Four years after the publication of her memoir in Italian, Giorgia Meloni’s personal and political reflections have been brought to an English-speaking audience with the release of ‘I Am Giorgia: My Roots, My Principles.’
In 2021, Meloni was leading her Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) party in opposition to the technocratic-led government.
Her unique personality had already made her well-known, particularly after a fiery 2019 speech where she declared: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian. No one will take that away from me.”
Those looking to ridicule Meloni turned her speech into a dance music track, but Meloni had the last laugh, and here she uses those components of her identity to structure her book.
A year after the book came out, the unthinkable occurred. A politician who began her career in the Italian Social Movement, which Mussolini’s former followers had created in the aftermath of World War Two, swept to power in the 2022 general election.
How did she accomplish such a thing, before becoming the strongest Italian PM in decades?
Meloni’s memoir is not like the literary works of other politicians, past or current.
What emerges is a self-portrait of a serious thinker who knows where her beliefs come from.
Her personal background is not what one may expect. This memoir begins with a story of a struggling young mother walking towards an abortion clinic. Her marriage was failing and her husband was preparing to leave: a second child simply did not appear to be an option.
Had her mother Anna not decided to turn back, Giorgia Meloni would never have come into the world.
A difficult childhood followed, as material circumstances changed significantly when her father left Italy and his daughters behind.
“The awareness of a father who is no longer there, who vanishes into thin air, is something that’s hard to explain. It may leave a deeper wound than a father’s death. At least then you can imagine him looking down at you from heaven. But when he chooses to leave, you’re left grappling with the ghost of a person who isn’t there,” she writes.
The combination of a devoted mother and loving Sicilian maternal grandparents gave Giorgia and her older sister a warm Italian family life.
Victimhood carries with it a major cachet in modern politics. As a woman from a disadvantaged single-parent family in a tough community, Meloni has every right to claim victim status, yet eschews it entirely.
Emotivism is not part of her make-up. Her application of observable facts when determining public policy decisions is not much influenced by others’ feelings.
Referring to a proposal to combat homophobia by introducing specific hate crimes, she insists that Italy’s current anti-discrimination laws are sufficient.
Confronted with demands for changes to family law, Meloni affirms “that the state should incentivise the most solid form of union to protect the children.”
Asked to support a watering down of marriage to accommodate cohabitating couples (like herself at the time of original publication), Meloni says that she does “not expect the state to extend the same privileges to me as it does for those who formalise their commitment in writing” (a year ago, Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin spent €21 million of Irish taxpayers’ money trying to do just this).
When confronted with the demands for legal surrogacy, she asks why it should be “lawful for a poor woman to be forced, out of financial necessity, to rent out her womb, endure an entire pregnancy as well as birth, only to sell her child.”
After being angrily taken to task by the mother of a paralysed man who sought euthanasia, she emphasises that legal changes cannot be made on the basis of personal stories, as decisions taken as a result of “momentary emotions” can easily lead to a situation where “depressed minors who seek to end their lives” are euthanised.
Again and again, she hammers away at the worst aspects of modern social and political debate.
“Every desire becomes a right, even when it’s based on nothing more than a whim, while any sense of responsibility has all but disappeared…Instead, here in Italy, selfishness often transforms into a political program. ‘I want to give birth to a child at seventy.’ ‘I want to be a mother even though I’m a man.’ ‘I want a ‘reddito al cittadinanza’ (a basic income provided by the state social welfare program) even though I’m fit to work.’ ‘I want to become an Italian citizen, even though I’ve just arrived in this country.’”
Strong stuff. Nor can this be written off as a jeremiad directed against others. She is self-critical throughout, for instance, when she expresses regrets that the emphasis she placed on her career – combined with fertility challenges – has meant that her daughter is an only child.
Abortion is unsurprisingly a major issue for her.
In most countries where abortion is legalised, a code of silence develops around it. No matter how many unborn children are killed each year, the issue is seen as having been dealt with, and politicians who raise any concerns are viciously targeted pour encourager les autres.
