Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: In the last few decades, dozens of countries have seen women heads of the state or government. But Italy, a laggard, is set to have its first-ever woman Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose conservative alliance with roots in post-fascism won big in the Sunday election, according to provisional results of the polls.
Some media reports also called her a ‘ new Mussolini!’
Leader of a most right-wing political outfit ironically called the Brothers of Italy, she emerged from the political fringes after leading the opposition’s coalition against her predecessor’s technocratic administration which battled the trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic and stabilized Italy in the last year and a half, the media reported on Monday.
Provisional results showed the rightist block getting at least 114 seats in the Senate, 10 more than a majority. With a substantial majority in both houses of parliament, it potentially gives Italy a rare chance of political stability after years of upheaval and fragile coalitions.
But Meloni, 45, will face many challenges, including soaring energy prices fuelling rampant inflation and undermining growth, the war in Ukraine, and a renewed slowdown in the euro zone’s third-largest economy. The hit to Italy’s finances and the prospect of more interest-rate hikes from the European Central Bank pushed the yield on Italy’s 10-year bonds to more than 4.3 percent compared with less than 1 percent in December 2021.
Predictably, she made all the politically correct noises, struck a conciliatory tone, and played down her outfit’s post-fascist roots to claim it was a mainstream group like Britain’s Conservatives. She also supported Western policy on Ukraine and did not take risks with Italy’s fragile finances. Earlier, she was a euro skeptic and her allies had an ambivalent position on Russia.
Charismatic but inexperienced, Meloni will succeed Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, who pushed Rome to the center of EU policy-making during his 18-month stint in office, forging close ties with Paris and Berlin. Meloni tried to reassure voters and investors that she would keep Italy’s mammoth debt under control and won’t question the country’s foreign alliances or support for Ukraine.
The new parliament, downsized to 200 senators and 400 lower house lawmakers, will meet for the first time on October 13.
Meloni may reverse some reforms Draghi introduced to boost growth. These could risk a spending plan for about 200 billion euros (USD 198 billion) of pandemic recovery funds from the European Union. Italy’s economy may grow only around 0.4 percent in 2023 compared to a 2.4 percent April prediction.
The election result marks a meteoric rise for the Brothers of Italy, which claimed over 25 percent of the vote, compared with only 4 percent in the 2018 election.
The rise of this party with roots in post-fascism is worrying Europe.