*BREAKING NEWS* Giorgia Meloni's speech at the “Margaret Thatcher Awards”.

Well, thank you very much and good evening. My thanks to President Procaccini and everybody at the New Direction Foundation for having honoured me with this award, dedicated to a woman who left her mark on the 20th century and went down in history for her courageous ideas but moreover for the freedom with which she expressed those ideas without fear of going against the tide when simply it was important to do it for the people and for the country. So I don't think I deserve it, honestly speaking. There's lots of work to be done and there is lots to be still demonstrated to be at that level. We are simply trying to do our best. We consider ourselves, I consider myself mainly a soldier and I consider myself a soldier of an idea. So thank you for this wonderful movie presentation. Thank you for this award. Brought to my mind the words of a great thinker who every conservative holds dear and I want to thank the wife for being here with us, Sir Roger Scruton who said, conservatism is the instinct to hold on what we love, to protect it from degradation and violence, to build our lives around it. Being a conservative means defending what you love, defending what made who you are. However, you know better than me in these days, in this era, to do so has become something, let's say, revolutionary because the world we are living in pushes us in the opposite direction. It seems like they want us to be a void that can be filled with whatsoever, a perfect consumer ready to buy anything simply for we love nothing no more. Conservatism is the antidote to a civilization that no longer believes in itself, a civilization that demolishes the beautiful and poor things it has created in its history. But the truth is that, as always, if you destroy what you are, if you destroy where you come from, you will be nothing better. You will simply be more weaker. Well, you simply will be weaker, more fearful because at the end of the day, only strong identities don't fear the others. So also when it is about, they tell us we have to hide our identity for instead we are not open to the others. It's exactly the opposite. You fear the others, you fear other identities if you don't know who you are. For if you know who you are, if you are proud of who you are, you fear nothing and nobody. And you can learn from the others. And you can respect the others. But again, the word respect comes from the Latin word, word, which means to look deeply. You cannot respect the others if you don't try to understand them. But you cannot ask for respect if you don't defend who you are and try to show it. And this is the work that we try to do every day. Not for we want to look back our shoulders, but for we want to go ahead. For simply when you learn the lessons of the past, then you can jump into the future. And this is the work that every conservative does. And that's why I want to thank you for being part of this family, for fighting in a side on which we know is not easy to fight, but simply for we don't do what we do for it is easy or it is difficult. We do what we do for it is just or not. And we know we are on the right side of history. So thank you very much. Thank you all.