Quote of the day by Giorgia Meloni: 'If I were fascist, I would say that I am fascist. I never hide'

When Giorgia Meloni said: ‘If I were fascist, I would say that I am fascist”

Just before she became the Prime Minister of Italy. Giorgia Meloni addressed the question head-on. Why was her party labeled as ‘far right’ and not ‘fascist’. In an interview with The Spectator in 2022. Meloni, who would soon become the prime minister and a formidable name in Europe, said if she were fasicst, she would declare it.“I have no problem confronting this,” Maloni said. “When we founded Brothers of Italy, we founded it as the centre-right, with its head held high. When I am something, I declare it. I never hide. If I were fascist, I would say that I am fascist. Instead, I have never spoken of fascism because I am not fascist.”“Here’s a declaration I made in 2006, nearly 20 years ago, that an Italian journalist published, a left-wing journalist – and I told him: ‘Mussolini made various mistakes: the racial laws against the Jews, the declaration of war, an authoritarian regime. Historically he also did other things that were good, but that does not save him,” Meloni said in the same interview.“In the DNA of Brothers of Italy there’s no nostalgia for fascism, racism, or anti-Semitism. There is instead a rejection of every dictatorship: past, present and future.” “I’ve always told my party bosses, even in memos, to exercise maximum severity with any manifestation of imbecilic nostalgia because those who are nostalgic for fascism are no use to us. They are only the useful idiots of the left,” Meloni said.

What is Brothers of Italy?

Brothers of Italy is a national-conservative and right-wing populist political party which is now the ruling party of Italy after becoming the largest party in the 2022 general election. Giorgia Meloni is the current leader of the party.While Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, or FdI) was officially born in 2012, its political lineage goes back to 1946 with the formation of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded by former followers of Benito Mussolini. In the 1990s, the MSI rebranded as the National Alliance (AN), a moderate “post-fascist” conservative party that publicly renounced fascism. FdI inherited both its leadership core and its official symbol, the fiamma tricolore (tricolor flame), from this lineage, though modern party leaders describe FdI as a mainstream conservative party.

Giorgia Meloni’s difficult childhood, joining politics at the age of 15

Abandoned by her father, Giorgia Meloni had a difficult childhood. She did not attend university and started working as a nanny, a waitress, a bartender. At the age of 15, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI). She later said that she was driven to join politics out of a desire for law and order, deeply affected by the 1992 Mafia assassinations of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.She quickly rose through the ranks, founding a student movement called Gli Antenati (The Ancestors) to protest education reforms, and eventually became the leader of Student Action for the National Alliance (the moderate successor to the MSI).At the age of 21, she won her first election in 1998 and became a local councilor for the Province of Rome. At age 29, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian Parliament) and was immediately named its youngest-ever Vice President. She also qualified and worked as a journalist.When media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi swept back into power with a right-wing coalition, he appointed the 31-year-old Meloni as the Minister of Youth in 2008. She became the youngest minister in the history of unified Italy.When Berlusconi’s government collapsed under financial crises in 2011, Meloni refused to support the subsequent technocratic European-led government. Seeing the traditional right-wing parties compromising their values, she made a high-stakes gamble in 2012 and co-founded Brothers of Italy.For nearly a decade, she ran a fringe party that struggled to stay above 4% in national polls but ultimately she was rewarded for her political persistence as her party became the biggest one in the 2022 election.