In the Italian parliamentary election of September 25, 2022 voter turnout was 63.9% (-9% in comparison with 2018). The so-called post-fascist, far-right Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) of Giorgia Meloni (*1977) managed to win 26% of the electorate in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Together with the far-right Lega of Matteo Salvini with around 8.8% (-50% of their 2018 vote) and the center-right Forza Italia (FI) of the shady former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi with around 8%, they will control an absolute majority of seats both in the 400-seat Chamber of Deputies and the 200-seat Senate.
The now most likely oppositional Social-Democrats (PD) of Enrica Letta ended up about where they stood in 2018, that is with roughly 19% of the vote. The populist Five Star Movement (M5S) was one of the great losers of the 2022 election: with roughly 15.4%, they lost more than half of their electorate (-17.3%). For Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva it was the first election. They ended up with notable 7.8% but split the vote of the Social-Democrats. The left-wing and green AVS (Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra) won roughly 3.6% (-0.3%). The pro-European Più Europa won 2.8% (-0.4%). The former M5S leader and former foreign minister Luigi Di Maio, with his new formation Impegno Civico, did not go anywhere: he did not make it into parliament, his party alliance ended below 1%.
In the 2022 Italian parliamentary election, we have witnessed a major shift within the right. Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s new, uncontested leader and will most likely become the country’s next prime minister. Derived from the Latin word dux aka leader comes Mussolini’s name Il Duce. And he is THE reference for Meloni’s party.
In February 2018, Giorgia Meloni stood next to Faschist dictator Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter Rachele Mussolini at the city of Latina’s Piazza del Popolo. Meloni took Mussolini’s hand, raised it in the air and shouted to a large crowd of her Brothers of Italy party base: “We want to win back this symbolic place in the history of the Italian right.”
Benito Mussolini, in order to fight malaria south of Rome, drained the Pontine Marshes and, in 1932, created the city of Littoria, later renamed Latina. In other words, Meloni’s choice of this city to launch her 2018 electoral campaign was no coincidence.
In 1992, at age 15, Giorgia Meloni had joined the Youth Front (Fronte della Gioventù), the youth organization of the fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). She created the student group The Ancestor (Gli Antenati), which tried to fight a public education reform advocated by the then Christian Democrat (DC) education minister Rosa Russo Iervolina.
In 1996, by the time the MSI had morphed into the party Alleanza Nazionale, which distanced itself from Fascism, Meloni became the national leader of the party’s student association Azione Studentesca. However, in an 1996 interview, Meloni said: “Mussolini was a great politician, the greatest in the past 50 years” (Mussolini è stato un buon politico, il migliore degli ultimi 50 anni).
In 1998, Giorgia Meloni was elected councilor of the Province of Rome. In 2006, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of parliament. At this time, she started working as a journalist. In 2008, at 31, she became the youngest minister in the history of modern, united Italy, taking over the Youth Ministry in Berlusconi’s fourth cabinet from 2008 until 2011, when Berlusconi was forced out of office because markets had lost confidence in his government amidst the debt crisis.
If you’re looking for a brighter spot in her career, one could meention 2008. As a young Minister of Youth, she invited the Italian athletes to boycott the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympic Games in order to show opposition to CCP China’s Tibet policy (a precursor to the Uyghur and Hong Kong policies), but neither PM Berlusconi nor the athletes were ready to follow her advice.
In 2009, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale and other parties fusioned to become the People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà, PdL); the PdL was originally launched as an alliance of parties at the end of 2007 and a worked as a joint election list in 2008.
In December 2012, together with Ignazio La Russia, the party’s first leader, Giorgia Meloni was one of the co-founders of the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI), a party named after the first line of the Italian anthem. The FdI members positioned themselves on the far-right. In the 2013 general election, the party only won 2% of the vote but, thanks to a center-right alliance with notably Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the Brothers of Italy won 9 seats; Giorgia Meloni got reelected to the Chamber of Deputies.
In March 2014, Meloni was elected FdI leader. In the 2014 European Election, the party did not make it over the threshold of 4%. In the 2016 municipal election in Rome, Meloni ran for mayor and, with the support of the Lega sister party Us with Salvini, finished third with 20.6%, which was not enough to make it into the runoff which was won by Virginia Raggi (Five Star Mouvement, M5S) against Roberto Giachetti (center-left alliance).
In the 2018 Italian general election, FdI won only 4.4% of the vote but managed to massively increase their representation in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies: an increase of 25 seats to new 32 members in the lower chamber; in the Senate, the Brothers of Italy went from 0 to 18 seats.
Still, FdI remained a minor party. Giorgia Meloni’s meteoric rise to power in 2022 was made possible thanks to infighting within other parties. In the Democratic Party (PD), rivalries had let to a split beetween the former prime ministers Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi as well as others. Letta had once been pushed aside by Renzi, who later stumbled. Because of this internal party division and later split — with Renzi founding his own party —, the PD ended up in the 2022 election below the symbolic bar of 20%.
A fight within the populist Five Star Movement between former prime minister Giuseppe Conte and former party leader Luigi Di Maio let to a split, with Di Maio breaking away. Furthermore, prime minister Mario Draghi had been “parachuted” to become the new leader of the government. He was another technocrat without a popular mandate leading the country; most Italians have no confidence in their politicians. Giuseppe Conte never got over the fact that he had been ousted by Draghi.
