ROME—National Rally, the party of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, suffered a humiliating defeat in regional elections on Sunday—losing a key southern region that it seemed well positioned to win. But in neighboring Italy, Giorgia Meloni—a far-right leader who has borrowed heavily from Le Pen’s playbook—is gaining popularity. Indeed, she is poised to become the standard-bearer of the Italian right, despite her party’s historical roots in postwar neofascism.
Last February, the far-right party Brothers of Italy was the only one in the country that refused to join the broad government coalition led by Mario Draghi. The party’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, explained her decision by paraphrasing the writer Bertolt Brecht: “We sat on the wrong side because all the other seats were occupied,” she said, proudly indicating her party’s staunch opposition to the former European Central Bank president, a quintessential technocrat utterly despised by her electoral base.
