Giorgia Meloni's selective memory

New Statesman​

5 days ago

Photo by Gianni Cipriano/The New York Times / Redux / eyevine
Twice, in Donald Trump Jr's foreword to the new English translation of Giorgia Meloni's memoir, the businessman and Apprentice judge dwells on her 'working-class' background. Long before Meloni became the Italian prime minister, he tells us, she was a 'young working-class woman with a deep love and vision for her nation'; this autobiography tells of her rise from a 'working-class Roman neighbourhood' to government. Trump Jr – son of a billionaire US president – clearly feels well placed to credit Meloni's closeness to the underdog, squeezing two mentions of her working-class credentials into his slender 268-word preface. I Am Giorgia asserts Meloni's ordinariness as a Christian, a mother, and an Italian.
It is not rare for politicians to boast about the challenges they have overcome and even their parents' blue-collar jobs. But what makes Meloni working class? She tells of how she began life in Rome's 'well-heeled' Camilluccia district, albeit in a family immediately ripped apart by the exit of her father who ran away to the Canary Islands. Further disaster hit, Meloni reports, when she and her sister accidentally destroyed the family home in a fire, forcing them 'out on the street' – or at least, prompting her mother to buy a different apartment, in the capital's Garbatella district. Conceived in the 1920s as a 'garden city' for Rome's working-class population, during Meloni's childhood much of Garbatella's social housing stock was being sold off to new owner-occupiers.
Her father's absence left its mark on the young Meloni; she also tells of being bullied as a child. The mix of abandonment and victimisation sets up a story of perseverance against the odds, also dramatising her defiance against schoolteachers who scolded her early right-wing views. The fact that Meloni never went to university (she attended a hospitality training college) also surely sets her apart from many politicians. Yet clichés about growing up in 'gritty' streets are misplaced. Several Italian responses to this book highlighted that Meloni's parents owned stakes in multiple businesses, while an investigation by the Domani newspaper alleged that her claims about the scale of the housefire were strongly exaggerated.
What of Trump Jr's claim that she has become 'one of the most significant political figures in the world', heralding a 'worldwide conservative revolution' against 'globalist elites'? I Am Giorgia appeared in Italian in May 2021, and soon became a top-selling pamphlet for the politician who led the opposition to Mario Draghi's cross-party government. Since then, she has continued to rise, both mobilising protest votes in the 2022 Italian election and maintaining right-wing dominance ever since. Her success in uniting traditional conservatives and her own more radical political tradition has become something of a model internationally.
This English translation, issued by Skyhorse – a US publisher whose website landing page is dominated by the face of Robert F Kennedy – adds no new material on her time in office. The editors of I Am Giorgia have made few obvious interventions, and allusions to her party's neofascist heritage – notably her repeated praise for Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) co-founder Giorgio Almirante – appear without further clarification. It would have been easy enough to muster a footnote to detail the nature of the MSI: though given that Almirante called his party the home of 'fascists in a democracy' up until his death in 1988, perhaps this would not have cast his political heir Meloni in a positive light.
In I Am Giorgia, Meloni adopts the tone of an outsider, painting conservative values as the victim of an all-consuming elite disdain. Even Silvio Berlusconi's political dominance in the 1990s and 2000s – during which she herself became a minister aged just 31 – does not trouble this account. Instead, we get stories of MSI members who were killed in the political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s, when, according to Meloni, right-wingers were 'criminalised'. Liberal hegemony is painted as an 'intangible dictatorship' working to destroy national culture: 'the mass deportations of the Soviet era have been replaced by policies supporting immigration'. Conservatives are underdogs because they are resisting a ubiquitous progressive orthodoxy. Indeed, to define oneself as right-wing means exclusion 'from the circles of the elites, from the radical-chic salons that Italy is filled with'.
When the Italian edition of the book was published, Meloni's party was in opposition; today, if she is fighting 'elites' at all, she is doing so at G7 summits and Nato meet-ups. Those she calls 'elites' are defined less by wealth or political authority than by their attitudes, especially on immigration, national identity, and the nuclear family. Tellingly, this book is also endorsed not just by the US president's son but also by the world's richest man. Elon Musk has been a great admirer of Meloni's focus on falling birthrates in Western countries, and this book leans heavily into this theme. She likewise casts her stance against 'unregulated' immigration as a defence of the weakest in society, from immigrants encouraged to risk their lives at sea, to the working-class Italians she deems 'most vulnerable' to competition for jobs and public services. Globalists use immigration as a 'tool to erode national identity' but the state can accept 'compatible immigration', especially by Christians or those with even distant Italian heritage.
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Some of Meloni's admirers in the press tell a reassuring story about how a once-populist politician has been tempered by the demands of office. Yet this book, originally published 16 months before her election win, complicates such a narrative. Well before she became premier, Meloni's party had combined heated rhetoric about identity with pro-business economics and a commitment to the major Western institutions. Accounts of Meloni's pragmatic moderation since 2022 routinely cite her support for Ukraine, or her abjuring of any Ital-exit from the EU. Yet these positions were baked in years before she took office, and the harsher rhetoric about the EU in this book is time and again tempered by an insistence on the need for a united Europe, 'rooted in civilisation and identity'.
If Meloni has not abandoned 'populist' notes, this is perhaps because her harsh condemnation of progressive 'totalitarianism' is not matched with truly radical alternatives of her own. Hence even in last June's EU election, her party's manifesto warned against a 'superstate reminiscent of the… Soviet model' and instead vaguely proposed a 'Europe of peoples and nations'. In truth her approach to EU politics has sought cooperation, not least as Italy has been the main recipient of post-pandemic EU funds. Meloni's prominence in the EU since 2022 has been remarkable: in part the product of weak leaders in Paris and Berlin, but also of other countries' politics becoming rather more like Italy's own.
The likes of Marine Le Pen's National Rally or Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom increasingly follow a 'Melonian' path of seeking to reorder Europe from within rather than just rebel against it. On immigration, on fossil fuels, and even on military spending, the EU is ever less of an enemy for Meloni's party. Her government can today even boast of its role as a 'bridge' between Brussels and the Maga camp in Washington. Still, even if Trump Jr or his father are ideological admirers of Meloni, the US president's erratic foreign policy and line on tariffs are also potential points of friction. Meloni has brought her part of the Italian right into the heart of the Euro-Atlantic institutions. Trump's moves to shake up these same institutions from above could still cause problems for her. But otherwise, if this is a 'worldwide conservative revolution', it continues apace.
I Am Giorgia: My Roots, My Principles
Giorgia Meloni
Skyhorse, 288pp, £25
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[See also: Keir Starmer faces war on all fronts]
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