The fascists return in Italy
The victory of Brothers of Italy led by Giorgia Meloni in the Italian general election is the latest shot in the arm for nationalist right-wing parties in Europe. The consequences could be calamitous.
AFTER NEARLY A CENTURY, THE FASCISTS have returned to power in Italy. On October 28, 1922, the fascists had marched to the capital Rome, forcing the king to send a telegram to Benito Mussolini inviting him to form the government. Mussolini ruled with an iron hand, tolerating no dissent for the next two decades. Many Italians, as is evident from the results of the latest election, have a lingering fondness for that era in which Italy was considered a major European power, with several colonies in the African continent.
In the election held on September 25, the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy (FDI) party together with its two far
GIORGIA MELONI holds up a placard saying “Thank you Italy” at her party’s electoral headquarters in Rome on September 26.
right coalition partners decisively won the election. The FDI is a direct descendant of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) that was formed after the Second World War, under the auspices of the occupying Allied forces led by the US. Washington had allowed the defeated fascist party of Mussolini to regroup almost immediately after the end of the war in 1945.
Many of Mussolini’s close collaborators were let off by
the US, which at the time was pre-occupied with the rising popularity of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the most powerful communist party to emerge in western Europe after the war. Western intelligence agencies actively enlisted the help of the fascists and the Italian mafia to keep the PCI out. The US had employed similar tactics in post-war Japan and other countries where left-wing parties were strong. In Japan, war criminals and collaborators were pardoned and made leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party.
TURN OF FORTUNE
In this year’s Italian general election, a large number of voters chose to abstain, disillusioned with the wheeling and dealing of the major political parties in the last couple of years and the lack of a genuine progressive alternative. Usually, voter participation is very high in Italian elections, but this time only around 63 per cent of the electorate bothered to vote as against over 70 per cent last time. The turnout was especially low in the south where centrist opposition parties, including the populist Five Star Movement party, still have considerable influence.
The Brothers of Italy led by Giorgia Meloni got over 26 per cent of the votes polled. The vote share of the main opposition party, the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), collapsed to a historic low of 19 per cent. The Five Star Movement bagged around 16 per cent of the votes. The victorious right-wing coalition got 46 per cent of the votes all around. Meloni’s two right-wing coalition partners are the Forza Italia led by the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the League Party led by
another extreme right-winger, Matteo Salvini. Together, the coalition partners control both the upper and lower houses of the legislature.
It has been a dramatic turn of fortune for Meloni, who will be the first female Prime Minister of Italy. In the general election held four years ago, her party had won only a paltry 4 per cent of the votes cast. The leading right-wing figure in that election was Salvini. But he made the mistake of entering into a coalition with the Five Star Movement and later became part of a broader coalition under the leadership of the PD. That government consisting of disparate parties was very unpopular with the Italian public. The pandemic had devastated the economy; inflation and rising unemployment were other major factors.
Meloni refused to join the coalition government and emerged as the main voice of the extreme right as well as the opposition in Italian politics. While Salvini’s League Party, formerly known as the Northern League, got a dismal 9 per cent of the votes this time, Forza Italia fared even worse, with around 8 per cent. But their support is crucial for Meloni to maintain her parliamentary majority. A leading figure in the PD, Debora Serracchiani, said that though the right wing has a majority in parliament today, it does not have the support of the majority in the country.
The Italian President plays a big role in the selection of the Prime Minister. The current President, Sergio Mattarella, had a crucial role in the formation of a centrist coalition government led by the technocrat Mario Draghi after the collapse of the government led by the Five Star Movement and the League. This time he has no option but to invite Meloni, and she is expected to be sworn in sometime in late October.
When Meloni was still on the fringes of Italian politics, she made several racist comments and disparaged immigrants. She believes in the “great replacement theory”, a conspiracy theory propagated by the European Right that claims that the white population is being slowly but steadily replaced by non-christian immigrants from Africa and other parts of the world.
She has mellowed only slightly. In a speech she delivered earlier in the year at a conference hosted by Vox, another far-right party which may soon come to power in Spain, Meloni spelt out her world view: “Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration. No to international finance, no to Brussels.” She had previously described European Union officials as agents of “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance”.
But when the likelihood of her becoming Prime Minister increased in recent months, Meloni changed tack. In August, she released a message in English, French and Spanish, saying that the Brothers of Italy party is more similar to the Conservative Party in the UK, the Republican
Party in the US, and the Likud in Israel. But the party’s emblem is the same as that of the MSI, the successor of the fascist party. They have not bothered to change it in the last 70 years. Mussolini’s granddaughter, Rachele Mussolini, is a rising star in Meloni’s party.
AMERICAN CONCERNS
The Biden administration has serious concerns about the new government. Senior administration officials feel that there is a danger of the West’s unity on Ukraine fraying as the harsh European winter sets in. Meloni, along with Salvini and Berlusconi, had made laudatory statements on Russia and President Putin not too long ago. Meloni has a special relationship with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, another leader who is close to Putin. The Hungarian Prime Minister’s political adviser, Balazs Orban, was quick to congratulate Italy’s right-wing parties on their electoral victory. “We need more than ever friends who share a common vision and approach to meet Europe’s challenges,” he said.
