revealed a controversial indirect economic link through a network of real estate companies in which the ex-wife Anna Paratore, mother of Giorgia Meloni, was a partner at various times.

[10][11] Meloni was raised in the working-class district of Garbatella in Rome, moving there after the more affluent home she had first lived in as an infant with her parents was destroyed in a house fire a few years after her father left.

[1] During this time, she founded the student coordination Gli Antenati ('The Ancestors'), which took part in the protest against the public education reform promoted by minister Rosa Russo Iervolino.

[29] In August 2008, she invited Italian athletes to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in disagreement with the Chinese policy implemented towards Tibet; this statement was criticised by Berlusconi, as well as the foreign affairs minister Franco Frattini.

After the cancellation of the primaries, she teamed up with fellow politicians Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto to set out an anti-Monti policy, asking for renewal within the party and being also critical of the leadership of Berlusconi.

[33][34] 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.

In May 2016, she promised to name a street after Giorgio Almirante if elected, causing controversy among the local Jewish community and the anti-fascist association ANPI (Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia).

[68][69] In October 2021, Meloni signed the Madrid Charter,[70] a 2020 document that describes left-wing groups as enemies of Ibero-America involved in a "criminal project" that are "under the umbrella of the Cuban regime".

[98][99] The PD, head of the centre-left coalition, conceded defeat shortly after the exit polls,[100] and Hungary's Orbán, Poland's Mateusz Morawiecki, United Kingdom's Liz Truss, and Marine Le Pen, former leader of National Rally (RN) in France, congratulated Meloni.

On the following day, delegates from FdI, the League, FI, and Civics of Italy–Us Moderates–MAIE, announced to Mattarella they had reached an agreement to form a coalition government with Meloni as Prime Minister.

[131] She thanked several Italian women including Tina Anselmi, Samantha Cristoforetti, Grazia Deledda, Oriana Fallaci, Nilde Iotti, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Maria Montessori, who she said, "with the boards of their own examples, built the ladder that today allows me to climb and break the heavy glass ceiling placed over our heads".

[134][135] One of the first measures implemented by the government regarded COVID-19 and concerned with the complete removal of the COVID-19 vaccination certificate, known in Italy as the Green Pass; moreover, non-vaccinated doctors were re-integrated into service.

[149] On 1 March 2023, the new leader of the Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, as well as More Europe and Greens and Left Alliance asked for the resignation of interior minister Matteo Piantedosi.

[155][156] On 23 May, Italy's Council of Ministers officially announced the approval of the first law decree in response to the emergency, an estimated €2 billion recovery package that was aimed to public and private businesses, schools, universities, museums and farm workers, among other categories.

"[160] After weeks of tension within the government and between majority and opposition parties,[161][162][163] on 27 June 2023 the Meloni cabinet officially appointed army corps general Francesco Paolo Figliuolo as Extraordinary Commissioner for the Reconstruction.

[169] On 3 November, Meloni met European Union (EU) leaders such as Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel, Paolo Gentiloni, Roberta Metsola, and other politicians in Brussels.

On 16 July, Prime Minister Meloni, along with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, travelled to Tunis in order to sign an agreement with President Kais Saied regarding the strengthening of the economic partnership between Europe and Tunisia, the European diplomatic support for the disbursement of the loan from IMF and, especially, the fight against irregular migration flows.

[215] In a July 2022 interview with Nicholas Farrell of The Spectator, Meloni rejected descriptions of her politics as far right, calling it a smear campaign by her opponents and cited British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton as one of her influences.

[1] In June 2024, Meloni criticised the EU ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035 that would "condemn [Europe] to new strategic dependencies, such as China's electric [vehicles]".

[252] She is also opposed to surrogacy, which is pejoratively known in Italian as utero in affitto ('uterus renting'),[253][254] and she has pushed in Parliament for a law to make it a "universal crime"; her efforts have been endorsed by the Catholic Church and by Pope Francis himself.

[277] Meloni complained about the danger of ethnic substitution also in her 2019 book on the Nigerian mafia,[299][300] co-written with Alessandro Meluzzi [it], anti-vaccine psychiatrist, founder of the "Anti-Islamisation Party" and at the time primate of a schismatic Italian Orthodox Church.

[306] Meloni declared that she wrote to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen "to ask her to come with me to Lampedusa to personally realize the gravity of the situation we face, and to immediately accelerate the implementation of the agreement with Tunisia by transferring the agreed resources".

[308][309] She was critical of Italian relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stating that these countries "systematically and deliberately spread fundamentalist theories that are the main causes of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism".

[311] However, upon taking office, Meloni reversed her position, with her government stating it was "keen to maintain the excellent relationship with Saudi Arabia" yet still calling for a "firm reaction" against Qatar to which several Italians were accused of involvement in Qatargate.

[312] In 2021, Meloni stated her party "denounced the authoritarian, Islamist direction Erdogan's Turkey has taken for years and asked the EU to withdraw Ankara's status as a candidate country",[313] but upon taking office, pursued closer ties with the Turkish government, due to Italy's interests in Libya, cooperation in stopping illegal immigration, shared nationalist values and common disagreement with French foreign policy.

[316] Following the Asia Bibi blasphemy case, Meloni criticised what she called the "silence of the West" and advocated a stronger stance by the international community against human rights violations in Pakistan.

During World War II, he was a wartime collaborator as a civil minister of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state,[362] as well as editor-in-chief of the antisemitic and racist magazine La Difesa della Razza, which published the "Manifesto of Race" in 1938.

[375] On 25 October 2022, on the occasion of the vote of confidence of the Parliament at the government, Meloni in her speech before the deputies said: "Freedom and democracy are the distinctive elements of contemporary European civilization in which I have always recognized myself.

[383][384] On 20 October 2023, Meloni announced her split with Giambruno, following his off-air statements transmitted by the television program Striscia la notizia that were described as "sexist" and "chauvinist", which included propositioning a female colleague for a threesome.

"[393] In November 2023, Meloni inaugurated a major exhibition on J. R. R. Tolkien at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome to mark the 50th anniversary of the author's death.