“The great challenge of our time is the defense of national identities and the very existence of states as the only means of protecting the sovereignty and freedom of peoples.” (Shades of racial awareness? We shall see. — ed.)
On May 31, the Italian right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia, led by Giorgia Meloni, for the first time reached 16 percent in the polls. This would have been an unimaginable result only a few years ago, and since then, Fratelli d’Italia has only continued to grow. The party recently reached 18 percent, surpassing the Five Star Movement and narrowing the distance between the Democratic Party and Lega led by Matteo Salvini.
The ascent of Fratelli d’Italia has been a slow one, only to sharply accelerate in recent months. That’s thanks to a unique figure in the Italian panorama: Giorgia Meloni.
As the only female leader on the Italian political scene, Meloni became an international star after a speech in Rome in which she stated: “I am Giorgia, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian.” That was a good summary of the values of the Italian right wing: family, homeland, and Christianity.
She was later elected president of the ECR, the group of European conservatives, a move that represents the culmination of a path begun before last year’s European elections that saw her become one of the main political conservatives in Europe.
In Italy, her party now governs important cities in two regions, Abruzzo and Marche. She has managed to reconstruct the Italian right that had fragmented after the end of the Alleanza Nazionale party while at the same time bringing together numerous people from the Catholic and classical liberal worlds as well as Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia, which is nowadays in crisis.
The decision to join the ECR proved in hindsight to be a winning choice because, on the one hand, it avoided the problems suffered by the Identity and Democracy group, of which Marine Le Pen’s party is a member, and on the other, it avoided the cumbersome presence of Angela Merkel in the EPP group.
Today the ECR brings….