Giorgia Meloni has denounced her neo-fascist past -- in four languages

But will she succeed in her fight against the system that seeks to create 'perfect slave' consumers?

Earlier this week, ultra-MAGA types on social media were fawning over Giorgia Meloni’s victory at the Italian polls. While elite media focused on her past, these commenters focused on her words from a recent speech:

“They attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity. I can’t define myself as: Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number.

“Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators.”

With news of her election, and a majority win for the coalition she built around her Brothers of Italy party (Fratelli d’Italia), the word “neo-fascist” has been on the lips of every corporate media commentator from Brussels to New York.

“How a party of neo-fascist roots won big in Italy” was the Associated Press headline. Writer Nicole Winfield begins:

The Brothers of Italy party, which won the most votes in Italy’s national election, has its roots in the post-World War II neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

Keeping the movement’s most potent symbol, the tricolor flame, Giorgia Meloni has taken Brothers of Italy from a fringe far-right group to Italy’s biggest party.

A century after Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which brought the fascist dictator to power, Meloni is poised to lead Italy’s first far-right-led government since World War II and Italy’s first woman premier.

Winfield is correct that the tricolor flame is all that remains of the original Italian Socialist Movement — along with Giorgia herself — having joined its Youth Front at age 15 (in 1992).

Supporters are focusing on the present; in 2022, Meloni denounced fascism in four languages. Watch the video here:

Giorgia Meloni condemning fascism in four languages

Note: the audio is compromised but there are subtitles. Working on getting that fixed.

So why did she join the neo-fascist movement in the first place?

Daughter of an absent Communist father and staunchly conservative mother, at age 15 she joined the Italian Socialist Movement’s Youth Front, by her own account in response to organized crime catalyzed by the infamous 1992 mafia bombing in her mother’s hometown of Palermo, Sicily, in which a well known anti-mafia judge was killed along with five bodyguards

Clearly a wunderkind, at age 19 Meloni rose to become a leader in the movement, which by then had been renamed the National Alliance by Gianfranco Fini. Fini was minister of foreign affairs and deputy prime minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s government. Her status was so notable that she was interviewed for a feature by French TV, in which she called Benito Mussolini a “good politician” in nearly perfect French. “Everything he did, he did for Italy,” she said, “unlike the politicians of the last 50 years.” Watch here.