Brothers of Italy

Italy is about to have its first female leader and the American left is furious. Giorgia Meloni grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Rome and was raised by a single mother, after her father, a communist, fled to the Canary Islands and was later convicted of drug trafficking in Mallorca. She wrote in her autobiography that her mother planned to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her but changed her mind at the last minute. Meloni worked as a nanny, a waitress, and a bartender before getting into politics, but she’s no AOC. Meloni, 45, is the leader of the right-wing populist Brothers of Italy party, which recently won Italy’s general election with 26 percent of the vote. She’s widely expected to be named Italy’s first female prime minister.

One is a blonde, photogenic woman who grew out of a youthful infatuation with Benito Mussolini to become the first female prime minister of Italy. The other is anything but photogenic, a grizzled veteran of more than three decades of political combat, who began his career as a student activist and became a respectable center-right statesman, only to reinvent himself as a populist firebrand. But if you were to judge Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by the frequency with which they appear together in media coverage, usually with adjectives like “far-right” and “extreme” attached, you might assume that the two conservative heads-of-state are basically indistinguishable. The European Union and its assorted sympathizers certainly seem to think so.