Giorgia Meloni
Giorgia Meloni has been Prime Minister of Italy since October 2022, the first woman to hold the office and the first leader from a party descended from the postwar neo-fascist tradition. Born in Rome in 1977 and raised by her mother in the working-class Garbatella district after her father left for the Canary Islands, she joined the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement at fifteen. She was elected to parliament in 2006, became the youngest minister in Italian history as minister for youth in Silvio Berlusconi's fourth government in 2008, and co-founded the Brothers of Italy in 2012. The party polled two per cent in 2013. Its rise came from staying out of office. Brothers of Italy was the only significant party to refuse to join the national-unity governments of Giuseppe Conte and Mario Draghi, which left it as the sole opposition and delivered twenty-six per cent in September 2022. Her government has been more conventional than her opponents expected and than her rhetoric suggested. She kept Italy firmly inside NATO and among Ukraine's strongest European supporters, maintained fiscal discipline and the EU recovery-fund programme, and built a working relationship with Ursula von der Leyen. She did not pursue the eurosceptic positions of her past. Domestically she has been harder. Her government criminalised surrogacy performed abroad, restricted the registration of same-sex parents, tightened rules on NGO rescue ships, and struck an agreement with Albania to process asylum seekers offshore, which Italian courts repeatedly blocked. She has also pushed a constitutional change to elect the prime minister directly.
- Lived: 1977 CE – ?
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: Prime Minister of Italy (2022-present)
