Giorgia Meloni, leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party. Photo / Getty Images
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party. Photo / Getty Images
Abandoned by her father and bullied by other children for being chubby, life was not too rosy for Giorgia Meloni when she was growing up in a scruffy working-class district of Rome.
Thirty years on, she is having the last laugh.
The leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party could, conceivably, become Italy's first female prime minister, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Brothers of Italy, which is the modern-day heir to Italy's fascist movement, was then a fringe party commanding less than 4 per cent of the national vote.
But a recent Ipsos poll found the party is now practically neck-and-neck with the governing Democrats as Italy's most popular party.
Mario Draghi, the Italian Prime Minister, tended his resignation on Thursday, with the potential implosion of his coalition triggering fresh demands by Meloni for an early election.
Brothers of Italy party leader Giorgia Meloni attends a rally for the elections in Piazza, Rome. Photo / Getty Images
Meloni could form an alliance with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini, the leader of the anti-immigrant League party, in order to lead.
The 44-year-old mother of one has come a long way from her childhood in Garbatella, a working-class district in Rome that was built in the 1920s.
Her father's abandonment of her, her sister and her mother – he sailed away from Italy on a yacht called Cavallo Pazzo or Crazy Horse and wound up in Gomera, one of the Canary Islands - was deeply traumatic.
The leader of Fratelli d'Italia, Giorgia Meloni in Rieti, Italy. Photo / Getty Images
Plied with biscuits and cakes by her adoring grandmother, Meloni put on so much weight that by the age of 9 she weighed 65kg. She was called "cicciona" – "fatty" – by the other kids.
At the age of 15 she joined the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the post-war successor to Benito Mussolini's Fascist movement.
She signed up at her nearest branch, in Via Guendalina Borghese, in the heart of Garbatella.
"That's the place where it all started," she writes in a newly published best-selling autobiography, I Am Giorgia.
At the age of 31, Meloni became the youngest minister in Italian history, serving in a government led by Silvio Berlusconi.
She founded Brothers of Italy in 2012. Its initial performance was pitiful, attracting just 3.5 per cent of the vote in European elections in 2014 and just over 4 per cent in a 2018 general election.
But policies including a naval blockade of the North African coast to stop migrants from reaching Italian shores and incentives for couples to have more children, have seen its popularity surge.
Meloni also opposes any further political union with the EU, which she says has "tragically failed".
"She is the main beneficiary of the shrinking of support for Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party," said Francesco Galietti, of the political risk consultancy Policy Sonar.
Meloni has been buoyed by a couple of high-profile defections from the League – the mayor of Verona, a city in the north of Italy, and Vincenzo Sofo, an Italian MEP and the fiancé of Marion Marechal Le Pen, the niece of Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-right National Rally party in France.
Vincenzo Sofo, partner of Marion Marechal Le Pen. Photo / Getty Images
"She's on a good trajectory and could make it to the very pinnacle of power," Galietti said.
