Christian, Italian, mother

As the Prime Minister of Italy and the star of the ultra -right Georgia Melony became the main beneficiary of the right turn in the EU and why the future of Europe depends on her choice

The leaders of the leading Western countries gathered at the end of this week to Apulia, the southeastern region of Italy. Here passes the anniversary, 50th Summit "Big Seven".

The guests are accepted by the head of the first ultra -right government of Italy since the time of Benito Mussolini - Georgia Melony. It was she who made one of the central topics of the summit of migration and at the last moment tried to remove the obligation of the G7 countries from the final communique to promote women's right to abortion at the international level. The Party of Meloni “The Brothers of Italy” has just shown impressive results in the elections to the European Parliament, confidently winning with 28.8% of the vote. The weight of Meloni as the president of one of the conservative factions in the European Parliament has increased, and now it has to be considered to be the whole EU: from the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Lyain to the leader of the French farm, Marine Le Pen. Like Meloni, who was inspired at the beginning of his career by the ideas of Italian nationalism, he managed to become a respected European politician who now plays a key role in the intermediary between Brussels and other ultra-right forces in the EU, ”Natalya Glukhova correspondent understood the New Year's Europe.

“Three women who overword Europe,” The Economist number on May 30 , on the eve of the European Parliament elections, came out with such a heading. On the cover is Ursula von der Lyain, the President of the European Commission, Marin Le Pen, the leader of the opposition in France, and Georgia Melony, the head of the Italian government. It is on them, according to the publication, the fate of the EU depends.

The election in the European Parliament, who passed 10 days after the release of the article, showed that the authors of The Economist are largely right. The party of Ursula von der Lyeen scored more than all votes, which increases its chances to re -election as the head of the European Commission. Marin Le Pen celebrates the triumphal victory in France, forcing Macron to dissolve the parliament. Meloni strengthened the positions of her Italian Brothers party at the pan -European level and, perhaps, for the first time in the history of the ultra -right forces will be part of the ruling coalition in the European Parliament and will play a key role in re -electing von der Lyayen.

In the new convocation, Italy will be represented by 76 euros deputies, and at once 25 of them are Meloni’s colleagues in the party. This is four times more than in the past elections in 2019, where the “brothers” received only 6 mandates. Seriously behind the meloni, levocentrists from the Democratic Party with 20 deputies, and the rest - including the right party “Forward, Italy!” - lagged behind even more.

“Italy and Georgia are changing Europe,” so the slogan on large election posters sounded, which were hung all over the past weekend throughout the country.

And this statement is not far from the truth.

Having passed the path from the activist of the ultra-right and even neo-fascist youth movements to the Italian Prime Minister, who copes with the crisis of refugees and the economic problems of the republic, Georgia Meloni changes how in Europe they relate to right-wing powers.

In Brussels, now not only consider her position on migrants quite constructive, but also hold the “Big Seven” summit in Italy, in the center of which this issue is posed . The readiness to work with Meloni at the pan -European level, without fear of accusations of cooperation with the ultra -right, directly on the election debate is declared by the Chairman of the European Commission Ursula von der Lyain. For the past six months, she has been seeking the support of Melony on EU summits during severe negotiations of Brussels with other right -wing conservatives, primarily Viktor Orban from Hungary.

On the way to the heights of the Italian and partly even the pan -European political career of Georgia Melony had to abandon a considerable part of his radical views. But far from everyone.

A follower of the ideas of Mussolini

Georgia Meloni was born in Rome on January 15, 1977 in a non -prosperous family. Her father Francesco Melony, a lawyer from Sardinia, threw a family and went on a sailing yacht to the Canary Islands when she was two years old. Later he will be sentenced to nine years in prison for drug trafficking. The mother of Georgia Anna Paratra, a writer of Sicilian descent, raised two daughters alone.

In 1996, Meloni received secondary special education in the field of linguistics. She never entered the university. Instead, the girl had to earn extra money to the nanny, the saleswoman in the flea market and the bartender in the club.

This difficult youth led Meloni to participate in the extreme right-wing social movements of Italy: in the mid-1990s they just experienced another Renaissance.

