You (rightly) thought with Rishi Sunak that Liz Truss and her followers in the UK had presented a plan which could be described as «voodoo economics»? Then you should be reminded that, during their election campaign, Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusoni had promised tax cuts, higher pensions and a lower retirement age in Italy.
With a public debt of over 150% of GDP, Italy is too big to fail and too big to be saved. Therefore, we should wish that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her cabinet will succeed. However, if the Meloni-Salvini-Berlusconi government is a success, it will take away reservations against the far-right elsewhere, for instance in France with Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National.
Italy still has to present its 2023 budget to Brussels. In order to receive the next tranche of the coronavirus pandemic recovery fund, Rome has to meet a list of targets by the end of 2022, a first test for Meloni’s far-right cabinet in Italy. Populists measures will meet a strong resistance from the European Union and its other member states.
The pro-EU Antonio Tajani (*1953) of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia serves as Giorgia Meloni’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Tajani is a former European Commissioner and former president of the European Parliament. Among the controversies surrounding him are a speech made in Trieste in 2019, which was interpreted as revisionist and irredentist by many in Croatia and Slovenia, as well as a radio interview the same year about “the good things Mussolini did”. Tajani told Zanzara radio: “Mussolini? Until he declared war against the whole world following Hitler, until he promoted [anti-Jewish] racial laws , apart from the dramatic event of Matteotti [a socialist politician killed by the fascist regime in 1924], he did positive things to realize infrastructures in our country.” Tajani added: “I’m not a fascist, I have never been a fascist and I don’t share his political thought, but if we must be honest, he built roads, bridges, buildings, sports facilities… He had remade many parts of our Italy.” This is pretty much in line with what Giorgia Meloni has said herself about the Duce.
On foreign affairs, Giorgia Meloni had made clear before forming her cabinet: “Italy is fully, and with its head held high, part of Europe and the Atlantic Alliance.” She added: “Anyone who does not agree with this cornerstone will not be able to be part of the government, even at the cost of not forming a government.” This was a warning to her potential partners Salvini and Berlusconi.
The other Deputy Prime Minister is the eurosceptic, populist, far-right Lega leader Matteo Salvini (*1973), who also serves as Minister of Sustainable Infrastructure and Mobility; Salvini would have liked to become Minister of the Interior but, because of his previous legal issues in that job, Giorgia Meloni made clear he was unacceptable in that role. Salvini had made anti-Roma statements, he was accused of kidnapping rescued migrants. Furthermore, Salvini has strong anti-immigration views, he is a protectionist and a fan of Putin, e.g. making a selfie in Moscow wearing a T-shirt showing Putin’s face, declaring that Putin is the world’s greatest living statesman and asking for an end to Russian sanctions.
At the end of the year, Italy will probably enter a recession, after its economy shrank 0.2% in the third quarter of 2022. Therefore, the choice of Giancarlo Giorgetti (*1966) as Minister of Economy and Finance is crucial. Giorgetti is a member of Salvini’s Lega. In the Draghi government, he served as Minister of Economic Development. According to the Corriere della Sera, in his youth, Giancarlo Giorgetti was close to the Youth Front, the youth organization of the fascist MSI. However, in the 1990s, he joined the far-right Lega Lombarda and Lega Nord of Umberto Bossi. From 2001 until 2006, Giancarlo Giorgetti was the chairman of the Budget Committee in the Camera dei Deputati. Since 2016 he has served as one of the Lega’s deputy leaders.
In total, Giorgia Meloni’s cabinet includes 24 minister plus the Secretary of the Council of Ministers, the independent Alfredo Mantovano. Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s first female prime minister. But she did not care too much about female representation. Only 6 ministers are women. 9 ministers and the PM are members of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, 5 are members of Berlusconi’s Forza Italy, 5 are members of Salvini’s Lega, and 5 are independents. The Minister of the Interior is the independent Matteo Piantedosi (*1963), said to be close to the Lega. The Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio (*1947), is already 75 and a member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Meloni would have liked him to run for president in 2022, but he refused, citing his lack of political experience, and President Sergio Mattarella was reelected.
On average, Italian governments have just lasted roughly 13 months. It remains to be seen what this cabinet can accomplish. Italy is a low growth, high tax, high unemployment and even higher youth-unemployment country with a public debt of 150% of GDP, which is only sustainable thanks to low interest rates, which go back to then ECB-president Mario Draghi’s “Whatever it takes” speech and policy, started during the financial crisis in 2012.
Back to 2022: before Giorgia Meloni presented the 68th cabinet since the proclamation of the Italian Republic in 1948, the first led by a woman, she pushed trough Ignazio La Russa (*1947) as President of the Senate. La Russa is a member of Meloni’s so-called post-fascist party Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI) and an admirer of Mussolini. He collects fascist memorabilia, including a statue, medals, photos and paintings, which he is not hiding, but on the contrary openly displaying in his house (documented on film). At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, he suggested to use the fascist salute instead of the handshake (Per evitare contagi usate il saluto romano). Like Giorgia Meloni, Ignazio La Russa is a former leading figure of the fascist Youth Front — at Meloni’s time already renamed Youth Action (Azione Giovani) —, the youth organization of the MSI respectively Alleanza Nazionale. Ignazio La Russa is an anti-immigration politician who has been fighting for lower taxes for decades; high taxes are indeed a problem in Italy.
The following day, in the Chamber of Deputies, Giorgia Meloni pushed through the ultra-catholic, ultra-conservative Lorenzo Fontana (*1980) of Matteo Salvini’s Leage (Lega) as President of the Camera dei Deputati. Fontana stands for anti-gay (“there are no gay families”), anti-abortion, anti-immigration and — like Salvini and Berlusconi — pro-Putin policies. At one time, Lorenzo Fontana had established contacts with neo-nazi groups in his hometown Verona and, in 2016, had had kind words for Greece’s neo-fascist, neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.
The party headquarters of the far-right Brothers of Italy is located at Rome’s Via della Scrofa 39. This is the address where the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a predecessor organization to Meloni’s FdI, had had its headquarters. The MSI was led by the fascist Giorgio Almirante, a follower of Benito Mussolini until the bitter end and of his ideas beyond the Duce’s execution.
The support for democracy is tied to economic success, stability, the promise of a decent future. In Italy, especially regarding young people, democratic leaders have largely failed in the past decades. Therefore, the populist temptations with Berlusconi, later the Five Star Movement and the Lega, and now with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Salvini’s Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia do not come as a surprise.
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.
Article about Italy’s long history of debt problems.
Beauty items at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
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 October 23, 2022 at 00:50 Italian time. Last update at 01:28.
