"Salvini, drunk; Biden, warmonger": Meloni's private chats reveal the intimacies of his party

RomePrivate conversations between members of Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, recorded in a recent book, have shaken the governing coalition, especially because of the mockery they dedicate to their partner and vice president, the leader of the League Matteo Salvini, the views on the foreign policy of the current Prime Minister Meloni and her praise of Mussolini.

Chat brothers: the secret story of Giorgia Meloni's party, written by journalist Giacomo Salvini, collects the WhatsApp chats that the leader of Brothers of Italy and some of the most important members of her party – most of them with positions in the current government – maintained between 2018 and 2024. The book reconstructs the years in which Meloni remained as leader of the opposition before the victory

The conversations contain criticism for everyone, but the harshest comments are those directed at Matteo Salvini, the current Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, with whom Meloni has always been in a battle to succeed Silvio Berlusconi. From the conversations published in the book, it is clear that Brothers of Italy aimed to win votes in the League and that he saw Salvini as an incoherent and unskilled politician, easy to ridicule in public.

Salvini, a recurring victim

In 2018, Salvini was vice-president and interior minister of a coalition government with the Five Star Movement, headed by Giuseppe Conte. His measures in this populist experiment, which lasted a year, caused harsh criticism from his current allies. At the time, they directly referred to the leader of the League as a "brat", in the words of the current undersecretary of the Presidency, Giovanbattista Fazzolari, one of Meloni's closest collaborators. The same prime minister also criticised the entry of the League into the government of Mario Draghi, who succeeded Conte, in 2021. "I do not understand Salvini's position, assuming that he himself understood it."

The criticism of the leader of the League does not end here. The current defense minister, Meloni's right-hand man and co-founder of his party, goes so far as to refer to Salvini as a "drunkard," and the current deputy education minister, Paola Frassinetti, criticizes Salvini's visit to Israel in 2018. "His banality about international politics is shameful," she writes.

In another passage from the book, Meloni tries to distance himself from Salvini after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and quickly sides with Kiev. "I wrote to Draghi to say so," she writes to her MPs, who consider the then US President Joe Biden to be "a warmonger" and "a sellout to the arms lobbies." In the chats, Meloni responds forcefully: "The Democrats' strategy is wrong, but now that the war has begun, it is not time for nuances. With the West and NATO, without conditions."

The mockery of Salvini goes until the end of 2024 and includes comments on the crisis suffered by Salvini due to the continuous delays of trains, which are his responsibility. "I am very satisfied. I thought we would go back to moving by mule, but there are still trains after two years," Meloni wrote in one of the chats.

In addition to Salvini, the book highlights other phrases and arguments that reveal the fascist sympathies of many members of the party, as is the case of the current Minister of European Affairs, Tommaso Foti, who refers to Benito Mussolini as "a giant."

Reactions to the book

Salvini played down the revelations, saying he was sure they "do not reflect the current thinking" of his government partners. However, he acknowledged that "it is not pleasant" to read such messages and confessed that what has bothered him most is being called "fat." "That did bother me because I have been trying to lose 20 grams for a long time without success," he said ironically.

Meloni described the book as "a forced and instrumental polemic" and assured that he will continue to work with Salvini "with loyalty and determination." Meanwhile, some members of his party downplayed his own comments, saying that no friendship would survive if private conversations were published out of context.