Giorgia Meloni’s memoir presents a candid portrait of a woman as a successful politician

Books on political stars fall in two categories: biographies, which are usually authorised by the subject and descend into hagiography, and memoirs which should ideally involve an honest reckoning of a lifetime’s mistakes and the inevitable recital of triumphs. Margaret Thatcher’s weighty ‘The Downing Street Years’ and Tony Blair’s ‘A Journey’ are regarded as the gold standard of how political autobiographies should be written, although they are poles apart. Thatcher’s memoirs amount to a recount of official history, while Blair accomplishes the near-impossible exercise of being informative without getting stodgy.

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister since 2022, doesn’t camouflage or sugar-coat her fallibilities, which seem to be an outcome of the country’s entrenched patriarchal norms and structures than her own misjudgements. She also emphatically — and justifiably — dwells on her successes, resisting the temptation to go over the top.

Meloni is a hard-as-nails politician and there is no attempt to show that her tough mien conceals a soft-as-silk inside, except when she gets emotive about Andrea Giambruno, a TV journalist and her former partner, who early on in their relationship indulged her with dinner at Paris’ “most luxurious and expensive restaurant”. This was when the Fratelli d’ Italia or Brothers of Italy, the party she founded in 2012 and has led since 2014, had recorded its first success. Meloni has since broken up with Giambruno after his lewd gestures and remarks on a show led to suspension.

She was difficult as a child who was happy within her family in Rome, where she and her sibling Arianna were raised by a single mother (her father left soon after Meloni was born), but lacked “acceptance” outside the protective ring. Her passage into politics at the age of 15 was through the Youth Front section of the Italian Social Movement. The front was a “minority group” but it gave Meloni a “certain pride, even a sense of superiority” because she never enjoyed being part of the “dominant mindset”. “Unpopular positions were always the ones that felt most natural to me,” she writes and gives the example of smoking weed. She never saw the act as “rebellious”. “If everyone was doing it, true nonconformity meant saying no.”

Meloni devoted her teens to political activism and not to “fashion, nightclubs or shopping” — a preoccupation that caused her to do side gigs, including that of a bartender, in the evening and on Sunday.

But Meloni is most at ease at rallies because “I’ve never believed that politics can be conducted solely from behind a screen”. Clearly, rallies give her a high that TV shows cannot. Mainly because she thrives on the crowd’s energy and enthusiasm and secondly, because the events give her the time to speak at length and impromptu. She emphatically states that she never relies on a spin doctor and prefers radio to TV because radio has “no room for frills, flashy visuals, or colours”.

To the advocates of a quota for women in legislative bodies, Meloni’s views might jar. She says a woman should not enter politics solely to represent women. At the same time, she admits to the ubiquity of “female discrimination”, with her being a case in point because pregnancy came in the way of her candidacy for a mayoral election. However, that did not change her views on women’s representation. “As a party leader (and I have always been against fixed quotas and in favour of a return to meritocracy), I want to choose only the best people, regardless of gender.”

Which is not to say that Meloni evades the question of selecting and fitting into an identity variously cast as a “woman”, as “Giorgia”, a “mother”, a “Christian” and a “European” — identities which do not necessarily sit at ease with one another. She attempts to reconcile the identity as an Italian with a pan-European and pan-Western one.

Where does Europe draw its primary identity from? “Can we even speak of Europe without acknowledging its classical and Christian identity? ...No one can deny that the history of Europe and the very essence of civilisation are indissolubly linked to its Christian roots.”

As the West seeks to grapple with the issues of immigration and Islamic fundamentalism, Meloni recognises the complexity of the former that “requires serious governance and clear, common sense rules”. To her, the red lines are that no one should enter Italy illegally and, if necessary, measures such as building walls or implementing a naval blockade should be used. Only foreigners who “are most likely to integrate successfully” should be allowed in, though she doesn’t spell out the criteria and process to evaluate a “successful” integration other than quote a pontiff who suggested favouring only Christian immigration.

In his foreword, PM Modi describes Meloni’s autobiography as “her Mann Ki Baat” and celebrates India and Italy being “joined in spirit by a respect for tradition and an embrace of modernity”. Not so long ago, didn’t the PM’s party ratchet up a campaign against an Opposition leader’s “Italian origin”?

— The reviewer is a senior journalist