On Saturday at 10:11 a.m., in the ballroom of the Quirinal Palace, the former residence of popes and monarchs before becoming the seat of the Presidency of the Italian Republic, Giorgia Meloni took the golden fountain pen from the table and put her signature on the document she was preparing for the first woman who chaired the Italian Council of Ministers. The leader of the Brothers of Italy, a far-right party that had just under 4% of the vote five years ago and was content with the comparsa’s role in the right-wing coalition, will head a conservative executive from Italy, the three parties that make up this spectrum in have occupied Italy for two decades. A government of two vice-presidents appointed to maintain the balance of power with Forza Italia and the league, led by Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini respectively. This marks the beginning of a new era in Italy. The only doubt now, given this government’s frantic start, is how long it will last.
The Meloni board, conservative in all areas of society and without a big name in one of the key departments, marched for the oath of inauguration in front of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, just as his boss had done in front of the gaze of his partner, television journalist Andrea Giambruno and his six-year-old Daughter. Some of the new ministers repeated (the economy minister Giancarlo Giorgetti was economic development minister under Mario Draghi) or already had experience in previous executives, such as Antonio Tajani (now foreign minister) or Matteo Salvini (who was already deputy). President and Interior Minister in the first government of Giuseppe Conte). There will be no experimentation in all these crucial portfolios for dealing with the coming crisis: the margin is too small. But Meloni has reserved his most ideological profiles for those ministries where civil rights are at stake.
The new prime minister has managed to right the Chigi Palace again after 11 years, when Silvio Berlusconi had to hastily give it up, leaving Italy on the brink of bankruptcy and with a risk premium at an all-time high (she was youth minister). To do this, she compiled a list at breakneck speed by Italian standards. It was difficult to fill portfolios such as the economy in a party with hardly any ruling class and after the resignation of several respected technicians (Fabio Panetta, ECB adviser, is well known). But the ideology already stands out in the name it has given to some ministries, such as family (to which the word “midwifery” is added), agriculture (this is accompanied by the epithet “food sovereignty”) or economics (which will be along with the hackneyed term “Made in Italy”).
The new Ministry of Family, Births and Equal Opportunities It’s quite a statement of intent. From there, an anti-abortion policy disguised as birth incentives is deployed and the basic idea of the family that Meloni has is underlined: it can only be one consisting of a father and a mother. At the head of the new ministry will be Eugenia Rocella, a passionate anti-abortionist, paradoxically one of the founders of the Radical Party (which built its ideology around abortion rights). Rocella is an outspoken opponent of living wills, in vitro fertilization with egg donation, the abortion pill Ru-486, homosexual families, LGBTI rights, explicit divorce rights or euthanasia.
Rocella, now an exponent of the Catholic fundamentalist wing of the so-called pro-life associations, faces all of these problems with conversion fever. In the 1970s she was a major feminist in the women’s liberation movement and signed a pro-abortion pamphlet. But he distanced himself from this in the 1980s and assured that this would lead to “the destruction of the individual”. Later, when Rocella was Health Secretary during Berlusconi’s final term, she really came to prominence when she led a fight against the right to die with dignity for Eluana Englaro, a woman who died in 2009 after being in a coma in 1992. Rocella promoted the so-called Salva Eluana decree, which prevented a patient in a vegetative state from having to withhold food and fluids. The then President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, refused to sign it.
food sovereignty. However, Meloni’s government also sees the family as an environment of maximum loyalty, in which it is not a problem to fill positions of responsibility. Even if it is a public tax. In this way, Francesco Lollobrigida, his brother-in-law, will take charge of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty. The concept of “sovereignty” underscores one of the great obsessions of the Italian far right: the war against Brussels to circumvent certain production quotas and blacklists of foods such as pasta or olive oil.
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In this way, agriculture and zero-kilometer or local products become a war horse against the European Union.
entrepreneurial sovereignty. One of the ministries that will receive a new surname is the old Business Promotion Portfolio, now called Enterprise and Made in Italy. The hackneyed paradox of using an Anglicism to refer to products made in Italy thus becomes the epigraph of an important ministry headed by Adolfo Urso, an exponent of the ancient Italian Social Movement (MSI), the post-fascist matrix from which the brothers of Italy are coming. .
The identity of Italian companies is another obsession of the Italian right, which has seen with horror how the country’s big companies have passed into foreign hands without any intervention from the government of the time: from fashion figures like Gucci or Valentino to big industrial conglomerates like z like Fiat or Pirelli. This is where state aid is managed and the necessary fights are sponsored to prevent further leaks
Merit, sports and energy security. The vocabulary of the extreme right takes on a new dimension in Meloni’s government. Although some ministries will not change significantly, the new prime minister wanted to rename them to convey what she expects of them. In this way, the educational portfolio is also referred to as “merit”, one of the values she has recently proclaimed also in relation to the promotion of women to key positions in the administration. “Merit, not quota,” he usually says. The Ministry of Sport will also be the Ministry of Youth, meaning that this is one of the values that must be promoted against “youthful deviance”. The Ministry of Ecological Transition, cornerstone of the previous executive to articulate the means of the post-pandemic recovery plan – PNRR, for its acronym in Italian – will be called Energy Security. It will be directed by an exponent of Forza Italia and from his new title he will seek energy self-sufficiency and end the dependency generated by the last governments.
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