Giorgia Meloni’s Legacy: Breaking Glass Ceilings and Closing Borders

When Georgia Meloni was appointed as Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022, article headlines varied. Some centered on her ground-breaking identity, as she joined only 12 other female leaders around the world, nine of which were their countries’ first. More often than not, however, news about her election was tainted by a far less celebratory fact: with collective memories of Mussolini permanently etched into Italian history books, Meloni would bring into power the same forces born from the dictator’s hands, heading the most right-wing Italian government since WWII. The significance of her rise to power is therefore two-fold. It not only signifies a break in Italy's political history as its first female leader, but also may reflect a broader pattern in which women in politics feel compelled to adopt more extreme positions—particularly on conservative platforms—to assert authority in traditionally male-dominated spheres.

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party: Neo-Fascist Roots

Meloni leads the Brothers of Italy party, commonly known to be of a neo-fascist origin. The Italian Social Movement (MSI) was founded in 1946 by a chief of staff in Benito Mussolini’s government. Following Italy’s allyship with the Nazis and subsequent defeat by the Allies in WWII, the MSI party roused fascist officials and sympathizers to its cause, particularly appealing to the “tens of thousands of ex-servicemen who had been on the ‘wrong side.’” By the 1990s, the MSI became the National Alliance, attempting to externally distance itself from fascism. Meloni was a member of the MSI’s youth branch, before going on to lead the youth branch of the National Alliance. In 2012, she co-founded the Brothers of Italy party—with which she leads Italy today as Prime Minister—keeping the MSI’s original tricolor flame as its unforgettable logo.

In the modern age, the neo-fascist roots of the Brothers of Italy translate to support for several controversially right-wing issues, ranging from anti-LGBTQ adoption policies and anti-feminist rhetoric to extremely harsh immigration laws. For women in predominantly conservative countries like Meloni, aligning with such extremist policies may function as a method of distancing themselves from traditional feminine stereotypes. This process is epitomized in countries such as Italy, where politics, alongside normalized cultural sexism, are deeply patriarchal. By championing controversial, hardline stances, Meloni carves a political identity that defies gender expectations, though at great societal costs. Her specific focus on illegal immigration is thought to explain her rise to power, and it now seems she is following through on her campaign promise to crack down on those arriving by boat.

Free Emigration to Restrictive Immigration

Italy has traditionally been a country of emigration, holding the record for largest voluntary emigration in recorded history: 13 million people between 1880 and 1915. This resettlement was mainly due to crises in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors following the country’s unification in 1861, which drastically reduced incomes for rural populations; the subsequent economic failure to create enough new jobs meant that emigration remained high in the following decades. In the long run, domestic frustration at the government’s failure to provide enough work for its own citizens may have fueled a deep resentment towards immigrating workers.

However, Italy is now considered an immigrant destination, with an estimated 6,387,000 foreign-born migrants living in Italy today, constituting approximately 10 percent of the entire population. This shift from emigration to immigration began in the post-war era, as people sought much-needed economic opportunities abroad whilst thousands of Italians returned home. This rapid switch is attributed to a range of factors, including increasing economic prosperity in Italy, a highly segmented, specialized labor market with openings for immigrant labor, relative ease of entry, and heightened motivations for emigration from origin countries. For example, a significant factor in migration to Italy was the collapse of communist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which brought waves of migrants and refugees from Albania and Yugoslavia. Albania in particular provides a stark image of the refugee crisis in this era, with thousands of fleeing Albanians packed onto crowded boats. Once Romania joined the European Union in 2006, Italy also experienced an influx of Romanian migrants.

Moreover, by virtue of its geography as a peninsula in the middle of the Mediterranean, Italy has become a logical destination for many migrants and refugees from Africa and Asia, including those intending to move through the country to elsewhere in Europe. These practical dynamics have been exacerbated by the destabilization of nearby countries in North Africa and the Middle East following the Arab Spring in 2011. From January to August 2011 alone, 52,000 North African migrants sailed to Italy, and as of January 2023, Moroccans are the largest non-EU group in the country. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by 2016, the migrant accommodation and processing systems for EU countries (most notably Italy, Greece, and the Balkans) were overwhelmed by asylum-seekers; however, these countries remained legally obligated to provide them with assistance.

Italy’s immigration policies have evolved over time. The first laws targeting immigration, dating to 1986, focused solely on acknowledging migrant rights—such as improving the status of foreign workers and their families—with little regard for larger economic migration flows or illegal immigration. These policies remained unchanged until 1998 when the country began distinguishing between humanitarian issues and a more securitized perspective on immigration, particularly when illegal or irregular. Since then, both left-leaning and right-leaning governments have remained fairly consistent in their policy aims to curb illegal immigration; laws up until 2017 introduced temporary detention of unauthorized migrants, made illegal immigration a felony, allowed for local security patrols, barred asylum-seekers from second appeals, and increased the number of detention centers.

