When Giorgia Meloni said: “If I were a fascist, I would say I am a fascist.”
Before becoming Prime Minister of Italy. Giorgia Meloni addressed the question directly. Why is her party labeled “far-right” and not “fascist”. In an interview with The Spectator in 2022.
If she were a fascist, she would announce it, said Meloni, soon to be prime minister and a huge name in Europe.“I have no problem confronting this,” Maloney said. “When we founded the Brotherhood of Italy, we established it as center-right, with its head held high. When I am something, I announce it. I never hide. If I were a fascist, I would say I am a fascist. Instead, I never talk about fascism because I am not a fascist.”Meloni said in the same interview: “This is a declaration I made in 2006, almost 20 years ago, published by an Italian journalist, a left-wing journalist – and I said to him: ‘Mussolini made different mistakes: the racist laws against the Jews, the declaration of war, the authoritarian regime. Historically, he also did other things that were good, but that didn’t save him.”“In the DNA of the Italian Brothers, there is no nostalgia for fascism, racism or anti-Semitism.
There is instead a rejection of every dictatorship: past, present and future.” “I have always told my party bosses, even in memoirs, to exercise the utmost rigor with any manifestation of imbecilic nostalgia because those who are nostalgic for fascism are of no use to us. “They’re just the left’s useful idiots,” Meloni said.
What is the brothers of Italy?
Brothers of Italy is a nationalist, conservative, right-wing populist political party that is now the ruling party in Italy after becoming the largest party in the 2022 general elections.
Georgia Meloni is the current leader of the party.While the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, or FdI) were officially born in 2012, their political lineage goes back to 1946 with the formation of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded by former followers of Benito Mussolini. In the 1990s, the MSI was renamed the National Alliance (AN), a moderate conservative “post-fascist” party that publicly repudiated fascism.
The FdI inherited its leadership core and official symbol, the fiamma tricolore (tricolored flame), from this lineage, although contemporary party leaders describe the FdI as a mainstream conservative party.
- In the 2013 general election, he received only 1.9% of the vote.
- In 2014, Giorgia Meloni took over as official leader of the party, focusing on social conservatism, Euroscepticism, anti-immigration policies, and traditional family values.
- In the 2018 general election, the party improved slightly, receiving 4.3% of the vote, serving primarily as a junior partner in right-wing coalitions.
- In the general elections held in September 2022, the Brotherhood of Italy shocked Europe by obtaining 26% of the vote, becoming the largest single party in Italy.
Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood, as she joined politics at the age of fifteen
After her father abandoned her, Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood. She did not attend university and began working as a nanny, waitress, and waiter. At the age of fifteen, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI).
She later said that she was driven to join politics out of a desire for law and order, and was deeply influenced by the 1992 Mafia assassinations of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.She quickly rose through the ranks, founding a student movement called Gli Antenati (The Ancestors) to protest education reforms, and eventually becoming the student action leader of the National Alliance (the moderate successor to the MSI movement).At the age of 21, she won her first election in 1998 and became a local councilor for the District of Rome. At the age of twenty-nine, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian Parliament) and was immediately appointed as the youngest ever Vice-President of the Chamber. She also qualified and worked as a journalist.When media mogul Silvio Berlusconi returned to power with a right-wing coalition, he appointed 31-year-old Meloni as Minister of Youth in 2008.
She became the youngest minister in the history of unified Italy.When Berlusconi’s government collapsed in financial crises in 2011, Meloni refused to support the subsequent European-led technocratic government. When she saw traditional right-wing parties compromising on their values, she took a high-risk gamble in 2012 and co-founded the Brotherhood of Italy.For nearly a decade, she ran a fringe party that struggled to stay above 4% in national polls, but her political tenacity was ultimately rewarded as her party became the largest party in the 2022 election.
