Meet Italy’s new pro-life, pro-family prime minister–who terrifies the EU elites

By Jonathon Van Maren

In his characteristically enthusiastic fashion, Rod Dreher is calling the new conservative Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni “The Woman of Europe’s Future.” The EU, of course, is concerned—European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyden threatened prior to the election that if the Italians voted for the wrong candidate, the EU could take steps similar to those they did in Poland and Hungary—that is, sanctions to discipline out-of-line members for socially conservative policies. The EU wants the sexual revolution to be mandatory wherever her shadow falls.

Meanwhile, it isn’t difficult to see why conservatives are enthusiastic about Meloni. When is the last time you heard something like this in a political speech?

It's not hard to see why the press despises Giorgia Meloni, who will likely be Italy's first female prime minister after winning the Italian elections. pic.twitter.com/dqRlfJZbAR

— Jonathon Van Maren (@JVanMaren) September 26, 2022

Read that again: “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death.” She ends by quoting G.K. Chesterton: “Chesterton wrote more than a century ago: ‘Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.’ That time has arrived. We are ready. Thank you.” So it has—and so she is.

The response of the mainstream press has, predictably, been to call her “far-right” and even “fascist”—which both the New York Times and The Atlantic managed to do. These people really do not seem to understand that they are actually mainstreaming far-right ideology and denuding the term “fascist” of all power by insisting that what it really means is believing that men cannot become women and the essential role of the natural family; they do not realize that their denial of reality has created the conditions for conservative success in the first place.

This is no exaggeration. I was listening to Canada’s state broadcaster last night while driving (masochistic, I know), and the news host was breathlessly interviewing a university professor from Rome who warned that Meloni was going to double down on far-right policies—and specifically cited her advocacy of the “natural family”—his phrase—as evidence of this. If reality is far-right and the miserable dystopia that the sexual revolutionaries are creating is “normal,” I’ll take “far-right,” thank you very much. So, as it turns out, will Italian voters.

The progressive version of “norms” is the gender-bending, abortions-for-all madness that places boundaries on nothing but free speech and freedom of religion; and it is those “norms” that they accuse politicians such as Meloni of violating. As I noted in an essay for The European Conservative last year, this is essentially political gaslighting: those that are running to preserve millennia-old civilizational norms are accused of being disruptors for objecting to new “norms” that are fifteen minutes old and demand that we trash everything we once knew about biology, human nature, and community.

Many American conservatives (excepting the libertarians, who think that terms like “family” and “community” are politically synonymous with “Communism”) have been enthused about Meloni’s rise. I wonder, though, if anybody notices the difference between Giorgia Meloni and Sarah Palin; between the French politician Marion Marechal (whom I interviewed at length for The European Conservative) and, say, MAGA “populists” such as the risible Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Read what Marechal has to say about the place of the natural family; listen to Meloni’s defence of a better polity. This sort of depth and seriousness is totally lacking in their trollish American counterparts.

Anyhow, if you’d like to know what Meloni stands for in her own words rather than imbibing the hysteria of media figures and progressives who believe that opposing the destruction of human life in the womb or decrying sex changes for children is “extreme,” listen to her English speech at the National Conservatism conference in Rome two years ago: