Giorgia Meloni, 45, is poised to become Italy’s first female prime minister and the nation’s first PM from the far right.
She is predicted to win up to 26% of the vote, ahead of her closest rival Enrico Letta from the centre left.
And her right-wing alliance – which also includes Matteo Salvini’s far-right League and former PM Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia – now looks to have control of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, with a projected 42.2% of the Senate vote.
Giorgia Meloni has pledged to “govern for everyone”.
“Italians have sent a clear message in favour of a right-wing government led by Brothers of Italy,” she told reporters as she acknowledged her victory.
Embracing a controversial old motto, “God, fatherland and family”, she campaigned against LGBT rights, wants a naval blockade of Libya and has warned repeatedly against Muslim migrants.
Unlike her right-wing allies, she has no time for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and is pro-Nato and pro-Ukraine, even though many voters on the right are lukewarm on Western sanctions.
Besides tax cuts, her alliance wants to renegotiate Italy’s massive EU Covid recovery plan and have Italy’s president elected by popular vote.Meloni formed Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) in 2012, four years after becoming Italy’s youngest-ever minister under Silvio Berlusconi in 2008.
Her party attracted little more than 4% of the vote in the last general election four years ago, and yet she is now expected to get around 25%.
Meloni was the only major party leader who refused to go into popular technocrat Mario Draghi’s broad-based coalition, so she was the only big opposition leader when it collapsed in July.
Meloni grew up in the working-class neighbourhood of Garbatella, raised by her mother after her father left them.
As a teenager, she joined the youth wing of Italy’s neo-fascist movement, formed after the war by supporters of late dictator Benito Mussolini.
In her 2021 book, I Am Giorgia, she stresses she is not a fascist, but identifies with Mussolini’s heirs, saying:”I have taken up the baton of a 70-year-long history.”
Source: BBC