Published: 30 September 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Giorgia Meloni is an anti-immigration Christian conservative with strong roots in neo-fascism but Italian Jewish leaders are not worried.
Meloni’s right-wing coalition is on course to control a majority of seats in Italy’s parliament, after Sunday’s general election, making her the favourite to become Italy’s first female prime minister – and its first far-Right prime minister of the post-war era.
Meloni grew up as a neo-fascist, an adolescent activist in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement).
More recently, she successfully rebranded her Brothers of Italy party as the country’s dominant conservative force, without fully expunging its post-fascist roots. She still uses Mussolini’s slogan, “God, homeland, family” , and is outspoken in her opposition to immigration, Islam, European integration, “woke ideologies” and what she describes as “LGBT lobbies”. Meloni strenuously defended Hungary’s Viktor Orban in his tussles with Brussels over democracy and the rule of law.
What does this new Italian Right mean for Jews and Israel?
In recent weeks and months, as her political star rose, Meloni has on several occasions expressed her support for Israel and sought to downplay the neo-fascist roots of her party.
“We have handed fascism over to history for decades now, firmly condemning the loss of democracy, the outrageous anti-Jewish laws, and the tragedy of World War II,” she said in a recent interview with Israel Hayom.
Meloni said her party “unambiguously condemns Nazism and communism” and “fiercely opposes any anti-democratic drift.” The Italian Right, she also said, “consigned fascism to history decades ago, unambiguously condemning the suppression of democracy and ignominious anti-Jewish laws.”
She said she would head a “modern European and Western right-wing government” and reiterated her party’s affiliation with other mainstream conservative factions, including Israel’s “Likud party, the British Tories and the American Republicans.”
