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.
She joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a far-right political party with neo-fascist roots, at age 15. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of National Alliance (AN), MSI’s legal successor. 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 Minister of Youth in the Berlusconi IV Cabinet, a role which she held until 2011. In 2012, she co-founded Brothers of Italy (FdI) and became its president in 2014.
She has expressed controversial views, such as praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1996 and Nazi collaborator and co-founder of MSI Giorgio Almirante in 2020. Meloni is supportive of the anti-gender movement, a belief born in the mid-1990s in the circles of the Opus Dei in order to condemn any social position other than that approved by the Catholic Church, which oppose gender studies.
On 25 September 2022, her party became the strongest party in the national parliament, and she was expected to become the next Italian prime minister, leading a center-right government together with Matteo Salvini (b. 9 March 1973) and Silvio Berlusconi (b. 29 September 1936).
She is the author of two books, Noi Crediamo (What we believe in), 2011, and Io sono Giorgia (I am Giorgia), 2021.
Meloni has a daughter, Ginevra (b. 16 September 2016), with her partner Andrea Giambruno, a journalist who works for Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset TV channel. She has said that she is a Christian and has used her religious identity in part to help build her national brand. In a 2019 speech to a rally in Rome, she said: “I am Giorgia. I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, I’m Christian.” In September 2022, she reportedly continued to embrace the old Italian Fascist slogan “God, fatherland and family”.
Meloni is an avowed fan of fantasy, particularly J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which she called a “sacred text”. As a youth activist with the Italian Social Movement, she attended “Hobbit Camp” and sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello (named after The Fellowship of the Ring). Later, she named her political conference Atreju, after the hero of the novel The Neverending Story. The Italian far-right has traditionally associated itself with fantasy, which it considers to share its “vision of spirituality against materialism”.
Link to Wikipedia biography