Giorgia Melonie; The Woman of the Hour.

Flushed with her party’s recent victory on Sunday, Giorgia Meloni is poised to become Italy’s first female prime minister. 

With her party brother of Italy garnering a plurality of the vote 26 percent the politician is likely to lead a Conservative coalition into power. Meloni’s victory however represents not merely the advent of Italy’s first female prime minister but a resurgence in conservative nationalism throughout the old continent. 

It appears Italy is about to get a political realignment 

Many have painted the soon-to-be prime minister as fascist labeling her as a right-wing extremist and a danger. However, reality tells a different story. The guardian a British left-wing newspaper put it best “Meloni’s party is not so much the heir to Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement as the first European copycat of the US Republican party. 

Instead of fascism Meloni represents the enduring influence of Trumpism. Like Donald Trump, Meloni was able to resurrect nostalgia for a long-lost glo- rious past combining fears of immigration and containing secularization Meloni drew together Catholicism and Nationalism. Combining the old traditional Catholic voter with a new sense of nationalism. 

One can say Meloni replicated Trump’s formula of earning both the old religious right and a slew of new voters on immigration and trade. This combination of nationalism and social conservativism is the formula of Trumpism, a formula which Meloni replicated successfully. It is often said that “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” 

One can have no doubt that the election of Donald Trump was the cough and the recent rise of Right-wing Nationalist like Meloni is the cold. So, where does Italy and for that matter Europe go from here? 

Perhaps the answer lies in the continual growth of Meloni-like figures across the old continent. However, there can be no doubt Meloni is the woman of the hour, but frame is fleeting.