Italy Elections Live: Giorgia Melonis Hard-Right Party Leads In Voting The New York Times
Italy Elections Live: Giorgia Meloni’s Hard-Right Party Leads In Voting – The New York Times https://clarkcountynewsnow.com/italy-elections-live-giorgia-melonis-hard-right-party-leads-in-voting-the-new-york-times/
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Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party, seems poised to become Italy’s next prime minister and the first woman to hold the position.Credit…Alessandro Garofalo/LaPresse, via Associated Press
ROME — Italy appeared to turn a page of European history on Sunday by electing a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, whose long record of bashing the European Union, international bankers and migrants has sown concern about the nation’s reliability in the Western alliance.
Early projections based on a narrow sampling of precincts, as well as exit polls, on Sunday night suggested that Ms. Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of fascism, had led a right-wing coalition to a majority in Parliament, defeating a fractured left and a resurgent anti-establishment movement.
The final results would not be clear until Monday, and it will still be weeks before the new Italian parliament is seated and a new government is formed, leaving plenty of time for political machinations. But Ms. Meloni’s strong showing, with about 25 percent of the vote, the highest of any single party, makes her the prohibitive favorite to become the country’s first female prime minister.
While she is a strong supporter of Ukraine, her coalition partners deeply admire Russia’s President, Vladimir V. Putin, and have criticized sanctions against Russia.
The victory, in an election with lower turnout than usual, comes as formerly taboo and marginalized parties with Nazi or fascist heritages are entering the mainstream — and winning elections — across Europe.
This month, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. In France this year, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of presidential elections. In Spain, the hard-right Vox, a party closely aligned with Ms. Meloni, is surging.
But it is Italy, the birthplace of fascism and a founding member of the European Union, that has sent the strongest shock wave across the continent after a period of European-centric stability led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who directed hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds to modernize Italy and helped lead Europe’s strong response to Russia.
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Giorgia Meloni preparing to cast her vote at a polling station in Rome on Sunday.Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Ms. Meloni’s victory showed that the allure of nationalism — of which she is a strong advocate — remained undimmed, despite the breakthroughs by E.U. nations in coming together to pool sovereignty and resources in recent years, first to combat the coronavirus pandemic and then Mr. Putin’s initiation of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.
How, and how deeply, a right-wing coalition in Italy led by Ms. Meloni could threaten that cohesion is now the foremost concern of the European establishment.
Ms. Meloni has staunchly, and consistently, supported Ukraine and its right to defend itself against Russian aggression. But her coalition partners — Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the League, and the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — have clearly aligned themselves with Mr. Putin, questioning sanctions and echoing his propaganda.
That fracture, and the bitter competition between the right-wing leaders, could prove fatal for the coalition, leading to a short-lived government. But some political analysts say Ms. Meloni, having attained power, may be tempted to soften her support for sanctions, which are unpopular in much of Italy.
If she does, there is concern that Italy could be the weak link that breaks the European Union’s strong united position against Russia.
Ms. Meloni had spent the campaign seeking to reassure an international audience that her support of Ukraine was unwavering. She sought to allay concerns by condemning Mussolini, whom she once admired, and Italy’s Fascist past. She also made more supportive noises about Italy’s place in the European Union and distanced herself from Ms. Le Pen and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, whom she had previously emulated.
Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s party, organized an electoral vigil on Sunday night in a lavish, underground conference room at Parco dei Principi, a grand hotel in Rome near Villa Borghese. The hotel — with neon-lit stucco ceilings and a marble bust of the Roman emperor Caracalla — was where the Five Star Movement greeted the news of its landslide election in 2018.
Guido Crosetto, a senior member of the Brothers of Italy, had one word to describe his mood as he climbed up the staircase out of a secluded room where party members followed the election on television.
“Nervous,” he said.
Supporters brought in cake, red peppers for good luck and “energy,” and green, red and white T-shirts as the first exit polls were projected on large screens, showing Ms. Meloni’s party getting between 22 and 25 percent of the vote.