However, one moment in 2017 seems to foreshadow Meloni’s current immigration strategy, which outsources processing responsibilities to other nations: a deal struck between Italy and Libya that equips and trains the Libyan coastguard to prevent would-be-refugees from leaving. For years, Italy has been criticized for this financial arrangement between the two countries, with advocacy groups claiming the Italian government is consequently complicit in the human rights abuses that occur when would-be-refugees are detained in Libya. As the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor states when describing the detention centers in Libya: “In these prisons, more akin to barbaric cages, individuals are severely exploited, abused, tortured, trafficked, and subjected to various other forms of violence and extortion.”

Meloni remains keenly aware that fear of migrants remains a powerful political issue both in Italy and across the European Union. As one of the few women in politics, Meloni may have felt compelled to wield politically salient and culturally emotional issues like immigration to solidify her legitimacy, reflecting a broader pattern in which women in leadership are expected to prove their toughness through extreme policies.

Many female leaders who have wielded true executive power in Europe have hailed from the right, and whilst political science explanations for this trend are currently limited, there are a few consistent hypotheses. Some argue that conservative women in power align more closely with the traditional conception of femininity accepted by the right, meaning their identity fundamentally encourages traditionalist family ideals. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, for instance, continued to cook dinner for her husband and other Cabinet members during her premiership, and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has seven children. Another explanation is that these conservative women tend to exemplify more masculine leadership styles or personal conduct, which can manifest in more extreme policy choices—an aggressive stance more often associated with the unapologetic hardness of male leadership.

Thus, after a campaign that relied on harsh anti-immigration discourse, Meloni extended the maximum time limit for people held in deportation detention centers to 18 months and directed the construction of new centers. Meloni has also fundamentally changed how charity ships, boats operated by humanitarian organizations, operate in the Mediterranean—captains now face significant fines if they carry out more than one rescue operation at a time.

More interestingly, Meloni was at the forefront of another seminal inter-country deal in 2023—but this time with Tunisia and involving EU partners. This EU-wide deal, signed in July 2023, pays Tunisia millions of euros to prevent migrant boats from leaving, with a significant focus on combating criminal gang activity involved in human smuggling. Meloni placed this agreement, alongside the 2017 Libyan deal, within a greater model for EU-North African relations, noting she took this step with “a level of pride but a level of gratitude.”

One year later, how are these policies felt today?

Deaths by Boat

If one looks only at the quantitative data on migrant arrivals, anti-immigrant Meloni enthusiasts should be overjoyed. After 2023, when the number of refugees arriving by boat starkly rose to twice as many as 2022, arrivals have decreased immensely in 2024. From reaching a high of 125,806 arrivals-by-sea in 2023, the latest 2024 data (December 11) show a 61 percent decrease to only about 54,000 arrivals.

Whilst migrant arrivals are declining, deaths by boat are not. Despite the wave of restrictive policies and agreements, thousands of people still needed to escape their countries of origin. Of the more than 212,000 refugees who attempted to sail from North Africa to Europe in 2023, at least 3,155 perished or disappeared. For example, 600 people drowned when a migrant ship capsized and sank off the coast of Greece in June 2023. However, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) notes that the actual death toll is much higher than official statistics: “the real number of dead and missing along these routes is believed to be higher as many incidents go unreported or undetected.” At least 2,273 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since the beginning of 2024, including at least 108 children.

In September 2024, twenty-one more migrants went missing at sea during their attempt to reach Italy. When rescued from a sinking boat by Italy’s Coast Guard roughly 10 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa, survivors recounted their perilous journey from Libya. The seven men, all identified as Syrian, described how they had left on a crowded boat with 28 people, including three children. After four days of treacherous weather, they were the only ones left.

The statisticalization of immigration issues can reduce real people to mere numbers. In the grand scheme of immigration policy discussion, 21 people can sound like a blip in the sea of arrivals, departures, and deaths. Twenty-one individual lives were lost because of active policy choices, indicative of a larger systemic failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable.

Looking to Albania

In line with her platform of outsourcing typically domestic responsibilities, Meloni also announced an agreement with Albania to build multiple detention centers on Albanian territory. The first center would serve an offloading purpose at a seaside port location. After being identified, refugees would be shipped off to another center inland. This plan seems to respond to bipartisan pressures to avoid building centers on Italian soil; conservatives do not want detained immigrants in the country, and progressives do not want immigrants in prison-like conditions.

