Tag: Brothers of Italy

It’s been 12 months since Giorgia Meloni, a controversial politician who for years had been a vocal member of the opposition within her post-fascist party Brothers of Italy, became the country’s first woman to cover the role of prime minister.

The worst fears raised after last year’s election results have not turned into reality: the country has not turned its back on Ukraine to embrace a more pro-Putin stance or made any moves to leave the European Union. Any references to Brother of Italy’s fascist roots have been down-played, and Meloni has significantly dialled back her own vitriol against immigrants.

But, as much as the fears that followed the establishment of the most hard-right government in Italy since World War II, many of the changes promised by Meloni have also largely failed to materialise.

Here’s Euronews’ scorecard for the Italian premier’s first year in government. Meloni made a total of 25 promises in her government’s programme, which we’ve grouped by topic.

Stopping illegal immigration: Fail

One of Brother of Italy’s electoral promises was to defend “the country’s frontiers” by creating a naval blockade off the coast of North Africa, an idea that has re-emerged in recent months as the country faced a surge in migrant arrivals on its shores.

This promise, clearly, has not been turned into reality – possibly because it’s legally tricky to implement, if not outright illegal.

A naval blockade can only be created unilaterally by a state in cases of legitimate defence when a war or an act of aggression from another country is involved – situations that don’t apply to the current circumstances.

Italy is not at war with either Libya or Tunisia, the countries of origin of most arrivals and with which the Italian government has actually forged agreements to curb migration.

In general, Meloni’s promises to curb migration have largely failed, leading to the premier’s admission that she had hoped to do better than she actually did.

By mid-October, more than 140,000 migrant arrivals had been registered by Italy’s Interior Ministry so far this year, compared to 70,000 in the same period last year.

But that doesn’t mean that Meloni’s government hasn’t tried to keep its electoral promises – including targeting NGOs which “encourage illegal immigration,” as Brothers of Italy wrote in its programme.

Since the autumn of last year, Meloni’s government has restricted the activities of NGOs and rescue ships, and struck a controversial deal with Tunisia’s President Kais Saied to assist the country in stemming migration. It has also made it easier to evict migrants from the country and send them back to “safe countries” like Tunisia.

For Meloni’s critics, human rights and migrant rights activists, that’s enough harm done.

Spending EU funds promised to Italy: In progress

In 2020, the European Union made available a huge fund of €191.5 billion to Italy to get back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic, called the National Recovery and Resilience Plan or PNRR.

Meloni promised to spend this huge sum without delays and without any waste of money on projects aimed at reforming and updating Italy’s infrastructure. But in April her government was still struggling to find ways to spend the EU funds due to Italy’s elephantine bureaucracy and delays at local levels.

While Meloni’s government has indeed started spending some of the EU funds already transferred, inefficiencies at every level of the process made it so that a big slice of the PNRR was still being withheld by the EU this summer.

In late July, Meloni presented a new plan to Brussels to spend the promised money – but the premier is facing an uphill battle before she can spend the entire €191.5 billion promised.

Supporting Italian families and encouraging new births: Pass/In progress

This was the very first point in Meloni’s party’s programme: to increase Italy’s birth rate and support couples wishing to build a family. By this, of course, Meloni meant the traditional, heteronormative family.

The party had promised up to €300 a month for every family during the first year of a child’s birth; and up to €260 between the second year and the child’s 18th birthday.

This is something that the Meloni government is still partially working on, having already introduced cheques for families with children but also planning new policies in this direction. In its latest budgetary plan, the government has included one billion euros to be assigned to projects supporting new births in Italy.

New measures include a cheque for families having a third child, fringe benefits up to €2,000 for families with kids, an extra month of parental leave paid at 60% of a worker’s salary and tax deductions for companies hiring new mothers.

“She’s introduced tax benefits and checks for families proportionally to the number of children that they have,” Marianna Griffini, Assistant Professor at Northeastern University London and an expert in Italian politics, told Euronews.

“Meloni even participated in Hungary’s summit on demography. She met with Viktor Orban and she was acclaimed as an ideologue by the Hungarian leader, so she’s definitely doubling down on the importance of the traditional family.”

Other, less traditional types of families have on the other hand been punished by the Meloni government, with surrogacy having been made illegal for Italians even outside of the country. During the past year, queer parents across the country have seen their names removed from their children’s certificate, as Italy passed a law saying that only the biological parent of a child can appear on it.

