He gets out three quarters of an hour late from a white Fiat 500, the same car with which Giorgia Meloni arrived at the Quirinale on the day of the oath. Journalists and operators turn on the cameras, three hotel guests returning from the monumental swimming pool of the Popes wrap themselves in their white bathrobes and nail their slippers to the asphalt: “But who is she, the Prime Minister?”. It’s the sister, beauty. And the five bodyguards in black uniforms who escort her into the Spa hotel were hired by the party. It is the day of the debut, in the city (not surprisingly) of the 40.1% of Fratelli d’Italia in the 2022 elections. On the display behind the stage it is written “Italy changes Europe”. The press to which the third row has been reserved wants to know only one thing. Arianna folds, or doubles? In the European elections, the “battle of battles”, will only the more famous younger sister run, or will both be on the list?
She is the one who shouts the news, leaving the room after the speech has just finished: “I’m not running.” Yet here she is, Arianna Meloni, head of the political secretariat of Fratelli d’Italia and, since yesterday, electoral stand-in for the tenant of Palazzo Chigi: «I don’t like being in the spotlight, you can also do politics behind the scenes. There has been a lot of talk about my presence here. Has Arianna changed her profile? Do you want to be a great leader? No, no, I have no personal ambitions, I’m not here to replace the Prime Minister or to be the head of the party.”
If she arrived in Viterbo on a sunny afternoon with the north wind, with the smell of sulfur from the spa, a gift box of thermal creams and the clients of the luxury hotel queuing for mud baths, catheterizations and irrigations, it is to promise a candidate for the European Parliament to the territory and give the community of “militants and good people” a bath of pure Melonian pride. “Governing the nation is the toughest challenge. In many years no one will ask us how many stars we had on our chest, but whether we have changed things. It will be the story of the government that changed Italy.” He reviews the “promised and achieved objectives” in a year and a half of the executive, from the stop to income to the tax reform and, given the judicial investigations that are throwing politics into crisis, asks the FdI ruling class for “seriousness and responsibility”. He swears that power will not change the sisters of Italy and tries to catch phrases: “We are not a utopia.”
Announced by the group leader at the city council Laura Allegrini as the sister of the “leader maxima at European level and beyond, esteemed by all the greatest presidents in the world”, Arianna Meloni reads a written text for fifteen minutes. If you close your eyes it’s like hearing the prime minister speak and everyone in the room plays to find the differences. The timbre is the same, the Roman accent too, the voice with which she reconstructs the climb from Garbatella to Palazzo Chigi (“Beautiful and ugly moments”), however, is slow, the tone serious and almost modest, to the point that she herself jokes about her shyness in front of cameras and microphones. The one from her Tg3 falls from her lectern and her noise forces her to stop: «It’s not my fault! Oh God… ‘ndo’ is that?”. She sets off again and goes straight to the destination to dismantle that “superstate, monster, leviathan” that is the EU when she wants to decide “the diameter of the clams”. In short, the Union of Giorgia&Arianna must be “free from the delusions of green ideology”.
Everyone standing, ovation. The Honorable Mauro Rotelli, the candidate for mayor of Civitavecchia Massimiliano Grasso, the group leader in the regional council Daniele Sabbatini and also the councilor with the blue jacket, who turns and whispers to his neighbor: «Giorgia is something else… .TO”. But in the meantime Arianna is on the pitch and will be holding other rallies. The second yesterday evening in Tarquinia, where she campaigned for the candidate to lead the Agricultural University supported by her husband, the minister and brother-in-law Francesco Lollobrigida.
