Defying EU elite, Meloni tackles the virtue-signallers

By calling out woke madness, Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni is beating the EU at its own game – and Europe’s new right-leaning governments are watching closely.

Giorgia Meloni’s popularity rose when she pushed back against European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s lecturing Italy on its responsibilities to illegal immigrants. Picture: AFP

Who is Giorgia Meloni, what is she? That is the question all of Italy and indeed most Europeans are asking today. Meloni is something of a conundrum: a conservative Euro-sceptic and supposed friend of Vladimir Putin who nevertheless has pledged to deliver increased help to Ukraine; an avowed social conservative and champion of the family who is not legally married and has only one child with her long-term partner.

She is a bitter foe of the rainbow warriors and gender-neutral identity push yet has no plans to change Italian same-sex marriage laws. She is determined to turn the ailing Italian economy around yet is utterly scornful of depersonalised consumerism on which modern economics is based. No wonder everyone is confused about Meloni.

One thing that can definitely be said about Meloni is that she is passionate in her beliefs and a mesmerising speaker. She could give lessons in rhetoric, and she has a formidable mind, steeped in the tradition of liberal conservatism and neo-Christian philosophy. She sprinkles her speeches with allusions and apt quotes from Ronald Reagan, John Paul II and even (shock, horror) GK Chesterton. She has no fear of the mighty forces of Euro-secularism.

As the child of a poor single mother and a father who abandoned them, it is no wonder she supports the traditional family.

She calls the family not just any coupling of sentient beings but a “bond of blood, of genetic inheritance … which is sacred”, words strongly approved of in a country where the family is everything. In fact, it might be one reason her popularity since taking office has soared.

She has been characterised as a dangerous reactionary and anti-gay because she doesn’t believe it is right for a “poor woman to nurture a child in her womb for nine months” to have it “sold to two rich men”. In fact, in Italy surrogacy for money has always been illegal. The ballyhoo in the cut-and-paste liberal media about her government’s crackdown on registering same-sex couples on children’s birth certificates was a misrepresentation of the situation in Italy, where two people of the same sex have never been permitted to register as a child’s parents. The Mayor of Milan simply took it on himself to do this as part of his own ideological campaign.

More important, like most Italian prime ministers before her, Meloni is acutely aware of the two big interrelated problems Italy faces. The first is the declining birthrate. Italy was the first country in the developed world to have in raw numbers more people over 65 than under 18. The coffin-shaped demographic profile that plagues the Western world is particularly dangerous in Italy. How Meloni wants to tackle this remains unclear.

At the moment the Italian family receives little state help. Meloni has spoken forcefully (as she always does) about tax breaks for families and increasing the ability of women to both work and have children. Although we in Australia are used to the idea of mothers working with young children, especially as we have access to part-time work and childcare, in Italy this is not common. Mothers are more or less expected to stay home when they have children although two incomes are necessary in Italy now, as they are in Australia.

The consequence is very late marriage, and fewer children. An acute lack of young people means a lack of working-age people to fuel the economy, now and in the future. Consequently in Italy, as in the rest of Western Europe, immigrants are being used to fill the gaps. They come from Eastern Europe, India, Sri Lanka, China and Africa. Not all of these immigrants are illegal. Even in the village where I own a house there are families from Macedonia and Romania. Most have done well.

Some of their children have been to university in Italy and gone back to work in professions in Romania; others are doing well in the local building trade. It is not unusual to find in the major cities family groupings whose origins are not Italian, yet they seem to adopt a more or less Italian way of life, especially if they have children, who benefit from Italy’s good, conservative education system. Racism certainly is not unknown. Forty or 50 years ago the idea one’s grandchild would have black skin was simply unheard of. However, this has changed and the acceptance of people whose origins are not Italian is much more common.

It is not this type of immigration Meloni’s government wants to target; rather, it is illegal immigration, the type of risky asylum-seeking we see frequently on the news, with people drowning at sea. Italy is known as a soft touch where it is easy to remain under the radar. These mainly young African men are seeking work. They are mostly heading for France, and Italy is the convenient first destination, but it has reached the stage where Italy is running out of space to accommodate them even temporarily.

France and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen lecturing Italy on its responsibilities to illegal immigrants has not gone down well and has heightened Meloni’s popularity when she pushed back against von der Leyen’s censorious attitude.

Meloni supports stricter controls and legal migration to Italy. However, on illegal immigration Meloni is proactive. One of her first moves was to go to Ethiopia to talk about stemming the flow of immigrants at the source. Unlike her critics, she acknowledges the Italian population wants this unrestricted flow stopped. She also acknowledges the problems that cause the flow in the first place are human problems and the EU, including Italy, has an obligation to help people at the source.

This is typical of the radical conservatism of Meloni. Rather than bow to elite opinion in the EU bureaucracy, which falsely characterises her attitude as inhumane, she has called out the inhumanity of the bureaucracy, which would rather see lives risked at sea than do something to help people before they go to sea. By calling out the false virtue signalling she is beating the EU at its own game – and Europe’s new right-leaning governments are watching closely.