Sir Keir Starmer is to meet the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, in Rome to discuss responses to immigration.
The meeting on Monday follows the deaths of eight people over the weekend in the Channel off the French coast.
The Labour prime minister is not a natural ally of the leader of the Brothers of Italy party but he needs to strengthen European ties since Brexit. They will also discuss Ukraine and economic issues.
Italy has adopted a tough approach to immigration and Sir Keir has promised “a new era of international enforcement to dismantle these networks, protect our shores and bring order to the asylum system”.
He added that the meeting showed the party was not interested in “gimmicks”, a word he has used in reference to the Conservative government’s discontinued Rwanda scheme.
It will be Sir Keir’s first meeting as prime minister with Ms Meloni.
But who is Ms Meloni, and what does the Brothers of Italy party stand for?
Who is Giorgia Meloni?
Giorgia Meloni, 46, was born on January 15, 1977 in Rome. She grew up in Garbatella, which is a working-class and traditionally Left-wing neighbourhood of Rome, having earlier lived in a smarter district, which the family had to leave when her father, an accountant who was on the Left, abandoned the family. She has a sister, Arianna.
She has said being bullied over her weight gave her a thick skin, which helped her rise in politics, and not having her father around gave her the determination to succeed. She has also said her childhood in Garbatella has helped her relate to working-class Italians.
In 1992, at the age of 15, she joined her local branch of the far-right student movement Youth Front. The group was part of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was established by Giorgio Almirante, a minister in Benito Mussolini’s government.
She joined MSI, it has been said, as she was looking for a second family to enable her to get away from a complicated home life. The local branch of its Youth Front was made up 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 Left-wing and Right-wing students that would often erupt into street brawls. 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 her 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 her on the day she joined the party. “The violence and assaults did not scare her. They became one more reason to stand up.”
However, a video once 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.”
Meloni rose steadily in 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.
MSI was dissolved in 1995, becoming the National Alliance. In 2004, Ms Meloni was elected president of the youth wing of National Alliance and, in 2008, got into parliament, becoming at 31 years old, Italy’s youngest-ever minister, taking 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.
Ms Meloni co-founded the Brothers of Italy party in 2012 and has been its leader since 2014. The party won four per cent of the vote in the 2018 general election.
She became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022 when her Brothers of Italy party won enough seats to form a government.
The politician outlined her political beliefs in a speech last year, in which she said: “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, yes to work for our people.”
She gained widespread attention in 2019 for a speech in which she rallied against Left-wing ideals that would make people into “codes”.
In her speech, she said: “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 also said she would defend, “God, the fatherland, and the family” from Left-wing politicians.
In 2016, Meloni and her then partner, journalist Andrea Giambruno, had a baby daughter named Ginevra. However, she announced in October 2023 they had split up.
What is the Brothers of Italy party?
The Brothers of Italy party says it aims to implement policies based on “principles of popular sovereignty, freedom, democracy, justice, social solidarity, merit, and fiscal equity, is inspired by a spiritual vision of life and values of the national, liberal, and popular tradition, and participates in the construction of the Europe of Peoples”.
The far-Right political party is rooted in the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which was formed by former members of Mussolini’s regime, and its logo features the MSI’s Italian flag-coloured flame.
In 2022 The Brothers of Italy took power under a coalition agreement with the League and Forza Italia, forming the country’s most Right-wing government since World War II. It has control of the senate and the chamber of deputies.
