One thing Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has been hailed for is the flexibility of her tongue. A polyglot, she has so far demonstrated her skills in Spanish, English, and French, besides Italian, her mother tongue.
Yet, the impressive capacity for code-switching demonstrated by Italy’s strongest woman has not been limited to languages. It is far-reaching and it goes beyond Italian politics, reaching out to transnational politics.
In a speech, articulated in fluent Spanish before a crowd of VOX supporters in the summer of 2022, Meloni appealed to a right-wing rejection of Globalization when she slammed those who told “us” that “a globalization without rules and the triumph of financial economy over real economy will promote democracy where autocracy reigns and bring prosperity to our democracies. Either they were wrong or they lied to us. Because only today are we taking account of what a high price we have paid by allowing the relocation of our companies (…) and the displacement of our wealth in the last few years.”
Yet, she believes in the globalization of her Western identity economics reified in her quest for a European and Western conservative front, of which she would (or already is) the leader. In 2020, she was elected as the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament, which comprises Spain’s VOX, Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia, and Sweden Democrats. Her visits to the Trump Tower and her friendship with the ruling elite in Hungary attest to her transnationalism.
In her loud speeches, where her tone approximates yelling at the crowd before her, she has maintained a routine of enumerating the ills of her ideological enemies, compressing them into a list that includes vague – but obvious enough- names such as “the politically correct,” “gender ideology,” “the synthetic,” and “the indistinct.”
Yet, Meloni does not miss the chance to appeal to values and principles pertinent to these ideologies. She criticizes Leftism, Communism, and the Latin American Left but she claims her ideological allies are the only ones left to defend workers in a Globalized world where the rights of foreign workers matter more than those of the local working class.
She advances her harsh stance against mass immigration as part of a struggle against racism, slavery, and human trafficking, just as she relies on Feminist metaphors to denounce “gender ideology” as an agenda to destroy motherhood and womanhood.
President Meloni’s impressive code-switching skills are not restricted to ideology and the like of institutions of ideological preaching. It goes beyond that and maps into policy making. In a recent post on Facebook that dates back to November 5, 2022, former PM Matteo Renzi wrote that the announcement of the extension of Italy’s gas drilling rights to the Adriatic made by PM Meloni stands in sharp contrast with her opposition to the same project when Mr. Renzi led the government 7 years ago.
People change their views and that could be case of PM Meloni. The mechanism behind that is results, figures, attitudes, and impressions. They are playing in her favour for now.
