It might seem like an unlikely alliance, when you first see the headlines: the so-called centrist Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, cosying up with the right-wing leader of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who was once branded by a German magazine “the most dangerous woman in Europe”.
But maybe it isn’t. Sunak announced his union with Meloni — leader of the country’s Brothers of Italy party since 2014 and Italy’s first ever female PM — last night, urging their European counterparts to show the “same sense of urgency” as Britain and Italy on tackling illegal migration — fitting timing, after his party’s controversially hardline stance on immigration at the Tory conference this week.
“Levels of illegal migration to mainland Europe are the highest they have been in nearly a decade,” Sunak said ahead of a historic meeting of about 50 European leaders in Granada yesterday. “With thousands of people dying at sea, propelled by people smugglers, the situation is both immoral and unsustainable. We cannot allow criminal gangs to decide who comes to Europe’s shores.”
He and Meloni will now chair a separate group on the subject and are expected to raise the need for more coordination between the EU and the UK.
So who is Meloni, 46, exactly — and what is it about her policies that made Sunak want to choose her an ally? Most commentators put it down to the mother-of-one’s supposedly charismatic, down-to-earth image and fierce protection of her core beliefs such as family values — the same characteristics that were credited for helping her to win over so many ordinary Italians when she was elected last year.
“I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, I’m Christian! You won’t take that away from me!” she has said in one of many impassioned attacks on left-wing ideals before she became Italy’s first female Prime Minister in September 2022. She campaigned with the slogan “God, country and family” and is known for her tough approaches to immigration, abortion access and LGBTQ rights, her on-stage selfie videos at the time being broadcast to her 1.1 million Instagram followers, who lapped up her speeches on how she was raised by a single mother in a gritty, left leaning district of Rome.
It must be the British people that decide who comes to the UK.
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) October 5, 2023
I chaired a meeting with @GiorgiaMeloni to strengthen European action to ending illegal migration.
Working in lockstep with our international allies, we’ll end dangerous small boat journeys that put lives at risk. pic.twitter.com/b5HaBfT14x
Those who’ve met Meloni say she’s a “pocket dynamo” with down-to-earth body language, who doesn’t do power dressing or slick brand management like many politicians. Instead, her whirlwind 2022 campaign saw her build a personal brand as a patriotic girl-next-door type and friendly face of the far-right who’s not afraid to use slang or say it how it is. “The voters like me because they trust me. They know there are no tricks, no lies. I have the courage to say what I believe in,” she has said of her no-nonsense approach to politics, telling Italians of her “humble” childhood and how she clawed her way up through the gritty political rankings to get to the top.
Meloni went on to win last year’s election with 26 per cent of the country’s vote, with a reputation as a tough-talking ultraconservative who had spoken highly of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the past and expected to form the country’s most right-wing government since World War Two.
Over the years she’s opposed gay adoption, insisted she’s not a feminist, fetishised “traditional” family units despite not growing up in one herself, and expressed support for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. There were suggestions that her leadership could mark a continuation of Italy’s darkest political chapter and accentuate a worrying swing to the right across Europe following the re-election of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the near-election of Marine Le Pen in France, and a new right-wing takeover in previously liberal Sweden earlier that year. Would her election spark a return to fascism in Italy? critics asked.
Perhaps not, if her first year in office is anything to go by. “Her cabinet did not do much in its first 100 days,” history professor Andrea Mammone said after her first 100 days in office. “The government is basically following the EU on international politics.”
Commentators say she’s managed to hit a sweet spot, towing the Brussels line and developing a friendly relationship with more liberal figures like US President Joe Biden, while making enough hardline choices to keep her right-leaning supporters happy, like arresting Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss in January and cracking down on illegal raves. “Not so radical after all?” a European political commentator asked on her one-year anniversary last month, while administrators in Brussels say they’ve been surprised at how “mild-mannered” and “soft-spoken” Meloni has come across.
That said, she has remained hardline on migration, suggesting policies such as the navy blockading the coasts of Africa. She reportedly contacted Sunak after it became public that he had failed to persuade Spain’s leader Pedro Sánchez to put migration on the agenda at the European Political Community (EPC) summit in Granada, and the pair have since published a joint article warning their European counterparts that “now is the time for action” as numbers of illegal migrants soar.
