Ravenna, Italy

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist.

Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues about which she hopes to be most persuasive are the ones that threaten Europe most: migrants arriving on boats, and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate.

On the first of these, the small boat migrants, Italy is in deep trouble. Already this year, nearly as many illegal migrants have arrived there by sea as arrived in Britain from France in the whole of 2022. Earlier this month, Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency. The talk is of up to 900,000 migrant sea arrivals from Tunisia if its crisis-torn dictatorship collapses, and a further 685,000 in Libya ready to cross. That would be a catastrophe, not just for Italy but for Europe and for Britain.

On the second, what Meloni calls the slow suicide of Europe, Italy is in even deeper trouble. Italy was once world-famous for the phrase ‘Mamma mia!’ and for the women who until the 1970s produced huge numbers of bambini even though they were poor. Now it has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at 1.2 births per woman. In 2022, it recorded a new historic low – only 392,600 births, down from 400,249 the previous year, the 14th consecutive yearly fall. Since 2014 Italy’s population has fallen by about 1.4 million. Demographers predict that it will collapse from 59 million to 47.7 million by 2070. Britain’s fertility at 1.6 is far healthier than Italy’s, but it’s not great either and still well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Nearly all economists agree that a declining population is fatal economically.

These two issues, boats and births, are inextricably intertwined. The liberal left in Italy, as everywhere, insists that we have not just an ethical duty to allow in migrants, legal or not, but an economic duty. We need them to pay our pensions, they say. But this, says Meloni, is nonsense – and she has a point.

Youth unemployment in Italy is nearly 25 per cent and one-third of Italians of working age do not work, the highest number in Europe. So the only work for illegal migrants is either slave labour at less than €5 an hour or crime. More than half of all thefts and robberies in Italy are committed by illegal migrants.

And this is where Meloni’s big idea comes in, though who knows what Sunak will make of it. Instead of importing a new population, she says, let’s reignite the traditional enthusiasm of Italian women to have babies. And her finance minister Giancarlo Giorgetti has just announced his intention to abolish tax for families that have two or more children, though the media has been more fixated on Meloni’s ‘homophobia’ because of government moves to limit same-sex couples from being registered as parents.

‘The best way to reduce the debt to GDP ratio cannot be to increase immigrant flows,’ Giorgetti says. ‘The strongest stimulus must be something else: to reduce the number of taxes to pay.’ The talk is of a €10,000 per year tax break per child until they finish university or start work.

The left in Italy is predictably horrified by this, and it’s fascinating that the two camps, left and right, have become polarised around two very different women: Elly Schlein, who has recently become the first woman to lead the post-communist Democratic Party (PD), Italy’s main opposition party, and Meloni.

These two women represent the two very different faces of modern feminism. Schlein is currently a lesbian and an eternally ‘woke’ feminist. The PD is the heir to Italy’s communist party, which was the largest in Europe outside the Soviet bloc. From 2011, it was in power more or less continuously until Meloni became prime minister last October.

Schlein, 37, was brought up in Switzerland and has three passports (Swiss, American and Italian). After school, she moved to Italy, where she completed a law degree at Bologna university in 2011 with a thesis on ‘the issue of over-representation of migrants in prisons and the rights of aliens in constitutional jurisprudence’. In 2008 and 2012 she worked in Chicago as a volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential election campaigns. She has never worked outside politics. In 2014 she was elected an MEP; in 2022, an MP. She left the PD for a period when the party’s politics moved to the centre. Her victory in February’s leadership elections, in which she ran as a ‘progressive, environmentalist and feminist’, means that the PD swings radically left – not in defence of workers like the old communist party but in defence of diversity and the planet. Schlein identifies as ‘a LGBTQI+ person’ and thinks, of course, that you can choose your sex.

During the rally in Rome that closed the PD’s election campaign last September, she bellowed from the stage: ‘Yes, I am a woman, I love another woman and I am not a mother. But not for this am I less of a woman.’

On the migrant crisis, she talks in meaningless platitudes. At a press conference last week, she said: ‘We need far-sighted policies that do not cause irregularities. We must work to look after who arrives in a legal way in this country, but the road is not to leave asylum seekers by the wayside.’ Last year she tweeted: ‘Solidarity is not a crime!’ after a migrant activist was acquitted of charges of aiding and abetting illegal immigrants. She has also accused the government of being ‘obsessed with the issue of immigration’ and has, naturally, blamed Meloni’s ‘right-wing rhetoric… which finds a new enemy every day’ for worsening the migrant crisis.

Meloni, 46 and Catholic, is a working mother who is fiercely patriotic and the definition of a reactionary feminist. She was brought up in a working-class area of Rome and, though she excelled at school, could not afford to go to university. She did a number of jobs such as barista, nanny, English teacher and market-stall holder, before becoming a full-time politician. In 1995, her estranged father, whom she had not seen since she was a child, was given a nine-year jail sentence in Menorca for drug-running.

As so often, it is the down-to-earth poor girl, Meloni, who is right-wing and pro-family, and the head-in-the-clouds posh girl, Schlein, who is left-wing and pro-migrant. Meloni is somewhere, while Schlein is anywhere. In a 2019 speech that brought about a huge rise in her public support, Meloni said: ‘Now they’re talking about getting rid of the words “father” and “mother” on documents. Because the family is an enemy, national identity is an enemy, sexual identity is an enemy… It’s the old groupthink game: they’ve got to get rid of everything that we are, because when we no longer have an identity and we no longer have any roots, we will be deprived of awareness and incapable of defending our rights.

‘That’s their game. They want us to be Parent 1, Parent 2, gender LGBT, Citizen X: code numbers. But we are not code numbers, we are people and we will defend our identity. I am Giorgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am Italian! I am Christian! You will not take that away from me! You will not take that away from me!’

Two DJs took final lines of Meloni’s speech and used it to create a dance track called ‘I Am Giorgia’ to ridicule her, but the song became a huge hit. Those -shouted words were music to the ears of millions of Italians – because they understand that if a society depends on mothers, and if we are no longer able to even say what a woman is, what hope does our civilisation have of survival?