Meloni hopes that up to 3,000 migrants could be held in the centers at any given time and that they would stay for about 28 days. However, this expectation is idealistic. According to the Asylum Information Database, the average processing time for asylum applications in Italy can vary from six to twelve months—28 days is far from an accurate estimate, and it appears more like a half-hearted nod to the empathy called for by the left. Notably, if a refugee is denied asylum, they are expelled back to the country from which they fled. Refugees granted asylum would be sent back to Albania from Italy.

Unlike Libya and Tunisia, this is not a paid deal. Meloni is relying on Albania’s debt to Italy dating back to the 1990s when the nation accepted thousands of Albanians who had “fled hell and hoped for better lives” in the midst of political and economic instability. Ironically, Albania is repaying Italy’s generosity in a refugee crisis by enabling long-term offshore detention. However, many critics identified the likely impracticality of such a plan coming to fruition. Immigration lawyers maintained that it was only a symbolic move and that from a purely numerical perspective, it would hardly stem illegal immigration. Moreover, the projected cost is extremely high for a non-economic agreement and is estimated to be around 160 million euros (US$175 million) annually for five years.

Despite these doubts and criticisms, Meloni has set this plan in motion. On October 14, 2024, 16 migrants were transported from Italy to one of the two new processing centers in Albania. Although human rights activists and left-wing politicians have called this move “dehumanizing” and “illegal,” European European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed support for this establishment of migrant “return hubs” in non-EU territories. She also referred to the project as an “out-of-box” solution to address the EU migrant crisis.

However, the plan immediately encountered hurdles. On October 18, a court in Rome ordered 12 of the 16 migrants to be sent back to Italy because their origin countries, Egypt and Bangladesh, were too unsafe; four of the migrants had already been sent back to Italy, deemed “too vulnerable for off-shore processing.” Citing a prior European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling, the court notably ruled that the European Union can only consider an origin country safe if the whole country is safe. In response, Meloni’s government tried to trim the list of designated safe countries. However, another transfer of migrants was blocked by judges, and operations at the centers were put on hold, awaiting an ECJ hearing in February 2025. Of the 24 asylum-seekers sent from Italy to Albania, none stayed in Albania.

Despite this legal pushback, Meloni has refused to back down, stating: "The centres for migrants in Albania will work, even if I have to spend every night there from now until the end of the (term of the) Italian government." On December 17, she called on the ECJ to overrule the blocks imposed by Italian courts, demanding clarification "on an issue which has been the subject of recent judicial measures with an ideological flavour." On December 23, Meloni vowed to open the “dormant” centers, despite the plan’s ongoing legal quagmire.

At one of the detention centers, Shëngjin, stationed Italian officers stay in a five-star hotel with a pool and spa: “We came here for work, we are the security for the migrant centre…but there are no migrants in the facilities, they have been transferred to Italy. It’s just us here. We are paid to act as tourists: breakfast, dinner, and sauna, all free—the Italian government pays.” The other detention center in Gjadër, Albania is being used by prison officers to house stray dogs.

This issue has the potential to undermine popular support for Meloni. To transport eight of the migrants to Albania cost the Italian government over 31,000 euros (US$32,319) per person. Opposition party (Italia Viva) leader and former prime minister Matteo Renzi criticized the plan as a failure: “Why should we throw away the Italians’ money like this? Why leave law enforcement on vacation in Albania when we need personnel in our cities?” He added: “The Albania migration’s deal is one of the biggest farces in our history. It cost one billion euros, and it is serving as [a] dog shelter.”

Meloni’s refusal to back down on the Italy-Albania Protocol may connect back to her unique identity as Italy’s first female leader. If she backs down, the right may view her as weak and soft on immigration; if she persists, she risks being viewed by the broader public as obstinate, impractical, and financially imprudent. This situation prompts the question: If Meloni were a man, would she really be stuck in the exact same position?

Breaking the Glass Ceiling  (At Whose Expense?)

As hardline and harmful as Meloni’s immigration policies are, there may be a more nuanced way of looking at her political extremism. As one of the few women in power, Meloni is positioned in a spotlight that is distinctly bright, disproportionately so compared to the powerful men who came before her. Though the tides may be slowly turning to a world in which women are equally likely to become country leaders, it is still an uphill battle. In a country like Italy—which is considered to have a particularly sexist and misogynistic culture—winning that uphill battle may involve appealing to strong existing political sentiments. Given the rise of right-wing populism and anti-immigration sentiments in the European Union since the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, it is not surprising that Meloni chose this issue to solidify her campaign. It is not so common to see moderate or left-wing women in power in Europe, and female leaders tend to hail from the right.

Therefore, perhaps Meloni’s extreme approach to the refugee crisis indicates a larger problem—a global problem. Women are less accepted as leaders than men, and when they do achieve positions of power, the loudest, most controversial voices are disproportionately heard. Meloni has broken the glass ceiling for Italy, but refugees and migrants are left to pick up the broken shards.