Giorgia Meloni (; born 15 January 1977) is an Italian politician who has been serving as the prime minister of Italy since 22 October 2022, the first woman to hold this position. A member of the Chamber of Deputies since 2006, she has led the Brothers of Italy (FdI) political party since 2014, and she has been the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party since 2020.
In 1992, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by former followers of Italian fascism. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), a post-fascist party that became the MSI's legal successor in 1995 and moved towards national conservatism. She was a councillor of the Province of Rome from 1998 to 2002, after which she became the president of Youth Action, the youth wing of AN. In 2008, she was appointed Italian Minister of Youth in the fourth Berlusconi government, a role which she held until 2011. In 2012, she co-founded FdI, a legal successor to AN, and became its president in 2014. She unsuccessfully ran in the 2014 European Parliament election and the 2016 Rome municipal election. After the 2018 Italian general election, she led FdI in opposition during the entire 18th Italian legislature. FdI grew its popularity in opinion polls, particularly during the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy by the Draghi Cabinet, a national unity government to which FdI was the only opposition party. Following the fall of the Draghi government, FdI won the 2022 Italian general election.
A right-wing populist and nationalist, her political positions have been described as far-right. She describes herself as a Christian and a conservative, and she claims to defend "God, fatherland, and family". She is opposed to euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and LGBT parenting, saying that nuclear families are exclusively headed by male-female pairs. Her discourse includes femonationalist rhetoric and criticism of globalism. Meloni supports a naval blockade to halt immigration, and she has been accused of xenophobia and Islamophobia. A supporter of NATO, she maintains Eurosceptic views regarding the European Union, which she describes as Eurorealist, and was in favour of better relations with Russia before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, after which she pledged to keep sending arms to Ukraine. Meloni has expressed controversial views, such as in 2020, when she praised Giorgio Almirante, a chief of cabinet in Mussolini's Italian Social Republic who produced racist propaganda and co-founded the MSI. In 2022, Meloni was the seventh on Forbes list of most powerful women in the world.
Early life
Giorgia Meloni was born in Rome on 15 January 1977. Her father, Francesco Meloni, was from Rome, born to radio director Nino Meloni from Sardinia and actress Zoe Incrocci from Lombardy, and her mother, Anna (), is from Sicily. Her father was a tax advisor, and according to some political profiles had communist sympathies and voted for the Italian Communist Party, while her mother later became a novelist. Her father abandoned the family in 1978 when she was one year old, moving to the Canary Islands and remarrying. Meloni has four step-siblings from her father's second marriage. Seventeen years later, in 1995, he was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to nine years in a Spanish prison. He last contacted Meloni in 2006, when she became the Vice-President of the Chamber of Deputies. Legal documents have recently revealed a controversial indirect economic link through a network of real estate companies in which the ex-wife Anna Paratore, mother of Giorgia Meloni, was a partner at various times. Meloni was raised in the working-class district of Garbatella in Rome, moving there after the more affluent home she had first lived in as an infant with her parents was destroyed in a house fire a few years after her father left. Her upbringing has been described by her family as impoverished. In her autobiography, Meloni wrote that her childhood and her family's breakdown influenced her political outlook. Meloni has a sister, Arianna, who was born in 1975 and is married to Francesco Lollobrigida, the Italian Minister of Agriculture since 22 October 2022.