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Ready or Not? Italy’s Meloni starts election campaign

#Ready #Italys #Meloni #starts #election #campaign

Far-right leader Giorgia Meloni on Tuesday launched her campaign to become Italy’s first female prime minister in September’s election, rallying supporters by asking: “I’m ready – the question is, are you?”

Members of the crowd of thousands in the port city of Ancona shouted back “Yes!” and waved the flags at Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party while chants of “Giorgia, Giorgia” filled the warm summer air.

Just over a month before the September 25 vote, opinion polls put Meloni on course to take power in the eurozone’s third-largest economy as part of a right-wing coalition.

The 45-year-old was once at the heart of Italy’s post-fascist movement but has sought to distance her party from the past while presenting herself as a straight-forward “Christian mother” who can restore national pride.

During a nearly hour-long speech on Tuesday, she railed against an overarching European Union, globalization, coronavirus restrictions and mass migration, and vowed to “liberate this citizen from a system of power that has held him down.”

“I like her, she’s a straightforward, nice person and she has clear ideas for the future,” said Paolo Berardi, a worker in his 50s from nearby Jesi, who came to hear her speak.

He said he used to vote for Matteo Salvini of the Anti-Immigrant League but changed his support two years ago, declaring: “Let’s try a change.”

– ‘Not afraid’ –

In the 2018 election, the Brethren of Italy secured just over four percent of the vote but are now regularly at 24 percent and Meloni claims he is ready to govern.

“I’m not afraid. I’m ready to fight this fight,” she stressed on Tuesday, while saying that the outcome of the elections “depends on the Italians.”

The snap vote was declared in late July after Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s coalition government collapsed, but with most Italians on holiday Meloni has so far carried out her campaign on social media.

At her first major rally, she was presented by Francesco Acquaroli, President of the Italian Friars of the Marche Region, of which Ancona is the capital.

He was at the center of a controversy in 2019 after attending a dinner celebrating Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, which marked the beginning of fascist rule in Italy.

Meloni has insisted fascism is a thing of the past while endorsing a far-right program ranging from a sea blockade to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa to an “Italians first” mantra.

She insisted Tuesday on the difference between economic migrants, whom she accused of depressing wages, and refugees fleeing war or violence – including those from Ukraine, whom she strongly supports.

She also hit back at criticism from rivals after sharing a video posted to a news website allegedly showing the rape of a Ukrainian woman by an asylum seeker in the northern city of Piacenza and promising to restore law and order.

It was later removed from social media for violating their terms, but she said it simply showed “solidarity” with the victim, whose image was blurred but whose voice could be heard, and insisted that she be a woman “very attentive” to such expenses.

Meloni’s gender and youth are her hallmarks in the male-dominated world of Italian politics, and many supporters like that about her.

“She’s a woman, finally a woman, and a real person who doesn’t talk like a politician — if you ask her a question, she answers even if you don’t like her,” said Dora, a sixty-year-old. something visiting from Monza, in the north of Italy.

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