They both became national leaders last autumn and are said to get on very well personally, describing Britain and Italy as “two of the closest friends in Europe”. So what will their relationship look like going forward? Here’s what we know so far.
The rough streets of Rome to the cusp of power
Meloni was born in Rome and started life in an upmarket residential neighbourhood of the city until her father, a left-wing accountant, abandoned the family to live in the Canary Islands. Her then-single mother moved to Garbatella, a gritty, left-wing, working-class area of Rome, with Meloni and her sister Arianna. According to her autobiography, she was bullied by boys over her weight growing up.
Meloni has tried to turn her upbringing into an advantage. Commentators say her childhood bullying gave her a thick skin, giving her a determination and enabling her to cast her enemies aside, and Meloni herself has said her abandonment by her father has left her with a sense of inadequacy that drives her forward. She also claims her “humble” working-class roots have given her a sympathy for ordinary Italians.
So how did a bullied young girl from a left-leaning area of Rome go on to become the country’s right-wing leader? Meloni says it was cameraderie, patriotism and a rebellious streak that drew her to join the youth wing of the far-right Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was set up by Giorgio Almirante, who was a minister in the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s government.
Anti-mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino had just been assassinated - she signed up that very day - and like many of her fellow youth activists, she had a complicated home life so was looking for a “second family” to fill that family void.
Meloni was just 15 when she first registered, and the only girl. Insiders recall a teenage Meloni ringing on the doorbell of her local branch of the Youth Front and being let inside by a group of all-male radicals, who were bemused by her interest at first but quickly grew to accept her.
She grew to accept them, too, despite the fierce competition between leftwing and rightwing students that would often erupt into physical brawls in the streets. She has since said she found a sense of community with MSI’s youth movement, who chose to focus on politics rather than discos or shopping like many of their peers.
“She had the courage of a lion and would not let the microphone be snatched out of her hand,” her friend Marco Marsilio recalls of meeting Brother of Italy’s leader on the day she joined the party. “The violence and assaults did not scare her. They became one more reason to stand up.”
A video recently surfaced on social media of a teenage Meloni praising Mussolini. “Everything he did, he did for Italy — and there have been no politicians like him for 50 years,” she’s heard saying in the clip, sparking fears that history will repeat itself if she’s elected.
Meloni continued to rise up through the rankings of student politics and went on to be elected president of the youth wing of National Alliance, the party that grew out of the MSI, in 2004.
At 31, Meloni became Italy’s youngest ever minister after being appointed by former Prime Minister Berlusconi to run the youth portfolio. She was still living at home with her mother at the time and reportedly shunned her government-provided car and driver and took her own Mini to work instead (since her election, she’s said she’ll stay living at home rather than moving into the PM’s palace).
In 2012 she founded the Brothers of Italy party, after National Alliance dissolved. Two years later, she became its leader.
From four per cent to a quarter of the vote
It took some time for Brothers of Italy to gain popularity. They scored just 4 per cent of votes in Italy’s 2018 general election - so how did the ultraconservative, neo-fascist-rooted party grow to winning a quarter of the country’s vote in just four years?
Many say this sharp rise in popularity was down to Meloni’s hard work to rebrand Brothers of Italy as a champion of patriotism rather than fascism. She claims to have a “serene relationship” with fascism, saying it was just another period in the country’s history, and insists she is not actually of the far-Right, but aiming to build a party similar to the British Tories and the Republicans in the US.
“I am certain that, together with her, it will be possible to strengthen our already established political and cultural cooperation,” she said, congratulating Britain’s new PM Liz Truss on Instagram last summer, with Truss returning the favour, describing the UK and Italy as “close allies”.
Like Truss, she admires Margaret Thatcher, is hot on tax cuts, and tough on immigration and gender identity.
“Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!” she said in a speech to Spain’s far-right Vox party this year.
The party holds the slogan “Less Europe, Better Europe” and Euroskeptic Meloni believes Italy’s laws should have pre-eminence over EU rules, despite not wanting to withdraw from the Eurozone.
Congratulations to @GiorgiaMeloni on her party's success in the Italian elections.
