Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia and the extreme right, in Rome, July 28, 2022. ROBERTO MONALDO / AP
While Giorgia Meloni has never seemed so close to winning the next Italian general election on September 25, the seduction operation appears to be underway for the leader of the Fratelli d’Italia party, leader of the right-wing coalition that also brings together the League of Matteo Salvini and supporters of Silvio Berlusconi from Forza Italia. For the far-right manager, the company is going through a necessary de-demonization exercise, the first act of which could be this video, published on social networks on Wednesday, August 10.
This sequence, distributed mainly to journalists from the foreign press, recorded behind a sober glass desk and declaimed in three languages (French, English and Spanish), tries above all to give the 45-year-old Roman a European image. who aspires to become the first woman to lead Italy. “For several days I have been reading articles in the international press about the forthcoming elections that will give Italy a new government, in which I am described as a threat to democracy, Italian, European and international stability,” she notes, referring to the fixed camera. Criticism she sweeps away by insisting on the change she believes her camp is making. “Several decades ago, the Italian right relegated fascism to history and unequivocally condemned the loss of democracy and the notorious anti-Jewish laws,” she said.
Certa stampa estera ispirata dalla sinistra descrive FDI comme un pericolo per la democrazia e la stabilità italiana… https://t.co/ql1YOgUG1Y
sulphurous past
This statement seeks to enchant the troubled past for the leader of a distant formation heir to the neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), whose emblem Fratelli d’Italia has preserved the tricolor flame. In particular, he recalls the Fiuggi Congress in Lazio, which marked the dissolution of the MSI in January 1995. “The political right is not the daughter of fascism,” said Gianfranco Fini, chairman of the new National Alliance party, from the platform. Today, Meloni’s strategy is to dismiss totalitarianism back to back. Thus, in her video, she expresses her “condemnation of Nazism and Communism, the only totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century still in power in some countries, surviving their tragic failure and condemning the left struggling”.
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On her unstoppable rise to power, the leader of the right-wing coalition still has to shake off a sulphurous past. Her remarks in the video contrast with the ambiguity she has maintained until recently. Thus, in October 2021, during the looting of the headquarters of the CGIL (the largest Italian trade union) in Rome by New Order fascist groups, Giorgia Meloni refused to clearly condemn the symbolic and political meaning, declaring that she “did not know the matrix”. this file.
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