Promoting “Made in Italy,” boosting Italian pride, and relaunching tourism: Pass

Meloni’s government definitely kept its promise to defend the concept of “Made in Italy” and try to boost Italian pride, though that doesn’t mean these efforts received international approval.

Earlier this year, the government pushed forward a controversial measure defending the Italian language and identity against the contamination of English words. The legal initiative would punish the use of foreign words in official communication with fines between €5,000 and €100,000.

“They did very well on this, I think,” said Professor Griffini laughing. “They tried to interfere with linguistic choices, and then they invested in the cultural sector with that ‘fabulous’ project boosting tourism, Open to Meraviglia.”

The project was largely mocked online for putting Botticelli’s Venus in the clothes of a 21st-century influencer as well as for using footage of Slovenia to advertise tourism in Italy. The ad campaign was dead in the water just a few months after launching, sparking an investigation in Italy about potential abuses of public money.

Changing Italy’s constitution for the direct election of the country’s president: Fail

One of the promises of Meloni’s party was to fight political instability in Italy by changing the country’s constitution and giving more powers to the president – making Italian politics look a lot more like French politics. With the constitutional reform suggested by Meloni, the Italian president would be elected directly, unlike now, and be a powerful head of state rather than a largely symbolic figure.

Meloni floated this idea earlier this year, but the initiative was strongly opposed by the centre-left opposition, which fears having too much power in a single person.

“They haven’t done much on this, they haven’t done anything on it, actually,” Griffini said. It’s unlikely that Meloni will make more progress on this issue in the coming months and years as opposition is unlikely to dwindle.

Giorgia Meloni was voted into office last October to the sound of alarm bells ringing across Europe.

As a far-right leader with a bone to pick with the EU, her landslide election perturbed political commentators, who branded her with a range of incendiary epithets: “Eurosceptic”, “radical”, “demagogic”, even Europe’s “most dangerous woman”.

But now that Meloni marks her first 100 days as prime minister, how has her premiership measured up to such forecasts? 

Has she followed through on her election campaign mantra that “playtime is over” for Brussels, or has she opted for a meeker stance to ingratiate herself with Italy’s European allies?

Here is a list of some of Giorgia Meloni’s main steps since being elected: 

Cracking down on rave parties

Few would have guessed Meloni’s “playtime is over” motto would end up taking such a literal turn, but it seems her intent to halt the fun and games was no joke — indeed, one of her first decisions as PM was to pass an “anti-rave” decree cracking down on unauthorised mass parties.

Meloni and her government defended the decision — which sees organisers of such gatherings facing hefty fines and up to six years in prison — on the grounds that it was necessary measure to curb partygoers’ antics and align Italy’s rules to its European peers.

“We have shown that the state won’t turn a blind eye and fail to act when faced with law-breaking,” she said at a news conference. 

Critics, however, deemed the move a “distraction” from more pressing political problems and feared it could limit students’ freedom to protest.

Migrant feud with France

Shortly after taking office, Meloni found herself in hot waters after sparking a spat with France over a migrant rescue vessel.

In November, SOS Méditeranée’s Ocean Viking ship — which carried over 200 migrants — was rejected by Italy and subsequently forced to dock at the French port town of Toulon, provoking France’s ire.

It comes as little surprise that the PM’s first squabble would end up involving Italy’s westerly neighbour, given her own longstanding animosity towards French President Emmanuel Macron and his migration policy.

In a talk show in 2019, Meloni had decried France’s “exploitative” economic relationship with former colonies such as Burkina Faso, arguing that the solution to Africa’s problems was not “moving Africans to Europe”, but to “liberate Africa from certain Europeans.”

The premier has used her criticism of French imperialist activities to justify her anti-migration stance — indeed, prior to her election, she proposed a naval blockade to clamp down on migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

While such loaded language may have subsided as of late, Meloni’s iron-fisted rhetoric on migration has certainly not softened. Indeed, her latest decree directly targets and curbs non-governmental organisations’ lifesaving activities at sea.

But for all the grandstanding and bold predictions, the reality on the ground would point to her promises having fallen flat.

Statistics released by the interior ministry prove migrant boat arrivals have not only failed to slow down, but have grown dramatically since Meloni took office. The first ten days of the new year alone registered an 880% increase from 2022.

An EU-friendly budget

For weeks, Brussels officials waited with bated breath as Meloni’s cabinet deliberated its budget plan for 2023.

But concerns were alleviated when it was announced that the new government’s plans for Italy’s debt-ridden economy would be considerably closer to the EU line than some had expected.

