The “I am Giorgia” of the Italian far-right Meloni, winner of the elections: a young woman named Calimera who gives for a series

The leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, Giorgia Meloni, has won the elections in Italy and is emerging as the country’s prime minister, which would make her the first woman to head the government. This is the profile of Meloni, who monopolizes this Monday, September 26, all the protagonism of her in Italy and in Europe.

The leader of the ultras Brothers of Italy, called to power in coalition with Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, had her first contacts with the Youth Front, the puppies of Italian post-fascism, when she was 15 years old. That small girl with a severe look, she undertook a career dedicated to politics that now, after dominating all the men in her ranks, she reaches her highest challenge: to be the first woman to conquer the Government of Italy.

The life of Giorgia Meloni (Rome, 1977) is marked by the indelible stamp of abandonment. Her mother, Anna, had to raise her alone, along with her beloved older sister, Arianna, after her father abandoned them and left for the Canary Islands. “I owe everything to my mother, a woman of will, cultured, who behind the armor she wears to face her life hides a fragile soul”, she acknowledges in her memoirs, from 2021.

Theirs was “a wounded family,” a mother and two girls under the roof of an apartment in Roma. As a result of a fire caused by a candle that the sisters left burning in her room, they had to leave the apartment. “We met on the street,” she remembers. Mrs. Anna managed to sell what was left of the house and move to the working-class neighborhood of Garbatella, where by chance she came into contact with politics, to which she would dedicate her life.

Meloni loved music, from Italian singer-songwriters to Michael Jackson, devouring the pages of The Lord of the rings and does not hide that he suffered bullying.

At the age of 15, he knocked on the armored door of the Youth Front, the youth organization of the former Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded by the last fascists.

The girl, always opposed to celebrating the Day of Liberation from Nazi-fascism because it was “divisive”, inaugurated her militancy in an incandescent summer of 1992, while the First Republic was collapsing under the weight of corruption and mafia bombs.

Her life consisted of weekend activism, codenamed ‘Calimera’ to throw off left-wing street gangs, and babysitting or waitressing jobs to bring home money.

In 1996, four years later, the young woman, already known for her dialectical toughness, rose as the national leader of “Azione Studentesca”, the National Alliance youth movement, the new face of the MSI, with which she was elected provincial councilor in Rome.

Her rise was meteoric, passing over all men, until at the age of 29 she reached the Chamber of Deputies, of which she was vice president until 2008, when she was appointed Minister of Youth by Berlusconi.

The rise of this woman with a deep voice, blonde hair and icy eyes coincides with her presidency, since 2014, of the Brothers of Italy, the new heirs of the MSI, with whom she is preparing her conquest of the country.

In 2016 she tried to be mayor of Rome, without success, but she gained great popularity by campaigning while pregnant with her only daughter, Ginevra, the result of her relationship with the journalist Andrea Giambruno.

Since then his role has only increased (in the 2018 elections he obtained a sad 4%). Its success stems from exploiting discontent over the pandemic and its role as the sole opposition to Mario Draghi’s defunct national unity coalition.

His high point came when, in October 2019, he appeared before thousands of people in the Plaza de San Juan de Letrán, a trade union fiefdom, to proclaim: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, a mother, an Italian and a Christian and they will not take it away from me” , in direct attack on homosexual legislation. Two youngsters took her speech, mixed it with electronic music and, unintentionally, elevated her to a pop icon. All of Italy danced and spread that catchy song.

His rivals, he maintains, are the “bureaucrats” in Brussels, the LGBT community or the “living room left”, while admiring Vladimir Putin’s Russia for sharing the “system of European values, defending Christianity and combating Islamic fundamentalism” , although it promises “loyalty” to the West.

His ideology was clarified in a Vox electoral act in Marbella (Málaga): “There are no possible mediations, it is said yes or no. Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby; yes to sexual identity, no to the ideology of gender; yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death; yes to the universality of the cross, no to Islamic violence; yes to secure borders, no to mass immigration”. Giorgia Meloni was presenting herself to the world.