An Anti-Modern Woman in Power: Giorgia Meloni and the New Right Government in Italy

On 25 September 2022, following an unprecedented electoral campaign across the summer, the Italian general election entrusted the government of Italy to Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d’Italia, the heir to the political culture of the Italian Social Movement and fascism. The warning against of the threat represented by a new right-wing authoritarianism ascending to power failed to mobilise the electorate, and the victory, widely predicted by the polls and built on a process of legitimisation, brought a right-wing woman to the Presidency of the Council for the first time. This article reconstructs the process, the scenario and the ideological horizon of this political phase. It is the outcome of the decade-long instability of a traditionally rigid political landscape. For years, the “crisis of politics” had led to a strong polarisation that overcame the traditional right-left alignments and manifested itself in an anti-system and anti-European rhetoric (endorsed by Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle). These movements had to reckon with the “national unity” governments in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, a circumstance that favoured Giorgia Meloni and the post-fascists who remained in the opposition. This “normalisation” of the right, which took over the political legacy of “Berlusconism” that legitimised it, was epitomised in the “Trieste Theses” by highlighting the themes of identitarianism and “European integrationism”: the fight against multiculturalism, the anti-Western philosophies of 1968, the anti-Enlightenment. Another powerful ideological element is the “peopolisation” of Meloni, incarnated in the intimate tone and political emotion of the autobiography Io sono Giorgia, as a mediatised morality tale of a successful “outsider”. A symbolic construction that reached its acme in the inauguration speech where Giorgia Meloni evoked “the piercing of the glass ceiling”, thus instrumentalising feminisms, which was immediately contradicted by her policies and the vision of the “natural family”, promoted by means of in a large anti-gender, anti-abortion and against the so-called “womb for rent” crusade.