At the age of 15, Meloni joined the "Youth Front" - the youth wing of the Italian social movement, at the origins of which there were still veterans of the fascist party Benito Mussolini. In 1996, she headed the organization “Student Action” - the extreme right movement of high school students, protesting against the “excessive power of teachers”. Later, Meloni participated in the activities of the National Alliance nationalist party, whose members called themselves “descendants of Dante and Machiavelli”, and called for sharply tightening immigration legislation and increase the role of a traditional family in society. It was from this ultra -right party that Meloni was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

As a member of the Italian parliament, the young and active Georgia Melony caught her eyes close to Silvio Berlusconi forces. In 2008, his party, together with the coalition allies, received the majority in the elections and formed the Cabinet of Ministers. Having become the prime minister, Berlusconi included 31-year-old Meloni in the government. So the former activist of nationalist movements became the youngest in the history of Italy as Minister of Youth Policy, however, without a portfolio, that is, without budgets and subordinates.

By 2011, the Berlusconi government was in a serious crisis: the Italian economy could not recover from the consequences of world financial shocks of 2008, and at the same time a series of scandals and criminal cases, including sex with a minor, collapsed at the prime minister.

Against this background of Melony, along with two more extreme right Italian politicians who previously held in the Berlusconi party, they decide to start their own political project. So, in December 2012, the party was born, which later became known as “the brothers of Italy” - it is with these words that the country's official hymn begins.

The new project did not try to hide that Mussolini was drawing his main ideas from the well -known melony from the youth of the Italian social movement. For this, the opponents immediately christened the Party of the "brothers" of the fascist,

But this did not prevent them from getting into the next elections to the Italian parliament, while typing a little less than 2% of the vote.

In 2013–2022, the “brothers of Italy” tried several options for party coalitions with other ultra -right, but did not succeed: their representation in the Italian parliament was limited to several dozen places.

But the unexpected success was waiting for the "brothers" in the elections in the European Parliament in 2019. Against the background of the general “green turn” in the EU, far -right Italian party, far from these ideas, received 6.4% of the vote and six seats of Eurode. Meloni could move from the chair of the deputy of the Italian parliament to the European legislative body, but preferred to remain a member of the Chamber of Deputies. And I was not mistaken.

Conservative of a pan -European level

In October 2019, Meloni took part in the anti -government demonstration "Italian pride" in Rome. At the rally, she spoke harshly against the influx of migrants to Italy and criticized the government’s proposal not to use the words “father” and “mother” in documents certifying the identity of minors.

“They want us to be“ parent-1 ”and“ parent-2 ”. <...> We are people and will defend our identity. I am Georgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am an Italian, I am a Christian, ”Melony said from the rostrum then.

A few months after that, Vladimir Putin will also speak out against the European idea of ​​“Parents number 2”.

The ultra -conservative performance of Melony at that rally in Rome was a springboard for her career. The Italians made remix on this phrases, and she quickly became a meme in social networks, collecting millions of views.

The rise in the popularity of Meloni in Italy has become noticeable at the level of the entire EU. During this period, the pan -European party of conservatives and reformists (ECR), which was also joined by the “brothers” on the eve of the elections to the European Parliament, was in the search for new persons. After Brexit, the British Tori left the party, and the long -term leader and creator of ECR, the Euro -deputy from the Czech Republic, Yang Zagradil wanted to retire and tried to find the one to trust his political project. Meloni approached the role of the ECR president as well as possible: the young conservative, who opposes the migration and strengthening of Brussels power gaining strength.

Having received the post of head of the party, Meloni quickly was able to consolidate her leadership on the pan -European conservative front. At the head of the ECR faction in the European Parliament, she was able to put the Italian politician Nikola Prokaccini, who received the Meloni’s melodies, only after Meloni herself refused the Meloni herself.

Feeling that she had caught a wave of popularity precisely on ultra -conservative values, Meloni began to use this rhetoric and inside Italy. The phrase “I Georgia”, famous after the rally in Rome, became the title of Meloni's autobiography, published in 2021. In the book, she spoke about her complex childhood and more in detail formulated her views on the traditional family and restriction of women's rights to abortion, and also shared thoughts on the history of Italy of the last decades and about the changes necessary for the country. In May 2021, the Financial Times newspaper called Meloni “the rising star of the Italian extreme right”, along with Le Pen. It was then that these two politicians began to compare.

Meloni's autobiography became a prologue to the Italian Brothers election campaign in the National Parliament elections in 2022. After counting the votes, it turned out that the popularity of the Brothers and Melony for 4 years-from 2018 to 2022-grew five times. The party received 26% of the vote and, with the support of other ultra -right forces, was able to form the government.

So, 12 years after working as a minister in the team of Berlusconi, Georgia Melony returned to the government, becoming the first woman in the history of Italy, who received the post of prime minister. And the first - since the time of Benito Mussolini - a ultra -right politician in this post.

"Soft nationalist revolution"

Meloni has been holding power in Italy for two years, while remaining at the top of sociological surveys and having - unlike several Italian governments - solid ratings of approval.

