As expected since the beginning of the year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced on Sunday, April 28, that she will be the lead candidate for her party, Fratelli D'Italia (FDI, national conservative right), in the European elections on June 8 and 9. In Abruzzo, from the stage of a rally for her party held in the town of Pescara, the head of the government put her popularity and the record of her early term in office in the balance for the next election.
The European elections will be the first nationwide electoral test faced by Meloni and her party since the legislative elections that saw her triumph in September 2022 with 26% of the vote, at the head of her far-right and right-wing alliance. According to the latest poll conducted by the YouTrend institute, the results of which were released on Friday, FDI is currently polling at 27.5% of voting intentions.
Along with Poland and Belgium, Italy is one of the few EU member states that does not plan to create national lists for the June ballot, allowing parties to present five regional lists that can all be led by the same candidate. Once elected, Meloni will relinquish her seat as a member of the European Parliament to serve her term as prime minister, having in the meantime personalized the election, even if it means betraying its spirit.
"I'm doing it because I want to ask Italians if they're satisfied with the work we're doing in Italy and what we're doing in Europe," she said at the end of her speech on Sunday, referring to her candidacy. As Italian voters can indicate their preferences on their ballot papers, the prime minister called on them to simply write her first name Giorgia, invoking her "popular roots," promising to always be "a person you can talk to without formality, without distance" and vowing that the palaces of power had not isolated her from the daily realities experienced by her fellow citizens.
'Italy is changing Europe'
President of FDI, Meloni is also head of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party, whose parliamentary group was joined in February by Eric Zemmour's Reconquête! movement, and which she intends to see play "a decisive role in changing European politics." Hoping to "multiply" her movement's representation in Strasbourg, the Italian prime minister announced her intention to lead a "revolution in European politics" thanks to a conservative group set to be strengthened by a new Italian contingent.
Her stated aim is to topple the current center-right, liberal and center-left majority and replace it with a new alliance of the right and far right in the European Parliament, of which her group would be the backbone, reproducing the "Italian model." Meloni's coalition partners, Lega Nord and Forza Italia, belong respectively to the sovereignist Identity and Democracy group, dominated by France's far-right Rassemblement National party, and to the European People's Party, representing the classical right.
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