My slow ‘melonisation’

Over the past four years, I’ve come to see things through Meloni’s lens mainly whilst travelling by taxi, when rather surly drivers would explain to me their bitter disappointment: they hadn’t expected Giorgia to defend Zelensky, to support the Atlantic alliance (“Putin’s better”) or to defend Israel. “Meloni is controlled by the Jews,” one of them told me. Well then! Taken on her own, Giorgia Meloni would thus appear to be the leader of a modern, prudent, pro-European, pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine conservative right – flexible on migration – which we didn’t realise we had in Italy. No relapses into the past, no petty, parochial squabbles; on the contrary, a flexible, pragmatic ideology, with ‘Italian-style’ political opportunism in full swing. Four years ago, expectations of fascism were sky-high – and yet, the more people screamed about ‘Orbanisation’, the more Giorgia became popular, mainstream, even quite likeable, certainly shrewd, the ‘disruptor of the year’, as Politico put it. As always in such cases, my judgement was – and remains – heavily influenced by the hysterical prejudice surrounding her. For example, the fact that a woman had finally made it to Palazzo Chigi was immediately turned into a stigma, a condemnation, a horror: ‘The worst kind of patriarchy,’ said a feminist friend of mine, ‘the one in a suit and heels.’ Perhaps. Meanwhile, as the emergency receded, critics began to grasp at straws: the problem became her facial features, her Roman accent, her mismatched handbag, her daughter’s travels. I have spent these years thinking: let us see how long it takes for them to make me give my first ‘like’ to one of Meloni’s posts. Not long. Then the rest, of course: few reforms, an all-in push on the justice system that could have been handled better, monolithic stances on fluid relationships – well, that’s not her world – but also little for the ‘traditional family’, defended only in words (my third child was born; I had high expectations). However, whether out of calculation, opportunism or conviction, Meloni strikes me as one of the few here to have grasped a couple of things: that if Ukraine falls, Europe falls, and that if Israel disappears, the idea of the West as we know it disappears. All around us, there’s still a great deal of confusion.