The Meloni Paradox: Rebranding the Italian Right

Book: Brothers of Italy and the Rise of the Italian National Conservative Right under Giorgia Meloni

In the labyrinth of contemporary Italian politics, where history’s ghosts often bump with the glare of today’s media spectacle – a residue of the era of Berlusconi - we find ourselves confronted with a curious phenomenon: Giorgia Meloni. A politician who is, at once, the heir to Italy’s fascist legacy and its most determined denier. To understand this paradox, we must first recognise that we are not merely dealing with a leader’s political ascent, but, with could be described as one of the most successful political repackaging campaigns in recent European history.

Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), traces its roots directly to Mussolini’s neo-fascist heirs. And yet, as pollical scientists Salvatore Vassallo and Rinaldo Vignati observe in their book, “Brothers of Italy and the Rise of the Italian National Conservative Right under Giorgia Meloni,” it now labels itself as Italy’s first “national conservative” force. It’s perhaps the most representative case study of how extreme political parties can be repackaged through strategic rebranding into something more palatable, more polished, and crucially, more electable.

At the age of fifteen, Meloni joined the Fronte della Gioventù—the youth wing of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). By nineteen, she was leading its student movement Alleanza Nazionale. Back then, these groups didn’t bother with subtlety: they openly admired Mussolini, flirted with fascist nostalgia, and often embraced street-level radicalism.

In a 1996 French television interview, a young Meloni justified Mussolini’s record as having done some good things to Italy—not so much a denial of fascism as a deft rhetorical twist: dictatorship as misunderstood patriotism. It was an early glimpse of her political style: rhetorical re-coding more than outright denial.

While she was a councillor in Rome, in 1998, Meloni founded the Atreju Festival, named after a boy in Michael Ende’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story – a move that blended pop culture with political myth. Atreju is chosen as a hero to save the realm from an apocalyptic force known as The Nothing—a mysterious, growing void that consumes everything in its path- an appropriate metaphor for the movement’s view of modernity. Today the festival features international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán and inevitably – or so it feels nowadays – Elon Musk.

A closer look echoes similarities with the Camp Hobbit, a cultural space of Youth Front a far-right youth organisation in the late 1970s. The far right’s fixation on mythical heroes is nothing new— figures like Atregu, or Tolkien’s Aragorn are more than fictional icons; they become political symbols of purity, destiny and resistance. For nationalist movements, these characters offer a ready-made narrative: a struggle against chaos, a chosen saviour, and a heroic past waiting to be reclaimed. As Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, myths turn ordinary things into ideological messages. A phrase like “family values,” a classical statue, a leather jacket, or even a festival name, can carry powerful ideological weight.

Take the flame in FdI’s logo. It looks patriotic—red, white, green, aligned with the party’s nationalistic branding—its name comes from Italy’s national anthem. But to those who know its origins in Italy’s post-war fascist era, it burns with something else entirely.

It traces back to the Arditi, elite Italian soldiers in World War I, known as the "black flames." Some of these soldiers later joined early fascist movements, including Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume, though others opposed fascism. The flame wasn’t a central symbol for Mussolini, who preferred the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of power. However, after the fall of the fascist regime in 1945, the newly formed Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) adopted the flame as its emblem—meant to represent ideological continuity and a guiding light through the perceived darkness of democracy.

Over the years, figures like Laura Boldrini and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre have publicly called for its removal. Yet, the flame persists – not just as a logo, or a tribute to heritage as Meloni’s party insists, but as a symbol that still speaks—to memory, to identity, and to Italy’s unresolved past.

Meloni’s rise within the far-right was rapid. By 2004, she became the first woman to lead a major youth political wing in Italy. By 2006, she was in parliament; by 2008, the youngest minister in Italian history. But it was Berlusconi’s decline that gave her space. In 2012, she left his party to form Fratelli d’Italia with MSI veterans like Ignazio La Russa. The flame remained as a sign of the party’s authenticity.

