Italy has its first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. And hers will also be Italy's first far-right government after the World War II. This firebrand, far-right, 45-year-old leader who founded the party just a decade back, has made history by polling 26 per cent of the votes in last month's national election. Her success has been due, thanks to the disunity and factionalism among her rivals in the centre-left camp. Her rise to power is phenomenal indeed seeing that only four years ago in 2018's election her Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) or FdI got just over 4 per cent of the popular votes. Her other coalition partners include former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (86) of Forza Italia (Forward Italy), a conservative, centre-right party and Matteo Salvini of the populist and extreme right wing Lega (League) party. But who is this Giorgia Meloni who is known to have won the hearts of most of her voters more for her steely determination and consistency than her ideology? She could outdo her other coalition partners like Matteo Salvini, in the election because unlike Salvini, she refused to join the Mario Draghi's interim, technocratic government.
This image of her as a strong person has worked for the Italian electorate frustrated over the demise of one government after another (seven governments, to be specific) for more than a decade in the past years. However, the stubbornness in her character can be traced to the struggle her family had to go through as her father abandoned their family when she was a child. So, she had to help her mother, who is herself a supporter of far-right ideology, run errands and do odd jobs like her mother did to make ends meet. Though her father would visit them from time to time, at a stage, she thought she should better see the back of him as no bond ever developed between them. Thus, deprived of a strong family bond in her early life, she was forever on the lookout for a second family and she found one in the youth wing of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a neofascist political outfit. As a member of the MSI's youth front, she had to work hard with her then-reactionary far right ideology among the university students infused with leftist ideology. This was indeed a tough time for the far-right ideology in the post-WWI I Europe, especially, in Italy, where the stigma of Mussolini's fascism was still attached to that kind of politics. So, it was not surprising that the rightist camp could not make much progress despite the near-bankruptcy of the left camp. Meanwhile, in 1995, MSI, in a bid to break with its fascist root, became National Alliance (AN), a rightwing nationalist party. As the leader of AN, she merged in a coalition with Berlusconi's Forza Italia and later joined his cabinet as youth minister in 2008. In 2012, she founded Fratelli d'Italia.
Politics gradually underwent a sea change in the post-Cold War Europe. Small wonder that Italy was no exception. And Meloni with her background fitted in well with general scheme of things in the post-Cold War Italian politics. When corruption and scandals, even allegation of mafia-connection, damaged the reputation of the politicians and the parties in office, the public were naturally looking for a change. Now with the public growing disillusioned with technocracy and political elitism, breakup of families, rise of the social minorities, especially, LGBTQA+, abortion-rights movement, gender-based politics, immigrants etc, the ground was fertile for the return of the far-right. So, did Meloni'sFdI and her coalition partners, Lega and Forza Italia. Obviously, the rest of Europe, especially, EU will be ill at ease in dealing with this new prime minister of Italy, the Europe's third largest economy.
