The far-right Brothers of Italy party is the junior partner in a three-way coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi competing in national elections on 4 March, but its leader, Giorgia Meloni, is aiming high. The 41-year-old, who is honing a softer image as she strives to broaden her party’s appeal, would like to be Italy’s first female prime minister.

With Brothers of Italy, a descendant of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), polling at between 5% and 6%, the numbers indicate that the chances of that ambition being fulfilled are remote.

But the election campaign has been good to Meloni. In particular, she has struck a chord in central Italy and the poorer south, areas where Matteo Salvini, leader of her far-right coalition partner the Northern League, has struggled to gain traction.

Her “Italians first” rhetoric, anti-EU stance and pledges to work towards preserving the traditional family and improving the lives of everyday Italians instead of pandering to big business have also helped win support from those long disillusioned with the left.

While her language may be slightly less explicit than Salvini’s, Meloni has equally tough views on foreigners. She is against granting citizenship to children born in Italy to foreign parents, and blamed the country’s failure to make it to this year’s Fifa World Cup finals on there being “too many” foreign players in the Italian football league.

In response to an extreme right supporter shooting and injuring migrants in Macerata last week, she said: “Uncontrolled immigration must be regulated.”

“She exists very much through heightening fear, reflecting principles that typically belong to the ultra-right,” said Vera Capperucci, a political science professor at Rome’s Luiss University. “But if you look at the real data the issues aren’t as worrying as the propaganda she uses.”

She exists very much through heightening fear, reflecting principles that typically belong to the ultra-right Vera Capperucci, political science professor at Luiss University

Who will get the top job if Berlusconi’s alliance achieves the 40% majority required to govern is anyone’s guess right now. Berlusconi is banned from running for office until 2019 due to a conviction for tax fraud. The 81-year-old is positioning Salvini as the next interior minister despite the Northern League leader’s campaign slogan, “Salvini for Premier”, reflecting more than a hint of his own aspirations.

A role for Meloni, who was a youth minister in Berlusconi’s last government, has not yet been mooted. But in this most unpredictable of election races, the notion of her becoming Italy’s next leader might not be as fanciful as it seems. “This is why she’s competing,” said Giovanna Ianniello, a spokeswoman for Brothers of Italy and close friend of Meloni’s.



The pair met in the late 1990s when Meloni led the Rome unit of Azione Studentesca, the student movement of the National Alliance, a party that emerged from MSI as it tried to jettison its often violent past, later becoming the Brothers of Italy.

Giorgia Meloni with the then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2009. They first met in the late 1990s.

Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/AP

“She is the only one [at the forefront of the campaign]. And it’s the Italians who will decide on 4 March, not the polls. Her personality is strong, she is bigger than the party itself,” said Ianniello.

A survey in January put Meloni’s popularity rating at 25%, lower than that of her coalition allies but higher than the centre-left’s Matteo Renzi.

Born and raised in Garbatella, a working-class area of Rome, Meloni got involved in politics aged 15 after registering with Fronte della Gioventù, the youth wing of MSI. It was 1992 and her interest in politics was piqued by the collapse of Italy’s postwar political order, or the so-called First Republic, amid a series of scandals that exposed widespread corruption and mafia influence.

“She was brave and held her own during gatherings,” said Andrea De Priamo, a Brothers of Italy adviser who was the youth group’s secretary for Garbetella at the time. “She threw herself into the movement and quickly showed natural leadership skills.”

Her rise in politics was facilitated by the arrival of Berlusconi, who swept to power for the first time in 1994 in coalition with the refashioned National Alliance and the Northern League. The government only survived a year, but the alliance was back for second term in 2001. In 2006 Meloni became the youngest ever deputy vice-president of the chamber of deputies. Berlusconi returned for his third stint as prime minister two years later, appointing Meloni as youth minister. National Alliance was dissolved in 2009 and she went on to found Brothers of Italy in 2012.

She has a good rapport with Berlusconi, and has steered clear of the machismo one-upmanship being played out between him and Salvini, denouncing them both for “behaving childishly”.

Giorgia Meloni: her critics say she is playing the ‘woman and mother card’ ahead of the election. Photograph: NurPhoto via Getty Images

But the relationship was tested in 2016 when a heavily pregnant Meloni ran for the office of mayor of Rome and Berlusconi remarked that the role was not compatible with motherhood. She came third in the race, but is now insisting that the coalition prioritises measures to help working mothers and incentivise people to have children.

Clearly that’s how she wants to be seen. I wouldn’t say cuddly, but almost Francesco Galietti, founder of the Policy Sonar consultancy

Her critics say she is playing the “woman and mother card” ahead of the election. During a TV interview last week, she cried when discussing how a potentially heavier workload would mean more time away from her daughter, who she had with partner Andrea Giambruno. But Meloni, who is against gay marriage and gay people adopting their partner’s children, was immediately rebuked by a lesbian mother for not caring about the rights of children within same-sex relationships.

It is her way of connecting with voters that is proving her strength, Ianniello and De Priamo both say. That said, a glossy image of her on campaign posters has left Romans joking about whether supporters will believe they’re instead voting for Meg Ryan.



“Clearly that’s how she wants to be seen,” said Francesco Galietti, founder of Policy Sonar, a consultancy in Rome. “I wouldn’t say cuddly, but almost.”