Her party, until recently, was on the sidelines. She was ignored for years by Italy’s male-dominated political class. She is a single mother with a heavy Roman accent, always casual and crude, gesturing her hands to the sky, decrying “woke ideology” and the annulment of culture. In any case, the rise of Giorgia Meloni is amazing. In a few weeks, if all goes as expected, she is set to become Italy’s first female leader. She has also set a benchmark for a far-right politician in Western Europe, winning a level of power that was out of reach for her counterparts in Germany and France, and she is doing so even after the forces driving nationalism on the continent — an immigration backlash and Euroscepticism – have faded. But Meloni’s profile is distinct, as is her path to political success. Amid war in Europe, it has largely avoided the pitfalls of nationalist forms elsewhere. He is a strong supporter of NATO and shows no affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has pledged not to disrupt Italy’s stability and Atlantic alliances. The country, he says, will not take an authoritarian turn. What will certainly change, however, is Italy’s tone. Meloni takes shots at the “LGBT lobby” and the “globalization” left. It highlights anecdotes about immigrant crime. She said “everything we stand for is under attack” — Christian values, gender norms. Some of her positions – such as opposition to gay adoptions, for example – do not have much traction with Italian voters, but she cites them as evidence that she cares more about principles than popularity. “In a political world where everyone says one thing and does another, ours [party’s] The value system is pretty clear,” Meloni said in an interview with the Washington Post. “You may like it or not, but we are not misleading.” Interview by Giorgia Meloni in the Washington Post If Meloni, 45, prevails, she will face a tough job: running a country in economic decline for a generation somewhat wary of its powers. Leftists are sounding the alarm, saying Meloni could push Italy into Europe’s illiberal bloc, along with Hungary and Poland, by fighting against diversity and agitating against Brussels. Her opponents argue that her views can go to extremes. They cite previous remarks – such as a 2017 speech – in which Meloni said mass illegal immigration to Italy was “planned and deliberate”, carried out by unnamed powerful forces to introduce low wages and drive out Italians. “It’s called ethnic replacement,” Meloni said at the time, echoing the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Her allies, on the other hand, say that Meloni has the kind of serious plans that her predecessors lacked and that she mainly wants to deal with Italy’s economic woes. Her speech is theatrical, but mostly deals with ideas to stimulate investment and curb prosperity. Her newly released party platform has 25 proposals — everything from expanding high-speed rail to kickstarting university research. Voters who leaned toward Meloni tended to cite, in interviews with The Post, her perceived honesty and consistency as reasons for their support. For now, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party — Italy’s brothers, a name that echoes lyrics in the national anthem — is the most popular in the country, favored by about a quarter of voters. It has a coalition agreement with other right-wing parties, giving it an overwhelming chance of prevailing against a fractured and folding left. The far-right bloc has said the top spot should go to the party leader with the most votes. However, after the September 25 general election, the president, Sergio Mattarella, has the final say on who gets the mandate. Meloni acknowledged in her interview with the Post that Italy faces extraordinary challenges. He cited the rising cost of energy and raw materials, uncertainty about whether the pandemic could return and Italy’s towering public debt – which permanently leaves the country several errors away from crisis. There is a reason Italy has had 11 governments in the last 20 years. “I cannot say that, in the face of such a responsibility, my hands do not tremble,” he said. “Because we would find ourselves governing Italy in perhaps one of the most complicated situations ever.”

A smart campaign strategy Meloni’s rise owes something to the fading star of another far-right politician, Matteo Salvini. Salvini, just a few years ago, was seen as Italy’s political dynamo – staging raucous rallies, banning migrant ships from docking and echoing former President Donald Trump’s pledge to put “Italians first”. Since his position as interior minister in 2018 and 2019, Salvini has dominated the national debate and the League party had become so popular that he thought he could reach the prime ministership. But his plan failed. When he broke up his governing coalition to force new elections, other parties joined hands to freeze him out. He fell to the opposition. He looked for new ways to stand out and contradicted himself by changing positions. Ultimately, Salvini returned his party to government, supporting former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, the embodiment of the European establishment. “Salvini had won the lottery,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “Then he lost it and Melony took it.” Even those who disagree with Meloni’s policies admit that she strategized wisely. As Salvini fell, she built ties with like-minded parties in Europe — including Spain’s Vox and Poland’s Law and Justice party — and made trips to speak to Republicans in the United States. For Italians, she framed her party’s enduring opposition role as a matter of principle: The Brothers of Italy would only participate in a government if elected, as opposed to entering a majority through backroom deals. Meanwhile, she tried to show that her party would still be a constructive player if it believed in a cause. Meloni, speaking to The Post, said he supports Draghi in handling aspects of the fallout from the Ukraine war amid a split in the prime minister’s coalition. “When he needed help, we offered it,” Meloni said. Especially when it comes to her positions on Europe, she has softened more noticeably than the other Western European nationalist who made a run for power earlier this year, France’s Marine Le Pen. While Le Pen’s platform had ideas that would lead to confrontations with Brussels – such as the primacy of national law over EU law – Meloni’s platform does not, said Luigi Scazzieri, a senior researcher at the Center for European Reform. “This kind of consolidation and Europeanization has gone much further in Meloni’s case than in Le Pen’s,” Scazieri said. The problem now for Meloni is that to get into government, she will need Salvini, whose party is part of the right-wing coalition. On the trail, Salvini – who once wore a Putin T-shirt while touring Red Square – suggested the West should reconsider sanctions against Russia, arguing the measures are causing pain in Europe and failing to change the Kremlin’s calculus. Analysts say there is already reason to question the durability of any Meloni-led coalition given the potential for competition and rivalry with Salvini. In theory, Salvini could complicate Meloni’s path even before she takes the top job by suggesting party leaders step back and choose an alternative representative. Enrico Letta, president of Italy’s center-left party and Meloni’s main social media partner, stressed in an interview with The Post that Italy is not in the midst of a sudden far-right surge. In the 2019 European elections, Salvini’s League took 34 percent of the vote. Meloni’s party got 6 percent. As then, around two-fifths of Italians still prefer far-right parties. the difference is that Meloni has taken away much of Salvini’s support. “It’s not a wave – it’s her,” Leta said. “Part of the country is betting on her, because she is young and new.” She predicted that the honeymoon would be “over soon” and that the inevitable compromises would damage her reputation. Meloni and those around her said she threw her party without shortcuts. “We took the longest route,” he said. “Italians today understand that we are a very reliable party.”

Well prepared for confrontation Meloni says she learned at a young age the importance of having enemies. Her childhood in the Roman suburbs was difficult. She was abandoned by her father, who sailed to the Canary Islands. She was raised by her mother, a right-winger who wrote romance novels. Playing with candles, he accidentally burned down the family home. And she was bullied for being overweight. In her autobiography, she tells the story of being called a “slut” when she tried to enter a volleyball match. He went on a diet and lost weight. “Years later, I’m grateful to those rednecks,” Meloni wrote. All these years later, Meloni refers to her rivals all the time, sometimes with glee. On Facebook, it reports skeptical or critical news headlines. On the trail, she talks about how the left is obsessed with trashing her and doing “everything to stop us.” Even in a video released last month rejecting any party ties to Italy’s fascist past, he noted that suggestions to the contrary had been “inspired by the powerful left-wing media circuit”. In her interview with The Post, she singled out the “globalist” left as the enemy and said the West is “paying for the weakness” of its ideology, which…