page_title: Giorgia Meloni
section_title: Leader of Brothers of Italy
hierarchical_section_title: Giorgia Meloni / Political career / Leader of Brothers of Italy
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Meloni e Crosetto a Sanremo per la campagna elettorale per le Elezioni europee del 2014 e comunali
context_page_description: Giorgia Meloni is an Italian journalist and politician who leads Brothers of Italy, a national conservative party in Italy. Meloni served also as Minister of Youth in Silvio Berlusconi's fourth government and president of Young Italy, the youth section of The People of Freedom.
  She is the co-founder of the right-wing party Brothers of Italy, along with Guido Crosetto and Ignazio La Russa, and on 8 March 2014, she was elected president of the party. She has been a member of the Chamber of Deputies of Italy since 2006.
context_section_description: In December 2012, Meloni, La Russa and Crosetto founded a new political movement, Brothers of Italy (FdI), whose name comes from the words of the Italian National Anthem. At the February 2013 general election, she stood as part of Berlusconi's Centre-right coalition and received 2.0% of the vote and 9 seats. Meloni was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Lombardy and was later appointed the party's leader in the house, a position that she would hold until 2014, when she resigned to dedicate herself to the party. She was succeeded by Fabio Rampelli.
  In March 2014 she became president of Brothers of Italy and in April she was nominated for the 2014 European election as the leader of the Brothers of Italy in all the five constituencies, but her party obtained only 3.7% of the votes, not exceeding the threshold of 4% and therefore she did not become a MEP, despite receiving 348,700 votes.
  As party leader she decided to form the alliance with the Lega Nord of Matteo Salvini, launching several political campaigns with him against the centre-left government of Matteo Renzi, placing FdI in Eurosceptic and populist positions.
  On 4 November 2015 she founded the Our Land – Italians with Giorgia Meloni, a conservative political committee in support of her campaigns. Our Land was a parallel organisation to FdI and aimed at enlarging FdI's popular base.
  On 30 January 2016 she participated in the Family Day, an anti-LGBT rights demonstration, declaring herself against the Cirinnà law, which recognised same-sex unions in Italy. At the same Family Day, Meloni announced that she was pregnant; her daughter Ginevra was born on 16 September.
  In the 2016 municipal election in Rome, Meloni ran for mayor with the support of Us with Salvini, but in opposition to the candidate supported by Berlusconi's Forza Italia. Meloni won 20.6% of the vote, almost twice that of FI's candidate, but did not qualify for the run-off, while the FdI obtained a convincing 12.3%.
  During the December 2016 constitutional referendum on the reform promoted by Renzi's government, Meloni founded the "No, Thanks" committee and participated in numerous television debates, including one against Prime Minister Renzi. When "No" won with almost 60% of the votes, Meloni called for snap elections and, when Renzi resigned, she withheld confidence from the next government led by Paolo Gentiloni.
  On the 2 and 3 December 2017 in Trieste, the congress of Brothers of Italy saw the re-election of Meloni as president of the party, as well as a renewal of the party logo and the joining of Daniela Santanchè, a long-time right-wing politician.
  In the 2018 general election, Brothers of Italy stood as part of the centre-right coalition, with Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Salvini's League and Raffaele Fitto's Us with Italy. Meloni's party obtained 4.4% of the vote and more than three times the seats won in 2013.
  She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the single-member constituency of Latina with 41% of the vote. The centre-right alliance, in which the League emerged as the main political force, won a plurality of seats in the Chamber of Deputies; however, no political group or party won an outright majority, resulting in a hung parliament.
  In October 2019, her speech at a right-wing rally in Rome, where she spoke against same-sex parenting, went viral on Italian social media platforms and became the object of many parodies.
caption: Giorgia Meloni with Guido Crosetto during an FdI rally in 2014
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