Leadership and Negative Campaign in the Audience Democracy: A Discourse Analysis of Giorgia Meloni and Enrico Letta’s Negative Strategies During the 2022 Italian Election

Giorgia Meloni, born in Rome on January 15, 1977, started her political engagement at 15. In 1996, at 19, she became the national coordinator of Azione Studentesca for Alleanza Nazionale. Elected councilor for the Province of Rome at 21 in 1998, she served until 2002. In 2004, she became president of Azione Giovani. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2006, she served as Vice President from 2006 to 2008. In 2008, she joined the People of Freedom (PdL) party. From May 2008 to November 2011, she served as Minister for Youth, becoming the youngest minister in Italy’s history at 31.
In December 2012, she co-founded “Fratelli d'Italia – Centrodestra nazionale.” Inspired by the Italian national anthem, the party emphasized national identity against the globalist vision attributed to Mario Monti’s government in 2011. Disagreements had led to the split from the PdL, involving Berlusconi’s unfulfilled promise of coalition elections. In March 2013, Fratelli d’Italia positioned itself in opposition and remained so until the 2022 elections. In 2013, Meloni was elected leader of FdI in the Chamber of Deputies. Her words about the new party became emblematic: “I think of all those whom we have defined as the exiles of Italian politics, those who have been expelled from the system just to avoid being normalized, those who have stopped believing and who would like to believe again. We want to provide a point of reference to all these people.”²⁰
On March 8, 2014, she was elected national president of Fratelli d’Italia at the Fiuggi congress.
In 2016, Giorgia Meloni contested the mayoral race in Rome, securing 20.6% of the votes. During the 2018 general elections, she significantly increased the party’s parliamentary representation, with 18 senators and 32 deputies. In September 2020, she achieved a unanimous election as the President of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR Party), the European political family representing over 40 European and Western parties. This marked her unique distinction as the only woman leading both a European political party and a national party.
Since the 2019 European elections, Fratelli d’Italia has steadily risen in elections from being a fringe party to a key player in Italian politics. Interestingly, this growth has run parallel to the decline of Matteo Salvini’s League, which started in 2019 after breaking ties with the Five Star Movement and the subsequent fall of the first Giuseppe Conte’s government.
The pandemic years revealed Salvini as more uncertain and conflicted, culminating in his highest level of contradiction when he joined a coalition led by former central banker Mario Draghi in February 2021 (Ventura, 2022a). Throughout the pandemic, Meloni remained outspoken in her criticism of the sitting government and the European Union. While she stayed true to her core issues, particularly immigration, she adopted a more measured approach compared to the League. Additionally, being in opposition without her usual right-wing allies allowed her to attract more attention from a fluctuating electorate disenchanted with the country’s situation and its leaders (Ventura, 2022a).

The success of the party must be connected to the figure of Giorgia Meloni and the construction of her leadership. Meloni portrays herself as a popular, decisive, and consistent figure, and for a segment of the electorate, she is also sufficiently reassuring. She quickly becomes a protagonist in significant talk shows on both public and private television, never hesitating to support her solid arguments and always unafraid of confrontation. Presenting herself as a fresh personality, her style and attitude captivate the audience and strongly impact the screen. (Ventura, 2022a).
Meloni grasped the opportunities offered by social networks and became the first Italian politician to open an account on Instagram. Through these platforms, she conveyed her messages and strengthened her leadership. Initially, she prioritized informative and institutional messages related to events, dedicating less space to her private life than other leaders.
With her autobiography published in 2021 titled “Io sono Giorgia, le mia radici, le mie idee” (“I am Giorgia, my roots, my ideas”), Meloni also begins to exploit the private dimension of her life, aligning herself with the canons of intimate politics. In the book, Meloni privileges the image of herself as a person in her relational dimension: daughter, mother, and companion. The contents of this book are amplified by traditional mass media, garnering significant attention in infotainment and entertainment shows, focusing primarily on the intimate and popular aspects of Meloni, overlooking the political messages present in the book (Ventura, 2022a).
The book reflects her Manichaean and moralistic vision, typically a populist one, which opposes the people (good) to the elites (evil). The former is composed of ordinary Italians, while the latter is a multifaceted universe of traitors to the people. This opposition is overlaid on the dichotomy of right, to which she belongs, and left, representing everyone else. The left is unequivocally portrayed as a unified and compact body, an enemy of the people. Meloni does not hesitate to describe it as guided by ideological delirium, adhering to violence justified as long as it is used against right-wing organizations, and above all, a left in total continuity with Soviet and communist totalitarianism. In short, the absolute evil. In her book, she also offers a fascinating historical reinterpretation regarding the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Meloni argues that democracy in Europe did not return in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, as commonly told, but only in 1989 when the Soviet bloc was dissolved, deceptively downplaying the significance of liberation from Nazism and Fascism (Ventura, 2021).
In June 2022, Giorgia Meloni was the favored leader within the right-wing coalition and among other parties participating in the elections. Capitalizing on this advantage, she shaped her electoral campaign around the slogan “Ready to lift Italy,” framing a narrative that portrayed her victory as inevitable and imminent.
Furthermore, the electoral campaign featured an underlying strategy: to ideologically normalize a party leader labeled as far-rightist by electoral competitors (Giordano & Antonucci, 2023). The personalized dimension of the FdI leader was incorporated into the communication campaign by emphasizing a specific feminine identity (mother, sister, daughter). It aligns with the model outlined by Campus (et al., 2021) for traditional female leadership, which tends to highlight the dimension of motherhood and the “going personal” approach to self- representation. The critical elements of this strategy included pragmatism in addressing political issues, simplifying electoral matters, and promoting a distinctive feminine identity (Giordano & Antonucci, 2023).



_{20 Giorgia Meloni, “Il mio intervento di apertura all’insediamento di - Officina per l’Italia -”, October, 9, 2013, https://www.giorgiameloni.it/2013/10/09/il-mio-intervento-di-apertura-allinsediamento-di-officina-per-litalia/}