Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is about to take the oath of office

• Giorgia Meloni will soon become Italy’s first female prime minister.
• She is poised to build the most right-wing administration Italy has seen in decades.
• Many Italians are still unsure what will happen next given her pledge to lead the country in a hard-right direction.

Giorgia Meloni, a hard-right politician who will soon become Italy’s first female prime minister, won the election with a platform that included support for traditional “family values,” anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and a commitment to stop migrant ships.

She is poised to build the most right-wing administration Italy has seen in decades as the leader of an alliance of far-right and center-right parties, with her own Brothers of Italy at the forefront.

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.

Two more right-wing leaders are part of the alliance that makes up the new government. One is Matteo Salvini, a former interior minister who turned his League party from a northern separatist party into a nationalist powerhouse in 2018 and became the darling of the far right.

The other is Silvio Berlusconi, a former Italian prime minister who is well known for his “bunga bunga” sex scandals with young girls. Berlusconi is a center-right politician. Both men have previously professed their appreciation for Russian President Vladimir Putin in public, which has raised concerns about the coalition’s strategy toward Russia.

And just this week, days before negotiations on forming the government were to start, leaked audio emerged in which Berlusconi seemed to place the blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine squarely on Kyiv’s shoulders and boasted of having repaired ties with the Russian president.

In the video, which was made available by the Italian news agency LaPresse on Tuesday, Berlusconi said, “I reconnected a little bit with President Putin, quite a bit, in the sense that for my birthday he gave me 20 bottles of Vodka and a very sweet letter, and I responded by giving him bottles of Lambrusco.” At the moment, the 86-year-old media mogul and millionaire was conversing with Forza Italia party members.

A party official said Berlusconi had been telling lawmakers “an old anecdote pertaining to an occurrence many years ago” when asked if he had been in contact with Putin. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Thursday, Berlusconi defended his remarks and said they had been misinterpreted.

Meloni, who has been a steadfast defender of Ukraine as it fights Moscow’s invasion, tried to clarify where she and the alliance will stand if in power in the face of criticism over the statements.

“I have always been clear that I desire to lead a government with a clear and unambiguous foreign policy. Italy is a full member of both the Atlantic Alliance and of Europe. Anyone who disagrees with this tenet will not be allowed to join the government, which will then cease to exist. Italy won’t ever be the weak link in the West with us in charge, she assured.

While conservative voters believe only a strong-arm politician, like Meloni, can lead the country out of the disaster with rising energy prices and high youth unemployment, liberals in Italy and the European Union are worried about what the predicted rightward tilt may entail for the country and its future.

Lorenzo De Sio, a political science professor at Luiss Guido Carli University, told CNN that Meloni was overwhelmingly supported by the center-right and was therefore not representing the views of extreme right-wing voters.

“I’d say that Meloni’s credo is to be a sort of modern conservative or conservativism for the twenty-first century. She could have some distant ties to the legacy of the post-fascist regime, but that’s obviously not the main focus of her political agenda right now.

Despite having the third-oldest population in the world, Meloni and her party have been attempting to appeal to young Italians, the potential voters of the future. After signing up with Youth Front, the Italian Social Movement’s (MSI) youth wing, a party founded by Giorgio Almirante, a minister in the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s administration, she herself entered politics at the age of 15.

Francesco Todde is the head of the National Youth movement, which Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party launched in 2014 in an effort to engage a younger generation of politically engaged Italians who were dissatisfied with the country’s current political landscape.

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