[WND News Center] In the wake of her country’s stunning rejection Sunday of the political left, Italy’s new prime minister – running on the belief that government’s job is to support family, church and civil society rather than control it – is being cast as the most “far-right prime minister since Mussolini.”
Benito Mussolini, in fact, was an avowed socialist who said he launched his National Fascist Party to “save socialism.” But in any case, Italian voters have chosen a new governing coalition that will be headed by Giorgia Meloni, the nation’s first female prime minister, and her Brothers of Italy party.
Meloni’s platform is summarized in a 2019 speech to the World Congress of Families that has gone viral on social media since her party’s victory Sunday.
She asked rhetorically why “the family” has become “an enemy” and “so frightening” to the left.
“Because it defines us. Because it is our identity,” she said, according to an English translation.
“Because everything that defines us is now an enemy, for those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves,” she continued.
“So they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity,” said Meloni.
“I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number, because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.”
See an excerpt from Meloni’s 2019 speech:
In her October 2019 speech, Meloni said the left has reacted with “fear” to her movement and the World Congress of Families.
Fifteen years ago, WND was at the World Congress of Families conference in Warsaw, Poland, which featured the warning of a “demographic winter” that posed an existential threat to Europe as the rejection of the “natural family” was leading to plunging birthrates and the consequent importation of millions of workers from countries with historic colonial ties who spurn the values of their host nations and refuse to assimilate.
Meloni concluded by reciting lines from a quote by G.K. Chesterton, the English writer and philosopher.
Chesterton wrote: “We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.”
Meloni finished with: “That time has arrived, ladies and gentlemen. We are ready. Thank you.”