Photo: AP pressThe Prime Minister of Italy, Đorđa Meloni, a former neo-fascist, is coming to Belgrade on August 5. He will sit at the table with Aleksandar Vučić, who himself has political roots in radical nationalism
The Prime Minister of Italy and the President of Serbia will meet on August 5 in Belgrade. If their biographies were scratched a decade back, the announcement would be significantly different. Djordja Meloni was then the president of the party that rose from the ashes Mussolini's fascism, and Aleksandar Vučić is the third man of the Serbian Radical Party, which was in the Balkans during the wars of the nineties expelled Croats from Serbia.
Meloni is the leader of the "Brothers of Italy" party, and in recent years has categorically denied the fascist label.
Her new party was founded in 2012 and has its roots in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was directly descended from the fascists. The party still carries the logo of the post-war ultra-right parties – the tricolor flame, which is perceived as the fire burning on Mussolini's grave.
"Giorgia Meloni doesn't want to get rid of that symbol because it's an identity she can't escape; it's her youth," Gianluca Passarelli, professor of political science at Rome's Sapienza University, told the British BBC in 2022.
"Her party is not fascist. Fascism means seizing power and destroying the system. She will not do that, and she could not. But there are wings in her party associated with the neo-fascist movement. She has always moved somewhere in between."
Giorgia was born in Rome, and she was only one year old when her father Francesco left the family. As her father was a leftist and her mother was a rightist, the public has long speculated whether her political path was partly motivated by a desire to take revenge on her absent father.
At the age of 15, she joined the Youth Front, a wing of the neo-fascist MSI, and then became the successor president of this movement.
The youngest ministers
Both Meloni and Vučić have in common that they were one of the youngest ministers in the history of the governments of their respective countries.
In 2008, at the age of 31, Giorgio Meloni became the youngest minister in Italian history, when Silvio Berlusconi assigned him the Ministry of Youth and Sports.
In 1998, at only 28 years old, Aleksandar Vučić took over the Ministry of Information in the Government of Mirko Marjanović. His ministry will be remembered for the restrictive Law on Public Information. It prescribed draconian punishments, so some newsrooms, those that were against the regime of Slobodan Milošević, were shut down.
Retreating from the past: He in 2008, she in 2012.
Meloni founded her own party in 2012 and in this way partially separated herself from the fascist history. Vučić and Tomislav Nikolić made a departure from the radicals under the leadership of the Chetnik duke Vojislav Šešelj four years earlier.
Giorgia Meloni is openly against expanding the rights of members of the LGBT community in Italy, and her slogan is: "Da natural families, ne "LGBT community lobby".
In 2023, Aleksandar Vučić said that, while he is the president, he will not sign the law on same-sex marriage, nor the law that, as he said, will create "some third gender, where you are not a man or a woman."
Extended support
The Italian newspaper "Il Giornale" states that the main topics of the meeting in Belgrade will be the process of Serbia's accession to the European Union, but also the issue of cooperation with the NATO alliance, in which the Italian Prime Minister "sees a strategic opportunity for the stability of the region".
Meloni, the leader of the ruling party in Italy, she last visited Belgrade in 2023.
Then she said that it is important for Rome that the Western Balkans join the European family.
"President Vučić knows that he can count on our support, in order to speed up the process of bringing the countries of the Western Balkans closer to the EU," Melonieva said.
She also pointed out that Serbia has a strategic importance for Italy and stated that in the time when there are major crises, space is opened for energy transition and artificial intelligence and other fields in which the two countries can cooperate.
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