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Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, won the country’s election for prime minister and could lead Rome away from the EU orbit while taking aim at international bankers.
“The situation in which Italy and the European Union find themselves is a particularly complex one,” she said during her victory speech. She continued, “The goal we set for ourselves as a political force is to make Italians proud of being Italian again, proud of waving the tricolor flag.”
Meloni will face significant challenges, including a sputtering economy, rising inflation, and navigating the Ukraine War. The Trends Journal reported on the election in last week’s issue. (See “ITALY’S LIKELY NEXT PM COULD INCH ROME AWAY FROM EU.”)
While a Euroskeptic and her signaling Italy leaving the European Union, considering Italy’s debt to GDP ratio of over 150, an estimated 100,000 small and medium size businesses going out of business and inflation skyrocketing as the economy trends toward contraction, her actions may not speak as loud as her words.
As part of the COVID recovery fund, Italy expected to get some 19 billion euros from Brussels this year which equals about 1 percent of Italy’s Gross Domestic Product. As reported by The New York Times, Mujtaba Rahman, Europe director for the Eurasia Group, estimates the recovery fund to total 10.5 percent of Italy’s GDP over the next few years.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, noted that there could be consequences for Rome if it moves in an “anti-democratic direction after the election.”
TRENDPOST: The Presstitutes in the Western media had a nervous breakdown when Italy’s election results came in. CNN ran a headline, “Giorgia Meloni Claims Victory to Become Italy’s Most Far-Right Prime Minister Since Mussolini,” and The Atlantic ran an article titled, “The Return of Fascism in Italy.”
Meloni, 45, has been described in the Italian media as a firebrand with sympathies for Mussolini. Her party is considered controversial and “far-right,” and the only major party in the country that has “never fully renounced its fascist background.”
We noted in last week’s issue that her challengers have called her a dangerous demagogue. She vowed that her party will “govern for everyone.”
She claims that she is an anti-woke politician.
The BBC noted that Meloni addressed a crowd in Spain earlier this year and said, “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology… no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration… no to big international finance… no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!”
Some 64 percent of the country voted in last weekend’s election and she won about 26 percent of the vote. Her closest rival, Enrico Letta, called it a “sad day for Italy and Europe,” and that his party would provide a “strong and intransigent opposition,” the BBC reported.
Meloni’s alliance will include Matteo Salvini’s Five Star Movement, and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. The Alliance won 44 percent of the vote and will control the country’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
Meloni will have to be nominated by Sergio Mattarella, the country’s president, which is all but certain to happen, but not before late October.
Meloni, who will be Italy’s first female prime minister, who at one time said she wanted to pull Italy off the euro currency, once called the EU “rotten to its core.” And although she’s spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—in 2014, she opposed sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea. However, she has been in favor of Italy providing weapons to Ukrainians to fight against the Russians.
She has been a major critic of her country’s immigration policy and vowed in August to introduce a naval blockade to patrol the Mediterranean.
“She is proposing herself as a sort of defender of the borders, a very Trumpian approach from this point of view,” Lorenzo Castellani, a history professor at Rome’s LUISS University.
TREND FORECAST: The Trends Journal has reported extensively on Drahgi’s failed premiership during the COVID-19 outbreak and other critical trend analysis that set the stage for Meloni’s victory. (See “ITALIANS TAKE TO THE STREETS TO RAIL AGAINST WORKPLACE ‘GREEN PASS” 19 Oct 2021, “ITALY DEMANDS COVID PASSPORTS” 10 Aug 2021 and “ITALY’S FIVE STAR MOVEMENT SPLITS DUE TO INFIGHTING OVER APPROACH TO UKRAINE” 28 Jun 2022).
Italy, the first western nation to launch the COVID War in 2020 and the first to impose draconian lockdown mandates on its population, and as we have detailed, the nation has paid and will continue to pay the socioeconomic price.
For Trends Journal subscribers, Meloni and last week’s Swedish populist party victory was a long noted trend forecast. We said when the COVID War began in 2020 that there would be growing anti-vax, anti-establishment, anti-immigration, anti-Eurozone movements spreading throughout Europe. This trend will greatly accelerate as economies decline, civil unrest grows and the refugee crisis worsens.