A timid applause came out of the room and, shortly after, a waiter carried in a large bucket of ice.
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A voter trying to enter a polling station filled with journalists waiting for Giorgia Meloni’s arrival on Sunday.Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
ROME — Dozens of photographers packed into the back of a small classroom waiting for Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader favored to become Italy’s prime minister after national elections on Sunday, to come in and cast her vote.
Her party had announced that she would be there at 11 a.m. Her spokeswomen were there. The Italian and international news media showed up. But Ms. Meloni didn’t.
In a statement, her office blamed all of the journalists who showed up and said that Ms. Meloni would vote later Sunday so as not to obstruct “the right to vote in peace.”
But if Ms. Meloni didn’t make it, her voters did.
“I’ve voted for her and the right since the times of Almirante,” said Paola Puglisi, 65, referring to Giorgio Almirante, an official in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed puppet state who after World War II formed and led the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, which Ms. Meloni joined in her youth. Her Brothers of Italy still carries the defunct party’s torch.
Ms. Puglisi said she was proud to live close to Ms. Meloni in an area near the EUR neighborhood of the Italian capital that Mussolini built as a modern imperial Rome.
“It’s going to be a big change, having a woman for the first time but also for the right,” Ms. Puglisi said. “It’s a turning point.”
Not everyone in Ms. Meloni’s home precinct liked the way things were heading.
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Paola Puglisi, 65, who voted for Giorgia Meloni, outside the precinct on Sunday.Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Federica Lombardi, 25, and her sister Emanuela Lombardi, 23, spoke to each other in a mix of English and Italian. Having attended international schools and lived in Washington, and now residing in London and Madrid, they said they moved in liberal bubbles that popped when they came home to vote for the center-left Democratic Party.
“Here, we are a minority vote, and it probably will be nationwide,” said Federica Lombardi, who works for a human rights law firm in London. She said she had doubts about Ms. Meloni’s sincerity when it came to her softened position on Europe. “I don’t buy it,” she said. “It’s political positioning.”
Her sister, who works in the luxury fashion industry in Madrid, said she was most concerned about Ms. Meloni’s effect on social issues.
“There’s this archaic vision that because she is a woman, she will be good for women,” especially on abortion rights, Emanuela Lombardi said. She said she worried that Ms. Meloni’s emphasis on preventing abortions acted as an “underlying judgment.” More generally, Emanuela Lombardi feared that electing someone from “the remnants of fascism” would ultimately validate long-taboo ideas. “I’m worried we will be going back many years,” she said.
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Giorgia Meloni would be Italy’s first female leader.Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
CAGLIARI, Sardinia — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader of a party descended from post-Fascist roots and the favorite to become Italy’s next prime minister, is known for her rhetorical crescendos, thundering timbre and ferocious speeches slamming gay-rights lobbies, European bureaucrats and illegal migrants.
But she was suddenly soft-spoken when asked on a recent evening if she agreed, all caveats aside, with the historical consensus that the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini — whom she admired in her youth as a “good politician” — had been evil and bad for Italy.
“Yeah,” she said, almost inaudibly, between sips of an Aperol Spritz and drags on a thin cigarette during an interview in Sardinia, where she had completed another high-decibel political rally.
That simple syllable spoke volumes about Ms. Meloni’s campaign to reassure a global audience as she appears poised to become the first politician with a post-Fascist lineage to run Italy since the end of World War II.
Such a feat seemed unimaginable not so long ago, and to pull it off, Ms. Meloni — who would also make history as the first woman to lead Italy — is balancing on a high-stakes wire, persuading her hard-right base of “patriots” that she hasn’t changed, while seeking to convince international skeptics that she’s no extremist, that the past is past, not prologue, and that Italy’s mostly moderate voters trust her, so they should, too.
Some of the competition on the ballots include Enrico Letta, 56, a former prime minister, who is the leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Democratic Party, which runs in a coalition with a series of small, p...