— Liz Truss (@trussliz) September 26, 2022
From supporting Ukraine to addressing global economic challenges, the UK and Italy are close allies. 🇬🇧🇮🇹
Other targets of Meloni’s include “woke ideology” that she says destroys “the foundations of the natural family” and illegal immigrants “undercutting the salaries of our own workers and, in many instances, engaging in crimes”. She’s particularly hot on targeting traffickers’ boats coming from Libya to Italy.
A “soft” new image over a party with a history
The similarities with Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Rally party until last summer, have not gone amiss. Both are right-wing female politicians who’ve adopted “softer”, more mainstream images in recent years, from pastel-coloured outfits to moderating their views on issues that matter to voters most.
Meloni, who has previously expressed support for Vladimir Putin, now says she supports Ukraine and has toned down her harsh views on Europe.
Unlike Le Pen, however, Meloni is more accepting of her party’s history. While Le Pen publicly threw out her father over his party’s racism and Holocaust denial, Meloni has previously praised Mussolini’s leadership and accepted her party’s connection to Italy’s neofascist roots. Her party’s logo is still a hangover from its fascist origins.
Recent years have seen Meloni distancing herself from her party’s neo-fascist history, referring to her party as “conservative” and “centre-right” rather than right-wing, and claiming fascism is “consigned to history”. “I never look back. This is my political party. I don’t want to be likened to someone who has been before,” she said recently.
Like Le Pen, Meloni doesn’t shy away from acknowledging her gender. Over the years she has weaponised her femininity, boasting about her childhood with a single, working-class mother and celebrating her identity as a woman and a mother and the fact that her party has so many women in leadership positions. She says she once cried when discussing how a potentially heavier workload would mean more time away from her daughter and posted a cheeky Instagram on election day, showing her holding a pair of melons in front of her breasts (her surname means melons in Italian).
In many ways, she presents as a feminist too, dressing in comfortable leggings and trainers for campaign rallies and giving speeches about being raised by a single mother in a working-class district of Rome, but feminist groups argue that she has used this femininity manipulatively.
Yes she supports women, but she seems to have a narrow vision of what a woman is: a vision that excludes minorities and those who don’t necessarily conform to that idealised image of the heterosexual, Christian mother. What about queer women and trans women? What about those who don’t want or can’t have children? What about non-Christians?
Critics have called Meloni a “fake feminist” like Le Pen, but Meloni herself says she refuses to call herself a feminist altogether. She says she is against “pink quotas” and that success should come down to achievement, not gender. For Meloni’s critics, her anti-feminist stance is the one thing they agree with her on. Progress shouldn’t just be about electing female leaders, they say, but where those leaders are leading us. In Meloni’s case, they worry the answer to that is backwards, not towards a more gender-equal Italy.
Politics, parenting and a partner with surprisingly different views
Meloni might have long referred to the youth movement as her “second family” but she keeps her first family close, too. Her inner circle includes her brother-in-law Francesco Lollobrigida, who works as her adviser, and her sister Arianna is also involved in her campaign.
Her partner, Milan-born journalist Andrea Giambruno, prefers not to get involved in politics himself, however. While he goes to all of her rallies, he’s admitted he “like[s] to hide in the law row where she can’t see me” and she says they “change the subject” when politics comes up a the dinner table.
It’s unsurprising, given Giambruno’s views. Despite his wife’s far-right political stance and the fact that he works for ex-prime minister Berlusconi’s TV channel, Giambruno says “his heart is on the left” and he’s always voted that way. “I’m in favour of legalising drugs, even the hard ones,” he said in 2020. “I would empty the orphanages and give all the babies to rainbow couples.”
The couple met eight years ago on the set of TV talk show Quinta Colonna. She reportedly arrived at the studio having not eaten all day and snacked on a banana during an ad break, but didn’t have the chance to ditch it before the show came back on air.
“I rush over there and snatch it from her hand, even with some enthusiasm, so we don’t catch Meloni with a banana on air,” Giambruno once recalled. She initially mistook him for a studio assistant, but they quickly began dating and she gave birth to their daughter, Ginevra, two years later.
