By Oyintari Ben
Giorgia Meloni, a hard-right politician who became Italy’s first female prime minister on Saturday, won the election on a platform of support for traditional “family values,” opposition to LGBTQ issues, and a pledge to stop migrant ships.
A handover ceremony took place at Chigi Palace, the prime minister’s palace in Rome, four weeks after Meloni and Mario Draghi’s Brothers of Italy party won the general elections.
The two grinned heartily as Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank, symbolically gave Meloni a miniature bell used in cabinet debates following over 90 minutes of private discussions.
She later held her first meeting of ministers comprising members of her party and its allies, former premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and Matteo Salvini’s far-right League.
Despite Meloni’s victory in the recent parliamentary elections, many Italians are still unsure what will happen next given her pledge to lead the country in a hard-right direction.
On Saturday, Meloni was being sworn in alongside her 24 ministers, six of whom were women.
At a time of skyrocketing inflation, an energy crisis, and the war in Ukraine, the Euroskeptic, anti-immigration alliance gains control of the third-largest economy in the eurozone.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, stated on Saturday that she had a “nice first conversation” with Meloni and that she was looking forward to working constructively with the incoming administration to address the difficulties they both faced.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz later expressed his desire to “operate closely together with Italy in EU, NATO, and the G7,” which Meloni echoed in her tweets in response to congratulations.
While Meloni’s party has never been in power, her experience as a minister is confined to her three years as youth minister in Berlusconi’s 2008–2011 administration. Brothers of Italy received only 4% of the vote in the 2018 elections but a record 26% in the poll taken on September 25.
