to it as Telemeloni.

Perhaps of greater concern in the light of worries about Meloni’s tendency to authoritarianism are two major constitutional changes her government is pursuing. The first is a judicial reform that would mean government prosecutors could not become judges and vice versa. This reform, Meloni’s government insists, prevents cosy collegiality between prosecutors and judges, and is the only way to guarantee a truly impartial trial. It continues a longstanding battle begun by Berlusconi, who waged war against the Italian magistrature, accusing it of leftist bias. Italian magistrates fear this is a first step toward placing prosecutors under the control of the executive branch. Nicola Gratteri, a prominent anti-mafia prosecutor, noted in a recent television interview that the proposed reform “was a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist”.

The mother of all reforms, however, which concerns von der Leyen and the European Commission, is a proposed revision of the Italian constitution to permit the direct election of the prime minister. Under the Italian constitution, the president of the Republic appoints the prime minister in consultation with the parties who have won the most votes. Usually this results in the leader of the largest party becoming prime minister, but when members of the governing coalition fall out with one another, the president may appoint someone else and cobble together a majority with a different lineup.

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Meloni insists that this system is anti-democratic and a cause of Italy’s political instability: there have been 69 governments since 1945. If prime ministers were directly elected, she argues, they would generally last the full five years of each legislature, and be able to carry out their agenda.

Given Italy’s proportional electoral system, in which the largest party rarely gets more than 25-30% of the vote, proposals being discussed include a “bonus” in which the winning party would receive an extra share of seats to achieve a more stable majority. These reforms make many people, including many in the European Commission, nervous. Viktor Orbán has used “winner compensation mechanisms”, similar to the one Meloni is proposing, to maintain a supermajority in the Hungarian parliament, even when his party receives less than half the vote. Meloni – almost certain not to obtain the two-thirds majority in parliament required to revise the constitution – will need to call for a national referendum to make Italy a presidential republic. Given their experience with fascism, Italians have generally resisted greater concentration of power, but Meloni’s popularity, and public frustration over a series of ineffective governments, make the outcome of a referendum far from clear.

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