In the 2022 snap election, FdI started as an outsider. They were the only notable party which had not been part of former ECB boss Mario Draghi’s national unity government. Whenever Italian politicans are in a mess, they call in a technocrat. In February 2021, it was Mario Draghi’s turn (German article). In January of that year, the small party Italia Viva of the former social-democratic (PD) prime minister Matteo Renzi had withdrawn its support for the cabinet of Giuseppe Conte. Mario Draghi stepped in and pushed through a few reforms. But already in July 2022, his position was substantially weakened. In the Senate, the Five Star Movement of former prime minister Giuseppe Conte withdrew its support for the Draghi government because of a rift over economic policies. The Italian Senate has 321 members. 192 were present on July 20, 2022. Only 133 participated in the vote. 95 Senators had confidence in Draghi, 38 had no confidence and nobody abstained. Formally, Draghi had the majority behind him. De facto, it was a vote of no confidence (German article). The end of Draghi’s national unity government was just a matter of time because also other parties were not too keen to keep the former ECB boss in power and were in favor of a snap election.
Back to Giorgia Meloni. She advocates anti-immigration, buy-Italian and anti-EU policies. Before Putin‘s escalation of the war against Ukraine in February 2022, she was in favor of better relations with Russia. At the same time, she is in favor of NATO and transatlantic relations. Like Marine Le Pen in France, after the escalation of the war in February 2022, she condemned Putin’s actions. Meloni went as far as to say that she stood firmly on the side of Ukraine.
However, her potential allies are spreading fake news and fairytales regarding Russia. In the past, Matteo Salvini has been spotted running around with a Putin T-shirt, in 2019 he called Putin the world’s greatest living statesman and, more recently, was in favor of an end to Russian sanctions. Meanwhile, Silvio Berlusconi said Putin was forced by the West to invade Ukraine.
In addition, the Italian newspaper La Stampa revealed on July 28, 2022 that a Russian embassy official had asked a foreign affairs advisor of Matteo Salvini in May if he intended to pull his ministers out of Draghi’s coalition government. The Italian daily La Repubblica wrote on July 29, 2022 that Berlusconi spoke to the Russian ambassador on the day he withdrew his support for Draghi. With such allies, it is not sure that Meloni and Italy will remain firmly on the side of Ukraine as was the case with Draghi and his government.
Like Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni has managed to soften her public image, running a positive, friendly social networks campaign. Meloni has repeatedly distanced herself from Mussolini’s racial laws, his decision to enter the war on the Axis side in 1940 as well as his authoritarian system. Nevertheless, until today, the Brothers of Italy use the Tricolour Flame (Fiamma Tricolore) in their party emblem, a symbol that was first used by Giorgio Almirante’s fascist MSI. In short, Giorgia Meloni stands for a kind of “soft-fascism”, which — to put it bluntly — sounds like fucking for virginity.
Giorgia Meloni tries to position the Brothers of Italy as a conservative party. She is a social conservative. At a rally of the ultra-right Vox party in Marbella, Spain, she positioned herself as a fighter against LGTB lobbies. She underlines her Christianity and wants to stop immigration, notably from Muslim countries. She has a soft-spot for the dubious Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. She is a nationalist and a populist who, despite contrary statements, has never fully cut ties with Fascism. As late as in 2020, she praised the MSI co-founder and notorious fascist and Nazi-collaborator Giorgio Almirante. In public Brothers of Italy gatherings, you can often spot some of her supporters making the Fascist salute (which was allegedly derived from the Roman salute, although there is no proof it existed in ancient times, and it later morphed into the Nazi salute in Germany).
Unfortunately, all of this is not just folklore. Italy is too big to fail and too big to be saved. Italy has a long history of debt problems and Italian public debt currently stands at over 150% of GDP, un unsustainable level. The spread between German and Italian 10-year bonds is around 240 basis points. In June, the inflation stood at 8.5%. The unemployment rate is roughly 8%, with a youth unemployment of around 24% in July 2022. On the positive side are exports, industrial production, consumption and GDP per capita on the rise. However, for some 30 years, Italy has largely been stagnating. More reforms are overdue. Under Mario Draghi, the ECB policy of easy money has made Italy’s debt burden manageable, but red lines were crossed and Italian governments never used the borrowed time to push through reforms. As prime minister, Mario Draghi did not do enough and did not have enough time to reform the country profoundly.
In addition, one must add that Meloni cannot count on paramilitary Blackshirts (Camicie Nere) like Mussolini. Italy has an anti-fascist constitution. Salvini is more outrageous than Meloni, like Zemmour in France in relation with Marine Le Pen. Previously, Salvini governed together with the populist Five Star Movement, itself a crazy populist mix of far-right, far-left and a not very serious comedian (Bebbe Grillo). And before that, Italy had several Berlusconi governments, the last one with Meloni as Youth and Sports minister. In short, populism is not a first for Italy.
A final note on Giorgia Meloni: she is not married, but she has a daughter with her partner Andrea Giambruno, a journalist working for Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset media empire, notably the TV shows Mattino 5 and Quinta Colonna. Giambruno has publicly stated to have voted more than once for the political left in Italy, but politics has not divided the couple (yet).
If you speak Italian, read Giorgia Meloni’s autobiographical book: Io sono Giorgia. Le mie radici, le mie idee. Italian edition, Rizzoli, 2021, 326 pages. Order the hardcover, download the Kindle edition or the audiobook from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
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Photo of Giorgia Meloni. Photograph extracted from a larger photo taken at CPAC 2022, showing also Hermann Tertsch and Victor Gonzalez. Photo Vox España via Wikimedia, public domain.
Article added on September 26, 2022 at 20:55 Italian time. Last update on September 27, 2022 at 02:40 Italian time.
