At the election party on Monday morning at around 2:30 a.m., Giorgia Meloni found the right words after her impressive election victory.
The 45-year-old Roman woman, who lives with her partner and their six-year-old daughter, will forgive the fact that she celebrated herself and her right-wing conservative party, Brothers of Italy, on a “night of pride and redemption, of dreams and memories”.
Matthias Rub
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.
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After all, she managed the feat of making her party, founded just ten years ago, by far the strongest political force in the country and increasing its share of the vote from four percent in the 2018 election to over 25 percent.
More important was her statement that she and her followers were "not at the end, but at the beginning" and that she would rule "for all Italians", that she would "promote what unites and not what divides".
Political roots in neo-fascism
This won't be easy for her.
A sizeable section of the left sees Meloni as a sinister threat to democracy, an enemy of women's and minority rights that has never severed its political roots in post-war neo-fascism.
Before Sunday's elections, caricatures and photomontages of Meloni circulated, showing her hanging upside down from a rope: a reference to the end of dictator Benito Mussolini, whose body was found in this way at a petrol station in Milan after being executed by partisans in April 1945 Piazzale Loreto had been put on display.
This hate may not be representative, but it is there.
Meloni claims that people believe her political molt from neo-fascist, which she admittedly was at the age of 15, to national-conservative democrat, as well as the former communists' transformation into democratic socialists.
During the election campaign, she repeatedly demonstrated her fearless pugnacity from her days as an activist with biting polemics against the salon socialists and their claim to a monopoly on permissible opinions.
That must be over when she soon – as the first woman in the history of the republic – moves into the Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of Italian prime ministers.
The admission that the idea of leading the EU's third-largest economy often robbed her of her sleep can be dismissed as a calculated attitude or simply believed.
Meloni has been in politics for 30 years, but has only three years' experience as Minister for Youth and Sport.
She will need all her intelligence and immense diligence, including her political instincts, to master the Herculean (or Amazonian?) task that lies ahead of her.