She actually is a compelling character, is the thing. Her backstory is an interesting one: she was mostly raised by a single mother in a working-class neighbourhood of Rome, she eventually became Italy’s youngest-ever government minister at 31, she’s now the country’s first female prime minister. You may have already heard all of that about Giorgia Meloni though, as she’s been hard to avoid over the past
few years.
Her party, the Brothers of Italy, is part of the global, populist right wing wave that has been threatening to engulf western Europe for the past decade or so. While their counterparts have so far flirted with power but failed to get it, she has now been running her country since 2022.
Perhaps most crucially, it doesn’t feel like she’s failing at it. The story of the far right in the 21st century is usually always the same; they’re cranks and they’re crooks, more often than not they’re in it for the money and, if tasked with actually being competent, they crumble. Rinse, repeat. Meloni has now been prime minister for nearly three years and, if anything, her party is more popular than ever.
In September 2022, Brothers of Italy polled at 26%; they have, over the past year, never dipped below 29%. Back in March, her administration became the fifth-longest running in the history of the Italian republic. If she lasts until the next election, which currently looks more than plausible, she will beat the current record, and become the longest-serving Italian prime minister in 80 years. Why?
Her autobiography offers some answers. I Am Giorgia got its name from a moment she should have found mortifying, but didn’t. As she mentions herself in the introduction, she gave a speech back in 2019 and told the crowd, with passion, that “I am Giorgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am an Italian! I am a Christian!” The speech became a meme, and the meme became a song, and the song has now reached 13 million views on YouTube.
Ask any Italian under 35 whether they’ve heard Io Sono Giorgia and they’re likely to say yes. Hell, they may have even danced to it in a club, and sung along to “genitore uno / genitore due”, arguably the catchiest bit of the remix. Another politician would have ignored it, or perhaps mentioned it in passing, then moved on. Meloni used it as a title for her memoirs, and named the chapters after the lyrics in the song. Not for the first time, she had the last laugh.
Again, it seems worth asking: what is it about her? The book is a confusing read, as it both provides some clues and doesn’t. Very early on, while discussing her childhood, she calls herself a “textbook Capricorn”, which just feels undignified. A few pages later, she attempts to argue, not unreasonably, that everyone ought to have their own role to play in society, and no one should rely on the state to do everything for us.
The way she does it, however, is by writing that, “to quote Michael Jackson, if you want to change, start with the man in the mirror.” How’s your jaw doing? All nice and tense? Join the club.
Elsewhere, she describes the “fantastic photomontage” someone made of the official picture of female ministers in the Berlusconi government, in which she was swapped with Kermit the Frog. “I use the word fantastic,” she writes, “because I adore the Muppets.” Though these lines all have the benefit of being short, if nothing else, rest assured that they sit alongside many, many sprawling, nonsensical paragraphs, on irrelevant topics ranging from “the 27 Club” to the song Imagine.
An especially vivid passage comes near the end of the book, and starts with a confession that she “constantly” talks to a guardian angel in her head, before turning into a broader paean to angels in general, and a boast about the countless angels she’s collected over the years.
In short: there is a way of reading I Am Giorgia that will leave a liberal-minded person feeling smug but frustrated; amused but confused by the vagaries of the stupid, stupid electorate. There is another way, however, which reveals just how dangerous the Italian prime minister is, and why she has been so successful so far.
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The kids are alt right
Meloni decided to get into politics at 15, following the assassination of Paolo Borsellino, a judge who’d tried to take on the mafia. Soon afterwards, she picked up the phone book, found the nearest branch of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, knocked on the door, and asked to join. What follows would warm the cockles of any former teenage revolutionary.
There are tales of staying up all night in all manner of grotty spaces, arguing about politics and what the future should look like. There is some mischief too – posters being put up in places where they don’t belong, under cover of darkness. Of course, there are some crushes, and a whole lot of youthful idealism.
Really, the only issue is that the movement she was a part of was a proudly neo-fascist one. You’d be forgiven for not really having noticed, though; Meloni writes and writes about her love of politics as a young woman, but rarely stops to set out just what those politics were. She explains, for example, that her essay on immigration at her final school exam triggered a veritable “political trial” from one of the teachers, but what exactly were her views on the topic? She doesn’t say.
Still, what does come across is how passionately she feels about her cause. A teenage activist-turned-elected councillor at 21, then MP at 29, minister two years later, then party leader in her mid-thirties, Meloni simply never stops. The book quickly becomes tedious when she rants against Islam, homosexuals, immigrants, feminists and all the other usual suspects, but the passages about her life are, at times, captivating.
Political autobiographies are rarely known for their uncomfortable candour, but Meloni isn’t afraid to dig deep. “When he died a few years ago, I felt nothing,” she says of her father, who left the family to move to the Canary Islands when she was a small child. Later, when speaking about her daughter, she writes: “I’m not entirely sure what happiness is. I’ve been chasing it my whole life and still don’t think I’ve ever fully caught it.”
Perhaps more oddly, she will gladly expose the many ways in which her political positions are hypocritical. She believes that children should only ever be brought up by a father and a mother, yet keeps praising the lovely and loving childhood her single mother gave her. She fights for the institution of marriage but isn’t married to her partner. In fact, their arrangement is quite a modern one, as they only moved in together once she was pregnant with their daughter, and they still live in different cities most of the time.
SMIALOWSKI/AFP
Does she care that it makes her social conservatism nonsensical? She does not! She is Giorgia and she will not apologise for anything. She will repeatedly – repeatedly – quote The Lord of the Rings if she wants to. No, really, she wants to: you can hardly go anywhere in this book without bumping into yet another Tolkien reference.
What this means in practice is that her autobiography should come with a whiplash warning. It is, in turn, a shamefully enjoyable read, a morally repulsive screed, an idiotic guide to right wing political thought and an engrossing memoir from a very earnest middle-aged woman.
There are points when Meloni sounds shrewd and much cleverer than people make her out to be. There are others when she writes things like “this was a low point for humanity, I have no doubt about that” – about the Holocaust. Is she an idiot who got lucky or a political mastermind who happens to be a blonde woman with an especially expressive face?
Is the fact that she’s seemingly not achieved all that much while in government a sign that she’s all air and no substance, or should we be concerned that she knows exactly what she’s doing, and is doing it at her own pace? There are many questions one could ask about the western queen of the far right, and it’s hard to tell if her memoirs answer them or muddy the waters even further.
You cannot beat an enemy if you don’t understand them first, but she is remarkably hard to pin down. While reading her book, I wrote down masses and masses of notes, many of them ending with some incredulous question marks. Looking at them now, it’s possible that the only ones that mattered were the ones I scribbled while around a third of the way through.
What is there to know about Giorgia Meloni? “Genuinely just loves politics / a sincerely odd character” is all I can offer. Well, that and a warning that she’s a force to be reckoned with, and isn’t going anywhere. That should worry us all.