She has praised him for being an “eminently present father” and says the split parenting duties with now six-year-old Ginevra equally. “He spends a week in Milan a month, but when he is here he almost always works in the evening and during the day he stays with Ginevra a lot. We help, we complement each other,” she said recently in an interview, though she did acknowledge that her stepped-up campaign has taken its toll at home.
“I want to thank my family, Andrea, my daughter, my sister, my mother. All those for whom I have been there less than they were there for me,” she said after her election in a nod to the family she puts at the heart of her political (and social media) campaign. Has that balanced parenting split continued since she took office?
A hero for ordinary Italians — or the most dangerous woman in Europe?
Determined. Stubborn. Charismatic. Angry. Sarcastic. Persistent. These are just some of the (mixed) terms and phrases used to describe Meloni by interviewers who met her during her summer campaign last year.
Such was the confusion around her, that she even had former US First Lady Hillary Clinton suggesting that her election would be a big step for feminism. “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing,” she said at the Venice International Film Festival in August 2022.
But others said they were terrified by Meloni’s success, expressing concern about that support for Vladimir Putin in the past and those hard stances on immigration, abortion access and LGBTQ rights. Her election was widely considered as a continuity of Italy’s darkest political chapter, the interwar dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, with rivals claiming that she’s the most dangerous woman in Europe. That she’ll endanger Italians’ civil liberties, that she’ll polarise the country and that she’ll sour relations with Brussels were among the fears among critics.
After voting closed, Meloni herself promised to “govern for everyone”, telling reporters that “Italians have sent a clear message in favour of a right-wing government led by Brothers of Italy”.
Her election marked almost a exactly a century after fascist dictator Mussolini took office in Rome, a chapter Meloni insisted was in the past. Would she keep her word?
Beginnings of a new political pairing — could Meloni be Sunak’s new secret weapon?
Meloni did keep her word, to a certain extent. Commentators say her first year in office hasn’t been as radical as many feared, with many surprised by the pragmatic start to her premiership but still fearing an authoritarian turn.
Her campaign mantra “playtime is over” did come to fruition, with one of her first decisions as PM being to pass an “anti-rave” policy cracking down on unauthorised mass parties. She kept her promise on supporting Ukraine, too, allocating millions of pounds in aid towards air defence systems, and promised to make Italy “an energy hub for Europe” in light of the ongoing conflict against Russia.
One of the first spats of her premiership was with France, over the issue of a rescue vessel carrying 200 migrants, which she rejected and subsequently was forced to dock in the French port of Toulon — the first sign she would be sticking to her anti-migration stance.
This month, she reportedly reached out to Sunak, who is set to host next year’s EPC summit, after the news that he had failed to persuade Spain to put migration on the agenda at this year’s EPC summit in Granada.
The British PM went on to turn down a photoshoot and press conference with Spain’s leader Pedro Sánchez at the conference, instead hosting a 60-minute meeting with Meloni alongside Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and French, Dutch and Albanian authorities to discuss tougher proposals to tackle migration.
He and Meloni have since publishing a joint article in the Times warning their European counterparts that “now is the time for action” on the issue. They said that many of the thousands of migrants who are crossing the Mediterranean to Italy every week will make their way north and attempt to come to the UK, and warned that failure to stem this flow now would threaten Britain and Italy’s “historic role as places of asylum and sanctuary”.
🔵 Con la lettera congiunta Meloni - Sunak si rafforza l’asse tra i governi conservatori di Italia e Regno Unito per contrastare l’immigrazione illegale di massa.
— Fratelli d'Italia 🇮🇹 (@FratellidItalia) October 6, 2023
Con il #GovernoMeloni, l’Italia torna più forte. pic.twitter.com/lb8DH69fln
“How can we take care of those who really need our help, when our resources are so overstretched?” they wrote, raising eyebrows among Sunak’s more centrist supporters, concerned that he and many of his ministers are continuing to take an increasingly right-wing stance. He and Meloni have described Britain and Italy as “two of the closest friends in Europe” and are said to have a close personal relationship, suggesting we’ll see more of their alliance in the months to come.
For those who once saw Sunak as a centrist technocrat and face of the Tory left, his latest political friendship might just make them think twice. Will his “Thatcherite” right-wing turn continue ahead of next year’s election and EPC summit in London? All eyes on his movements and friendships over the next few months.