She moved decisively into populism—pro-family, anti-immigration, Eurosceptic. In the 2018 election, FdI doubled its vote share (4.35%), though it lagged behind Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the chaotic populists of the Five Star Movement. (M5S).

Salvini, who had abandoned Bossi’s secessionist agenda and even apologised for the Lega’s comments about southerners, was appointed interior minister of an odd coalition between what were often described as right-wing populists and left-wing populists, headed by an independent, Giuseppe Conte. In the summer of 2019, with the Lega leading the polls, he overplayed his hand by leaving the coalition. He had intended to trigger an election; instead, President Sergio Mattarella brokered a coalition between the M5S and the centre-left, followed in 2021 by a coalition of almost all the parties, headed by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank.

Meloni waited. Since 2019 Fdl's popularity grew steadily, and during the last years of the COVID-19 emergency, stood alone in opposition to Mario Draghi's technocratic premiership. Onto a stage at a political rally in Rome, Meloni described herself in a few simple but forceful terms.

“I am Giorgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian. I am Christian.” In so doing, she crystallised her politics. She’s a woman (no ‘non-binary genders’ for her). She’s a mother to one daughter (she believes in family values). She’s Italian (she believes in the identity of the nation-state, not the EU superstate). Finally, she’s Christian (none of that ‘multi-faith’ stuff for her). So powerful was that simple message that it became a viral dance remix. It is worth a listen, to understand Meloni fenomeno.

Italy is 87th in the global rankings for gender equality. Meloni dismisses feminism as “a left-wing ideology harmful to women because it advocates for gender quotas in candidate selection and the introduction of gender ideology into schools”. Her government has increased support for working mothers and, like other natalists like Orbán, tax relief for large families. Yet despite the incessant invocations of ‘Dio-Patria-Famiglia’, Italy’s birthrate has fallen to a historic low. It appears that modern women have been redefining their ambitions, often choosing paths beyond the traditional role of nurturing large families.

I can’t think of a more exciting antidote to Meloni’s conservatism and dullness that have dominated Italy’s political stage, other than that of Elly Schlein. Schein, leader of the centre-left, is openly queer, child-free, and unapologetically progressive. Her declaration—“I’m a woman who loves another woman. Not a mother, but not less of a woman for that,” offers a striking counterpoint to Meloni’s messaging. The juxtaposition couldn’t be sharper: two Italys, two identities, two futures.

After winning 25.9% of the vote in 2022, Meloni became Italy’s first female Prime Minister. Pundits warned of a fascist revival, but Meloni didn’t have to do much to prove them wrong. Unlike Salvini, she publicly supported Ukraine and worked with Ursula von der Leyen on controversial migration deals, such as paying Tunisia’s authoritarian regime to stem migration flows. She also implemented legal measures to limit NGO rescue missions in the Mediterranean, and circumvented judicial oversight to proceed with offshoring migrants to detention centres in Albania.

Yet beneath the surface, old habits endure. Vassallo and Vignati argue that FdI is a top-down, centralised party that is still led by MSI-era veterans. They concede that the party is characterised by nativism and populism, yet they reject the ‘fascist’ label. Their characterisation of FdI as Italy's first genuine "national conservative" party though, is what Umberto Eco would have termed as "hyperreality."

The party's ideological pastiche—projecting images of Gandhi alongside D'Annunzio, Hannah Arendt next to Marinetti—creates a theatrically curated political space where historical contradictions are flattened into a glossy narrative of "Italian pride." This is not eclecticism but a deliberate strategy, designed to normalise what is, in essence, a post-fascist movement operating within democratic structures. It’s a branding campaign. And it’s working.

This is the genius and the danger of Meloni's project. By translating far-right heritage into the language of patriotism and modernity, she offers a myth that everyone feels safe. But like all myths, it tells us less about the truth than about what people wish were true. Her claim that “no one is further right than me” isn’t just a political boast. It’s a statement of symbolic ownership. Her project is less about fascism’s return than its transformation—into something more wearable, more electable, more Instagrammable.

But as with all myths, the danger lies not in what they reveal—but in what they conceal.