Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia – Brothers of Italy – party is on track to become Italy’s first female prime minister, prompting Italian and European leaders to question whether the one-time admirer of Vladimir Putin will lead the third largest EU economy in the pro-Russian camp after this month’s election. Ms Meloni insists she supports sending arms to Ukraine and fully supports Western sanctions against Moscow. But her “Atlantic” stance, apparently aimed at making her party more acceptable in Brussels and other power centers in Europe, is relatively new. She praised Mr Putin’s victory in the 2018 election on her Facebook page. And her coalition partners Silvio Berlusconi of the Forza Italia party – the disgraced former ‘bunga bunga’ maestro is still a political force – and Matteo Salvini of the Lega party openly expressed admiration for Mr Putin until recently. The general election on September 25 will mark the end of the Mario Draghi era. The former European Central Bank boss was appointed in February 2021 to oversee the recovery of Italy’s pandemic-ravaged economy and negotiate a rich package of loans and grants, worth nearly 200 billion euros, from the European Union that will could help make the eternal a sick country more competitive. Mr Draghi has also helped Europe forge a largely united front against Russia. But his national unity government collapsed in July after Forza Italia, the League and another major party, the Five Star Movement, suddenly withdrew their support for Italy’s unelected leader. While there is some chance he will emerge as Italy’s next president (head of state) in a few years, most Italians assume he will disappear from the corridors of power in Rome. He has never had a political party to support him and considers himself non-political. Ms. Meloni’s rise has been nothing short of spectacular. In the last election, in 2018, the Brothers of Italy party garnered just 4 percent of the vote, relegating it to the fringes of Italy’s political spectrum (the country’s parliament has 19 parties, with constantly shifting alliances). Today, the coalition of Brothers, Forza Italia and League polls at 45%, making it virtually unassailable. In second place is the center-left Democratic Party, led by former prime minister Enrico Letta, with 24 percent. He is hampered by his inability to form political alliances. Ms. Meloni, 45, was born in a working-class Roman neighborhood called Garbatella, built in the 1920s and full of socialist residents who opposed Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. But Ms. Meloni and the parties that gave birth to the Brothers were anything but left-wing. The Brothers grew out of the Italian Social Movement, which was founded by Mussolini’s loyalists immediately after World War II. Its successor was the National Alliance (AN). Ms Meloni became president of its youth wing in 2004, was elected to parliament two years later and became Italy’s youngest minister in 2008 when she caught the eye of Mr Berlusconi, then prime minister. In 2012, he helped rebrand AN as Brothers and made it the unexpected vanguard of nationalist, family-oriented Christian conservatism with a Eurosceptic streak. Her efforts made little headway until well after the 2018 election, when her nationalist stance and opposition to immigration and what she called “LGBT lobbies,” plus her reputation as a tough, hard-working, social media-savvy newcomer networking. a sea of tired old men, began to resonate with center-right and hardline voters. Support from Mr Berlusconi and Mr Salvini didn’t hurt. At the time, she was openly pro-Russian. Four years ago, he praised Mr Putin’s sweeping election victory as a representative of the “unquestionable will of the Russian people”. Its lieutenants admired Russia for what they called its “stabilizing role in Syria” (Russia entered the Syrian civil war in 2015 after the government asked for help fighting rebel groups). She is sometimes compared to Donald Trump, another politician who has, at times, praised Mr Putin. Since then, she has taken her message to the pro-European, pro-American, anti-Russian sphere. He described the Russian invasion as an “unacceptable large-scale act of war by Putin’s Russia against Ukraine” and said he would support arming the Ukrainian military, as Mr Draghi had done. “With the wind in her sails, she is sending messages to a wider audience, both to attract potential voters and to appease potential critics,” Francesco Galietti, chief executive of Policy Sonar, an Italian political risk consultancy, said in an interview her. “Meloni knows that without a strong Atlantic stance, it would be impossible for her party to run the country.” Opinion: Harbinger of Europe’s coming recession: Family businesses rocked by unaffordable energy bills Opinion: Vladimir Putin’s Russia shows little sign of losing sanctions war, so far But there is no doubt that many Brothers supporters are neither Atlanticists nor Russia-haters – polls show that more than half oppose sanctions against Moscow. The party’s coalition partners, Forza Italia and the League, do not want to alienate Russia completely. The country is a major trading partner, a critical supplier of Italy’s oil and natural gas, and is dominated by a personality that appeals to their natural attraction to powerful men. Mr Berlusconi has advocated close ties with Russia. He and Mr. Putin are good friends. They have been spotted holidaying together in Sardinia and Sochi, on the Black Sea, where Mr Putin has a mansion. Mr Salvini, who made a name for himself with his fierce anti-immigration stance when he was interior minister in 2018 and 2019, once walked through Moscow’s Red Square wearing a Putin T-shirt and said he believed sanctions hurt countries by imposing them as much as they hurt them. Russia. Alan Friedman, the American author of a new Italian book on the future of the economy, The price of the future (The price of the future), said he thinks the Brothers are more in the pro-Putin camp than they care to admit. “Meloni is a shrewd politician who is desperate to present herself as a moderate center-right,” he said in an interview. “I don’t believe a leopard can change its spots so easily. There are simply too many pro-Putin people in her party.” Certainly Mrs. Meloni’s insistence that she considers Mr. Putin a threat to Europe does not convince everyone. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Andrea Marcucci, a Democratic Party senator, said he would be concerned about Rome’s relationship with Europe if the Meloni-led coalition formed the next government. “We have a right closer to Moscow than to Brussels,” he said.
