Italy’s hard right nears power, but it isn’t Mussolini

There’s an election in Italy Sunday, almost exactly 100 years after Benito Mussolini’s “blackshirts” marched on Rome and brought the first fascist dictator to power.

Giorgia Meloni, the hard- right populist politician who is likely to win that election, rejects any comparison with that ugly past. The party she leads, Brothers of Italy, has some nostalgic neo- fascists, but she compares it to Britain’s post- Brexit Conservative Party or the U. S. Republican Party as rebranded by former president Donald Trump.

She shares her hostility to the European Union with Britain’s Conservatives, her hatred of immigrants, gays and Muslims with the U. S. Republicans, and her truculent nationalism with both. She is militantly Christian and dabbles in Great Replacement paranoia. And like them, she wages a non- stop culture war.

“There is no middle ground possible,” Meloni told a rally last June. “Today, the secular left and radical Islam are menacing our roots . . . Either say yes, or say no. Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobbies. Yes to the universality of the Cross, no to Islamist violence. Yes to secure borders, no to mass immigration.”

The brutal simplicity of these slogans works as well with lower- income, poorly educated Italians as it does with the same sort of people in heartland America or red wall Britain. The goal is to distract them from the fact their populist heroes really govern in favour of the rich ( which explains why those leaders must be shameless liars).

Meloni lies too, but when you compare her to populist peers such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump, she doesn’t seem that bad.

The brutal simplicity of these slogans works as well with lower- income, poorly educated Italians . . .

Like them, she has no permanent political principles, just cynical techniques for attracting distressed and desperate voters. But she shifted toward the centre to build her party up from four per cent of the vote in 2018 to a predicted 25 per cent this time.

She now claims to support the European Union and NATO. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she avoided the pro- Putin stance common on the radical right. With the Italian economy teetering on the brink of recession, she is promising good behaviour to Brussels.

So not a complete disaster. Continued access to the EU’S COVID recovery fund, which has promised Italy 191 billion euros during the next six years, should keep Meloni from straying too far from orthodox economics.

Brothers of Italy will probably be the largest party after this election, but with only 25 to 30 per cent of the vote, Meloni will not be able to govern alone. The problem is the two parties with which she will need to make a coalition, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Lega, are rivals of her party.

Both men will be trying to claw back the popular support Brothers of Italy has stolen from them, so there will be tears before bedtime.

In normal times, their chosen tactic would be to undermine Meloni’s party by pushing for harsher policies on immigration and bigger conflicts with the EU. With the Russian energy blockade promising a hard time for Europe economically this winter, however, the obvious strategy for far- right parties is to advocate a softer line on Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Both men have been Putin fanboys in the past. Now Salvini softpedals his admiration for Putin, but demands an end to the sanctions against Russia because they are allegedly hurting Italy more than Russia.

Meloni can’t afford to play that game, and the expected post- election coalition of far- right parties is unlikely to last long. She has sufficiently detoxified herself that she could lead a coalition with other parties instead, and that may well happen.

Post- fascist parties in power in Italy are still bad news, but the damage to the European Union and NATO can probably be contained.