"The hostility of the left is like the North Star for me, confirming that I am on the right path": In her autobiography, Giorgia Meloni explains why she is right-wing

Giorgia Meloni loves to speak her mind. Especially when it comes to politics, and when the Italian Prime Minister discusses the fundamental differences between right and left in her autobiography "I am Giorgia," which is published in German today, Friday, she gets down to business. After all, the core of her identity is at stake.

"The left doesn't like the right, that's pretty obvious," is how she begins her political creed, which can be read in advance in the "Welt" newspaper , and continues: "By the way, I don't like the left either, and I make no secret of it." Meloni also immediately provides the reason for her dislike, which she has actually never given any reason to doubt.

Meloni's dislike of the left is not least due to the fact that the left constantly tries to explain to the right what right means. Journalists, politicians, and "more or less respected intellectuals" spend a lot of time on this, Meloni says. But in doing so, they ultimately only emphasize how they believe the right should be: not as it is, but as the left would like it to be.

The left is thus claiming moral superiority for Meloni – a claim for which it has, however, failed to provide any evidence. On the other hand, the left is pursuing a political calculation with this tactic. They want a right that no longer receives any votes: "If the right likes the left, then of course it no longer likes those on the right."

This means that the right must stick to its principles: "If the left strokes your hair and congratulates you on your presentable positions, that means you've done something wrong." Meloni therefore sees only one strategy: The right must not try to please the left. In the Prime Minister's clear language: "For me, their hostility is like the North Star, confirming that we're on the right track."

The course the right must pursue is directed against everything the left stands for, according to Meloni: a politics that pursues utopias and only wants to see in the world what fits its own beliefs. "Leftist thinking, yesterday and today, is an ideology in whose name one is prepared to justify any form of oppression and violence," she writes. From this "ideological incitement," Meloni draws a direct line to religious fundamentalism. And ends up with Islam. That is, with Islamist fanaticism.

For those who believe they are fulfilling a noble mission and obeying the will of Allah, it is right to remove all those who hinder them from fulfilling their task, writes Meloni: "That is what terrorists do when they shoot defenseless people, and that is what the dictatorship of the one-size-fits-all mentality does when it denies its political opponents their fundamental civil rights and the right to freedom of expression."

The parallels are now somewhat too narrow. It's a very long way from the fight of the woke left to terrorism. And the fact that the left has something in common with Islamist fanatics is that both want "a world without borders and differences," as Meloni writes, is worth discussing. Things become clearer again when Meloni explains what she considers the core of right-wing politics.

"The right puts the human being at the center," she writes. The Italian left, on the other hand, follows a "mysterious, dehumanizing anthropology." She doesn't say exactly what she means by this. This makes it all the clearer what it means to put the human being at the center: to understand them as beings organically embedded in the three spheres of family, nation, and Western culture. Essential to this, she says, is the principle of freedom.

Meloni's credo sounds like it was cribbed from a textbook of political liberalism. Self-responsibility, a sense of community, and skepticism toward the state are the key words she cites as the principles of her politics. This is probably where Meloni's aversion to "a world without distinctions" comes from. Italy's identity, she writes, is embodied in the thousands of bell towers throughout the country, whose chimes combine to form a single unit: "For me, 'I am' means belonging to all of these things at once."

Giorgia Meloni: I am Giorgia. My roots, my ideas. Europa-Verlag, Munich 2025. 384 pp., Fr. 41.90.