The basis of this success is a change in the migration system. Meloni has obtained the conclusion of bilateral agreements with Tunisia , Turkey , Libya , and Albania on the placement of illegal migrants in these countries, who have arrived in the southern regions of Italy by the sea in the last years. Instead of considering migrant statements on the provision of asylum in Italy, the government invited them to wait for a solution (often negative) in refugee camps in other countries, and not in Italy itself. The rigidity of this measure and the understanding that, even having moved across the sea, you can be sent from the EU back, reduced the flows of illegal migration to Italy by 67% from 2023 to 2024.

At the same time, Meloni appeals to the ideas of a large traditional family very understandable to part of Italians and opposes same-sex marriages, while claiming that in Italy LGBTs are not discriminated. In 2022, the respectable American magazine The American Conservation called Melony's rule in Italy a "soft nationalist revolution."

However, with which Meloni had to finally say goodbye to the premiere’s post - this is with his views of Euroskeptics. Now she is trying to benefit from the simultaneous position of the head of one of the largest EU countries and the president of the faction included in the European Parliament.

In exchange for accounting for Italian interests in the budgets, initiatives and sanctions of the EU, Meloni seeks to be useful to the European political mainstream.

To do this, relying on her right -wing and conservative views, she acts as an intermediary between Brussels and ardent critics of the European Union.

For example, it was Meloni who convinced Viktor Orban Prime Minister Viktor Orban last year not to impose a veto on the accession of Ukraine to the EU, and then agree to allocate a package of assistance to Kiev in the amount of 50 billion euros. In addition, it was she who managed to achieve the consent of Budapest to the pan -European migration pact - a large -scale reform of the entire EU migration system, approved in December 2023.

Von der Layen - on the one hand, Le Pen - on the other

On the eve of the elections to the European Parliament of Georgia Meloni, both of her “accomplices in the overword of Europe” from the cover of The Economist magazine.

Realizing the inevitable growth of the popularity of right -wing forces, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen a few months before the vote began to prepare the ground for a potential coalition with Meloni. The votes of her euro deputies need von der Lyeen for guaranteed re -election the head of the EU government for a second term.

In addition, the support of the Italian prime minister will not interfere with the approval of the candidacy of the chairman of the European Commission and in the European Council - the body where the heads of state are sitting. Shortly before the election, French President Emmanuel Macron, dissatisfied with how von der Lyain consolidates the power over the EU, tried to find an alternative to her.

Over the past two years, Ursula and Georgia have developed friendly relations. The head of the European Commission often visits Italy: in 2023–2024, she was three times in Rome , twice in Emilia-Romania and once on Lampeduz -at one of the hottest points of the European migration crisis.

At the end of April, von der Lyain said that the European People’s Party, the largest legal -centric faction, which includes the current head of the European Commission, is ready to join an alliance with the “brothers of Italy”.

In response, other centrist and pro -European forces published a joint statement, in which they demanded from Ursula to “decisively reject any normalization, cooperation or alliance with the extreme right and radical parties”. But she did not do this.

Georgia Melony in an interview on May 26 stated that she would be interested to become part of the “right -center majority”, and that she was ready to unite with any (only not left) forces. First of all, Meloni had in mind “identity and democracy” (ID) - another, more radical than ECR, the European Parliament faction. The ID includes the ultra -right Italian League Matteo Salvini and the French “National Association”, led by Marin Le Pen.

Marin Le Pen herself offered Melonya the Union: “Now is the time to unite. If we succeed, we can become the second group in the European Parliament, ”she said a few weeks before the election. However, the alliance with von der Lyan Le Pen resolutely rejected, saying that "her time has expired." The head of the European Commission, in turn, said that the Le Pen party takes a pro -Russian position, and called it the Putin puppet.

“Le Pen on one side and von der Lyeen extend the hand of Melony on the other. But the Italian Prime Minister will be able to choose only one "

- It is believed in the Berlin analytical center SWP. If Meloni sides the von der Layen and will “directly lead the EU policy together,” she will have no other choice but “abandon Le Pen, Orban and others”.

What role will Meloni decide to play after the elections: a pragmatist seeking to unite the forces of right -wing and legal forces, or a “radical destroyer” who wants to rebuild the EU and regain power to national states? Meloni, as noted in Politico, has not yet revealed the cards.

Nevertheless, the intrigue will be resolved over the next few weeks. И то, какой выбор сделает в итоге Джорджия Мелони, действительно может определить будущее Европы на ближайшие пять лет.