The budget law — approved by parliament in record time — includes proposals such as €21 million tax breaks to relieve businesses from the burdens of the energy crisis, as well as fiscal incentives and a lower retirement age.

While some of the plan’s measures remained controversial — especially a higher cap on cash payments — it displayed a greater of restraint than what had been touted by Meloni’s right-wing bloc on the campaign trail.

Meloni herself subsequently embarked on a charm offensive with Brussels, courting EU President Ursula von der Leyen in her first foreign trip, a move analysts attribute to Italy’s dire need to receive its €190 billion EU post-COVID recovery funds — that itself entails a set of reforms.

“It would have been unthinkable for Meloni to risk missing out on this money. Failure would have been a tragedy,” noted Daniele Albertazzi, a politics professor at the University of Surrey told Reuters. 

“She behaved in the only way she could.”

Maintaining Italy’s support for Ukraine

Giorgia Meloni was sworn in on a promise that she would maintain her steadfast support to Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s invasion, and has certainly not rolled back on any of her pledges — to the satisfaction of Kyiv.

It appears Meloni has been willing to put her money where her mouth is, as further reports emerge that Italy and France are days away from finalising a deal to supply Ukraine with a SAMP/T “Mamba” air defence system.

The PM and her cabinet’s allegiance to Ukaine however, could not be taken for granted. 

Despite welcoming a large share of Ukraine’s refugees, Italy remains one of Western Europe’s most Russia-friendly countries. The burden of decades-long economic hardships and the scars of COVID-19 have left many Italians reluctant to support sanctions, a sentiment which populist politicians — many belonging to her own bloc — have been willing to tap into.

Some of Meloni’s colleagues have themselves cosied up to the Kremlin. Fellow coalition leader Silvio Berlusconi is a long-time confidante of President Vladimir Putin confidante, who was recorded last October admitting to exchanging gifts and “sweet letters” with the maligned Russian leader. 

And Matteo Salvini — appointed by Meloni as deputy PM — had previously expressed positive attitudes towards Russia, and had donned a Putin T-shirt back in 2014.

Taking journalists to court

Italy has long been ranked as one of Western Europe’s worst countries for journalists, coming in at 58th place in the 2022 World Press Freedom Index. 

Some journalists have expressed concerns that Meloni’s election win has made life even more challenging for reporters in Italy, especially those belonging to the left.

While Meloni — herself a journalist — has expressed her support for press freedom, critics point to hostile behaviours from members of her party, Brothers of Italy, towards leftist journalists, as well as legal threats made by the right-wing leader herself against dissenting voices, as signs of a worsening situation.

Among these is Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian-Italian journalist and academic, who found herself threatened with legal action after claims she had made about Meloni’s views on immigration.

“[Meloni and her party] want to take down anyone who ever dares to criticise their policies,” she told Euronews. “It’s a sign of what’s to come.”

But while Meloni eventually fell short of taking Jebreal to court, she did not spare another journalist: Roberto Saviano.

In October, she decided to sue Saviano — one of Italy’s most prominent anti-Mafia campaigners and an avowed Meloni critic — over comments he had made in 2020, in which he labelled her and Salvini “bastards.”

If found guilty, Saviano could face up to three years in prison, a prospect which a global press freedom watchdog described as a “chilling message” to Italy’s journalists.

What do the analysts and the public say?

After 100 days in office, what do commentators and the Italian public say about Meloni so far? 

Analysts have found their fears of a potential far-right takeover have been somewhat mitigated, although they remain unconvinced with Meloni’s performance.

“Her cabinet did not do much in its first 100 days,” Andrea Mammone, a history professor at Rome’s Sapienza University, told Euronews. “The government is basically following the EU on international politics.”

“This clearly shows how complex it is to run a country when someone is starting from populist premises,” he added.

According to opinion polls, Italians are broadly satisfied with Meloni’s job so far. Her party, Brothers of Italy, has soared since she took office, and she currently has a 48% approval rating.

It would appear Meloni has managed to hit a sweet middle spot, flexing her muscles when necessary to signal strength to her supporters — the arrest of Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss earlier this month certainly bolstered her image — while also towing the Brussels line.

As Meloni further consolidates her power, she is likely to continue this careful balancing act which has reaped her significant rewards both home and abroad. But as a string of Italian prime ministers each saw their support plummet shortly after enjoying an initial ‘honeymoon’ phase, it remains to be seen whether the newly elected PM will manage to cling onto her popularity — or suffer the same fate.