Can-do Giorgia Meloni shakes up Italy
As the rest of Europe’s sclerotic governments and their leaders flounder over illegal immigration and grapple with the headache of the Russia-Ukraine war, Italy has something a bit different.
That is a prosecco-sipping mirage. In reality, life in Italy for the average Italian is stressful. It has a labyrinthine bureaucracy, a terrible banking system and people still rely on personal relationships (especially familial) for much business. It has a rapidly ageing population, one of the lowest birthrates in Europe and during the past 10 years the country has had more than a million uninvited immigrants land on its coast.
But as the rest of Europe’s sclerotic governments and their leaders flounder over illegal immigration and spend a great deal of time coming up with no solutions, and grapple with the headache of the Russia-Ukraine war, Italy has something a bit different. Italy has Giorgia Meloni. And who is Giorgia? She says it herself: “I am Giorgia. I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Christian and I am Italian.”
Four years ago Meloni’s blunt description of herself was criticised by the rump left and even employed as a rap to satirise her. Ironically, the rap has become so popular it is played at clubs and bars, and people rap along.
She has been smeared over the fascist past of the party she has headed since 2014, Brothers of Italy. Her strident views on illegal immigration, permeated with a strong sense of Italian nationality and culture, have been called racist. But Meloni’s popularity has surged to more than 70 per cent.
Meloni is already the second longest serving one-term prime minister since World War II, behind Silvio Berlusconi, and as Donald Trump noted during a pan-European meeting on Ukraine, she may well become Italy’s longest serving single-term Prime Minister since World War II.
Her success so far is remarkable. This is a country that has had 69 governments in 78 years. So how has she done it? Well, first, Meloni makes no bones about who she is and what she stands for, as her autobiography I Am Giorgia makes clear. She lays out her views and guiding principles, most of which were developed as a child of a hardworking single mother, abandoned by her father who tried to force her mother to abort her.
She grew up in Garbatella, one of Rome’s poorest areas, so she could see herself in the lives of people whose circumstances were not improved by the airy ideological assumptions of the new left.
She is dismissive about the assumptions of what she calls the Imagine crowd, citing John Lennon’s famous song. Whether it is “imagine no borders”, which would give you no nationality, or “no religion”, which would demean your culture, leave you rootless and with no principles, Meloni has no time for that old “flower-power in the sky” stuff or the new identity politics. That is not surprising since her own identity was largely forged in the heat of her local politics.
She is also dismissive of the push to remake the family in the new ideology of personal identity. She is scathing about trying to call parents anything other than mother or father. She has banned same-sex adoption, much to ire of the new identity crowd. Her condemnation of this was summed up in a speech: “How can it be right for a poor woman to nourish a baby in her body for nine months, then sell it to two men?” However, Meloni is a conundrum.
She grew up without a father, whose desertion she calls the greatest emotional void of her life. But despite that acute trauma, she is herself a single mother who in 2023 sacked her long-term boyfriend, a television journalist and the father of her own daughter, for making lewd remarks. Perhaps her championing of the Italian family is an idealistic reaction against her own history and situation.
Her views on race and immigration are probably the most controversial. She has a strong view that the lives of the poor are not improved by the uncontrolled influx of even poorer people who live under the radar, who are usually exploited. As soon as Meloni became Prime Minister she set up immigration detention and used naval patrols in the Mediterranean to block illegal boat arrivals. Some of this has been quite successful. She also has gone to the source of the arrivals.
She spent some time in North Africa offering inducements to leaders to help stem the flow. Meloni has had some success. This is in stark contrast to the failure of most European governments to deal with the immigrant crisis.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has only just decided to take illegal arrivals out of hotels because of trenchant opposition from local people and build detention centres. Meanwhile, France is still floundering over whether to accept a deal from Britain or simply stick to the shambolic plan of encouraging boatpeople across the Channel.
However, without immigrants it is hard to see how some of Italy’s notable exports such as fashion and furniture can keep afloat.
Italy’s sweatshops are full of Chinese immigrants. There is even a rural area full of Sikh agricultural workers, and many towns and cities need immigrants to do everything from sweeping the streets to collecting the rubbish. Italy always had a laissez-faire attitude to immigrants and now has second and third generations of Romanian Italians and Italians of African and Asian heritage. It is also noticeable in some provinces that the formerly aimless youths selling towels or hanging about the supermarket for tips are actually working, on the roads, on building sites and so on.
Meloni is definitely making her presence felt as a leader.
She has projected a much more complex character than anyone expected. Her aura of can-do common sense when few politicians can speak like the rest of us is refreshing – and powerful. It was amusingly summed up by her disdainful eye-rolling when German Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to lecture the US President on the importance of a Ukraine peace deal. It spoke a thousand words about her and quickly went viral on YouTube. And while everyone else is trying to work out where to go with Trump, Meloni may almost have him in her little pocket.
I have just returned from a break in an old village in central Italy. To say things have changed in provincial Italy is an understatement. Our picturesque village is a hive of building and fixing due to a foreign invasion, mostly American and English. Italy, it seems, is where all the world wants to come and experience “the Italian dream”.