She knows that her big goal is within reach, and she shows it too: “I think I’m capable of leading a government that will decide sensible things for Italy and can change a lot,” Giorgia Meloni called out to the two thousand or so to supporters who gathered in Ancona’s Piazza Roma on Tuesday.
She played her favorite role once again: one against all, the Fratelli d’Italia against the rest of the world. “We do not betray the citizens, we have no masters over us, we cannot be blackmailed and we will not be bought by anyone,” Meloni said. After the year and a half under Mario Draghi, Italy was in bad shape, said the 45-year-old Roman, who in a few weeks could become the first woman to move into the Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian Prime Minister. She, Giorgia Meloni, could get the country back on its feet.
Meloni’s speech in Ancona was also her first campaign appearance since the parties submitted their lists of candidates this week and the election campaign was officially launched. The front woman of the Fratelli d’Italia has good reason for her certainty of victory. Your post-fascist party leads in all polls with around 25 percent ahead of the second-placed social democratic Partito Democratico, which comes in at 20 to 22 percent. 25 percent is far from enough for a government majority – but unlike the top candidate Enrico Letta, Meloni can count on a powerful electoral alliance: the right-wing bloc she leads also includes Matteo Salvini’s right-wing populist Lega (12 to 13 percent in the polls) and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (seven to ten percent).
Voting will probably do the rest. It is a mixed system, with two-thirds of the parliamentary seats distributed according to proportional representation and one-third of the seats in single-member constituencies according to the first-past-the-post system.
Because the right-wing bloc of Fratelli d’Italia, Lega and Forza Italia is much stronger than the disjointed left and center, pollsters are unanimous in their opinion that the right will win 80 to 90 percent of all single-member constituencies. This would ensure that the right-wing parties would have the majority of parliamentary seats even if they did not reach 50 percent in the proportional representation constituencies.
But it’s not that far yet. Giorgia Meloni and the other party leaders will now be touring the country for a month to promote themselves. Meloni wants to visit all the main towns, and it is no coincidence that she chose Ancona first: Ancona is the capital of the Marche region on the Adriatic Sea, a former stronghold of the left, which has been under the control of Francesco Acquaroli, a friend of Meloni’s party, since 2020 , to be led.
“Here we won, here we govern. And here we have shown that our party has a leadership that can offer solutions and give answers that the left has not been able to provide for decades,” stressed Meloni in Ancona.
Of course, the Marche is also a region in which one can guess what could happen to the whole of Italy if the election forecasts come true. Shortly after taking office, regional president Acquaroli banned the sale of abortion pills in the regional counseling centers and hospitals – it has become almost impossible to carry out an abortion in the Marche.