In the US, the Trump wing of the Republican Party has been the most effusive in praise of the victory of fascist forces in Italy. Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, said that Italy “deserves strong conservative leadership”. The Trump administration’s policies on immigration and the banning of travellers from Muslim countries are much admired in right-wing circles in Europe. The Trump administration is, in fact, a role model for the putative authoritarian leaders raising their heads in Europe.
There will be pressure on the new government to reassess its policies vis-a-vis Russia as the economic situation in Italy deteriorates. Berlusconi recently defended Russia’s decision to launch its “special operations” in Ukraine, while Salvini questioned Western sanctions on Russia. Italians, like their compatriots in other parts of western Europe, are likely to face a very cold winter as a result of Moscow cutting off energy supplies to most EU nations. Energy prices started soaring soon after the conflict in Ukraine started. In the coming months they are expected to soar even further.
In recent statements, Meloni has sworn fealty to the EU but until last year, she was advocating the withdrawal of Italy from the bloc to “regain” Italian sovereignty. Berlusconi has threatened to walk away from the coalition if attempts are made to distance the country from the EU. In 2014 Meloni had said that the time had come for Italy to leave the Eurozone; now she is only demanding that Brussels renegotiate the terms of the 20 billion euro loan the EU extended to Italy in the wake of the pandemic. The Italian economy is already the second most indebted in the Eurozone.
Meloni stressed that she will continue supporting the government in Ukraine and the Us-led moves to defeat Russia on the battlefield. The new right-wing government, according to most Italian and European commentators, is unlikely to re-calibrate relations with the EU at this juncture. Ursula von der Leyen, the EU chief, had issued a warning before Italians went to the polls stating that Brussels had “the tools” to deal with Italy if it went in the wrong direction.
It will be immigrants and the LGBTQIA+ community that will be targeted in the short term by the new government. Meloni has said that she wants to impose a naval blockade on Libya to stop refugees from entering European waters.
In her first speech after the election results were out, Meloni said she would rule on behalf of all Italians, irrespective of their political affiliations. But far-right rulers all over the world, once in power, tend to ride roughshod over press freedom, an independent judiciary, and other checks and balances. Within the EU, this trend has been evident in countries like Poland and Hungary.
EUROPEAN TREND
The election results are the latest shot in the arm for the resurgent nationalist right-wing parties in Europe, which are gearing up to take power in other key European nations. In Sweden, an upstart extreme rightwing party, the Sweden Democrats, came second in the polls held in August. They are lending outside support to the right-wing government which has displaced the Social Democrats. Twenty-two per cent of first-time voters aged between 18 and 21 cast their votes for the Sweden Democrats, a party with clearly established neo-nazi links. Sweden, which produced leaders like Olof Palme and is the birth country of Greta Thunberg, is on the verge of becoming like Hungary and Poland, where immigrants are unwelcome and Islam-bashing is popular.
In neighbouring Finland, the ultra-right is surging. In the last general election, the nationalist True Finns party running on an anti-immigration platform, won 20 per cent of the votes. Both Sweden and Finland till recently were not part of NATO. After the Ukraine conflict started, both countries formally joined NATO.
In the Czech Republic, which is also heading for the polls, a right-wing party with ideology similar to that of the ruling Fidesz party in Hungary, is gaining ground. As in other European countries, inflation and the high cost of living have sent many Czechs below the poverty line and into the arms of populist right-wing parties. As in countries like France and Italy, it is the working class and the poor who once used to vote for the left, who have shifted to the right. Earlier this year, the French far right under the leadership of Marine Le Pen put up its most impressive show so far, getting more than 40 per cent of the votes in the final round of the presidential election. In the election to the national assembly her party emerged as the second biggest opposition bloc.
In Spain, the Vox has made tremendous gains and is now the third biggest party in the country. Many observers feel that it is only a matter of time before the party emerges as the biggest in Spain. The Alternative for Germany (AFD), another party with neo-nazi links, has set the political agenda in Germany on key issues like immigration. It has been consistently polling around 10 per cent of the votes in national elections since 2017 when it first entered the Bundestag.
When Meloni was still on the fringes of Italian politics, she made several racist comments and disparaged immigrants.
The Ukrainian government is dominated by the far right. The Azov regiment doing much of the fighting has not shied away from displaying its Nazi emblems. Leading members of the Azov brigade were welcomed recently by US Congressmen and Biden administration officials during an official visit to the US. The extreme right is expected to do well in Bulgaria, another EU member state, where election is scheduled to be held in October.
Fascist and xenophobic governments are acceptable to the Western elite as long as they are anti-russia and anti-china. A similar attitude was prevalent a century ago. Leading politicians, including Winston Churchill, initially expressed admiration for the fascists. The consequences of treating fascists and racists with kid gloves have proved to be calamitous for humanity in the past. History could repeat itself. m