Christian America and Catholic Italy are the major exceptions to this. Meloni’s sentiments are strongly pro-life, but she is pragmatic enough to know that it is not possible to repeal the law allowing for abortion in the first 90 days of pregnancy.
Unafraid of the response she would get while facing an election, she called for measures like enhanced financial supports to mothers and “the strengthening of pro-life centers.”
In government, she has followed through on this, by changing the law to allow pro-life groups to offer counselling support in abortion clinics.
Her rhetoric is striking; it is remarkable that a European PM-in-waiting would condemn America’s Democratic Party for its links to Planned Parenthood, and actually describe a partial-birth abortion in print.
Where could this fire come from, except from the fire of faith?
“I am Christian,” she told the crowd. But her story is not that of the typical Italian Catholic. At the insistence of her atheist father (who probably influenced her more than he could ever have imagined), she was not baptised as a baby.
Faith came later, through her grandmother and a local priest, Father Guido Chiaravalli, who ministered in Garbatella and devoted much of his time to fighting the plague of drug use and other vices.
Her respect is undiminished. When an elderly Fr. Guido later wrote to Meloni’s grandmother to express disapproval of Giorgia for having a child out-of-wedlock, she saw it as proof that “he never stopped looking out for us…Not a single sheep could escape his flock.”
She writes of her devotion to the late Pope John Paul II and to her guardian angel, and of the prayers she says over her daughter Ginevra at bedtime.
That is the personal element, but what of the civilisational question? Meloni’s obvious love of Europe and its individual nation states is tied closely to Christianity, and she denounces efforts to water down the continent’s Christian identity, while also opposing an approach to immigration which would lead to a major cultural and religious shift in Italy.
Three years into her tenure as Italy’s leader, it is worth taking time to assess whether she has succeeded.
Last year, the American nationalist conservative Ryan Girdusky provided a balanced overview of her accomplishments in The American Conservative, which have included a reduction in illegal immigration and an increased focus on the country’s dire demographic situation.
Certainly, she has stabilised Italy’s national politics, and become a leader of high stature internationally.
The inclusion of a foreword by Donald Trump Junior is both unfortunate and significant. In a foreword so forgettable that he may actually have written it himself, Don Junior predictably refers to his father in the first sentence.
Yet the fact remains that Giorgia Meloni probably has the best working relationship with President Trump of any European leader. More importantly, she enjoys strong working relationships with major European partners.
Unlike Hungary’s Orbán and other anti-establishment figures, Meloni is respected in Brussels, in Washington and on the global stage.
Those Irish activists looking to emulate her success should take note. They should also consider her other attributes: her command of European languages, the breadth of her reading and her patience in labouring for 10 years with a newly-created party before winning the 2022 general election.
One curious absence in this account of the political and personal development of Giorgia Meloni is a certain Benito Mussolini.
An interview which Meloni conducted as a 19-year-old in 1996 included the statement that Mussolini was “a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy.”
Does she still believe this? This book gives few clues. Meloni’s political beliefs appear much more similar to those of traditional conservatives in Europe and North America than the race-based fascism of the Mussolini era.
It is significant that she joined the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement on the day that the anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino was murdered in 1992.
Part of the explanation for the residual affection for fascism in Italy is the sense that life was better and more orderly in the 1920s and 1930s; ‘he made the trains run on time…’
Mussolini’s most obvious accomplishment however was the crushing of the Sicilian Mafia under the ‘Iron Prefect,’ Cesare Mori.
In the violent and corrupt era when Giorgia Meloni entered adulthood, she may well have yearned for a strong leader who would defend Italy from its domestic enemies. In time, she likely matured enough to find a deeper (and Christian) basis for her worldview.
If so, she should have felt confident enough to explain how her thinking evolved since her youth.
She should also have included at least one additional chapter dealing with her time in office from 2022 onwards. The mere translation of an Italian memoir into English after four years, without the inclusion of any additional content, makes the author seem lazy – which she most certainly is not.
What she is is one of the most remarkable political figures of our time, one whose ongoing progress should be closely watched.
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