Italy Votes / Episode #3
Back to the future. Italy prepares for a return to the combattimento. The West shivers in anticipation.
Continuing our pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world this year, the focus today is on Italy. Now as campaigning moves through the final days before Sunday’s balloting, the outcome is becoming ever more certain, with enormous, potentially catastrophic stakes for Italy, Europe, and democracy.
Move over Mussolini, here comes Giorgia Meloni.
Though political polling was legally frozen on September 9, some 16 days before voters cast their ballots across Italy, there has been no indication that anything has changed very much. Italy is preparing for quite a sharp tack to starboard. The leader of the neo-Fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party is holding a commanding lead. Giorgia Meloni, is prepared to become the first declared fascist prime minister since Benito Mussolini assumed the same role, quickly dubbing himself simply Il Duce—the leader.
And leading is what Meloni is fully preparing to do, in directions that are already becoming painfully frightening—tying herself closely to forces in Europe and Italy that are challenging entrenched, historically-democratic values across the continent. Nowhere else in today’s European Union is there a leader as closely aligned with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who himself appears unapologetically prepared to ditch values held by the other 26 members of the European Union and cozy up to Vladimir Putin.
When the European Parliament adopted a report charging the Orban government was undermining the EU’s democratic values, turning into a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” and sought to withhold $7.5 billion of EU funding from Hungary, Meloni shot back that “Orban has won elections several times even by a wide margin.” And when the EU, operating under the mandate that unanimity is required, sought to ask the UN Human Rights Council for a special rapporteur on Russian human right violations, Hungary vetoed the idea. Instead, the other 26 were forced to make their request one-by-one. Just a foretaste of what may be in store with a second Putin stalking horse inside the EU tent.
Meloni’s embrace of a form of modern fascism and accompanying European counter-values has long and deep roots. At age 15, undeterred, indeed attracted by the slogans “kill the fascists” scrawled across walls in her working class Garbatella district of Rome, she knocked on the door of MSI, the avowedly fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, joined the youth wing, and her career was launched. It was a toxic formative atmosphere where the young Meloni flourished. “I try to be more calm, then they take pictures of me with swollen veins,” Meloni screamed to a Sicilian campaign rally last month. “I’m from Garbatella, and every now and then the soul comes out.” As long as 25 years ago, Meloni was telling a French television network that Mussolini was “a good politician,” and her strident speaking style with her deeply resonant voice could have been cut from an Il Duce campaign stop.
While Meloni is most likely to take over the prime minister’s office, her party, though leading in the polls, registers barely 25%, less even than right-wing populist Marine Le Pen in France, so Italy’s Brotherhood is unlikely to accumulate an outright majority in parliament. Still, she’s acquired some quite like-minded allies and coalition partners. Bring on Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi. At 85, Berlusconi, former prime minister, media tycoon, accused variously through the years of bribery and sex offenses, is a perpetual fixture of Italian politics with his Forza Italia party. Matteo Salvini, 49, with his Lega party, has made several passes through various governments, and sadly makes Meloni appear positively AOC-ish. (My reference to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes.) The West, he fervently believes, should rethink sanctions against Russia since they’re hurting Italy as much if not more than Russia—a theme that with Italy’s fiscal travails hardly falls on deaf ears. The big question: what happens when these EU sanctions on Russia come up for their mandatory six-month renewal and need a unanimous vote of the 27 nations.
Indeed, if there was any question of a pan-European hard-right fraternity pulling for this coalition, one has only to listen to their French counterpart Le Pen—standard-bearer of the Rassemblement National, second place finisher to President Emmanuel Macron in April and a leading power in France’s National Assembly. “Good luck,” she proclaimed, “still and always with you.”
And Monday evening, heading into the home stretch of her campaign, Meloni only upped the ante, suggesting in an interview that her (expected) victory will only pave the way for other clones in other European nations. Next up she believes? Vox in Spain. She tried to make her comments more palatable for the mainstream audience at home in Italy who she hopes will catapult her into the role of prime minister, observing, “We are not against Europe at all, but for a more efficient Europe." Efficiency, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Still, the rest of Europe is already beginning to make plans for such a future. German chancellor Olaf Scholz, meeting with Enrico Letta, Meloni’s principal center-left opponent, went so far as to describe Meloni’s Brotherhood as “post-Fascist.” Meetings in Brussels this week are already surfacing the idea of lifting the EU’s unanimity rule for issues involving foreign and national security affairs. How to achieve that goal, however, is still very much in question. Will such a change require the approval of its most immediate target—Hungary?
Needless to say, Meloni does have some powerful opponents lining up against her. On the far left is former prime minister Giuseppe Conte, leader of the 5-Star Movement who charges Meloni and Salvini are “unfit to govern Italy.” Letta, another former prime minister, whose center-left Democratic Party is the top-polling of the moderate bloc, just 3% behind the Brotherhood, called Orban “a danger to the whole of Europe,” leaving unsaid what that means for Meloni—and Italy. The problem is that Letta’s party has no clear coalition with the kind of support that could lead to a centrist government. Since 2018, 5-Star has lost two-thirds of its following, while the Brotherhood has surged six-fold and the Democrats have largely stagnated.
This will be the 70th government since Mussolini was deposed and the current republic established in 1946. Many consider that the 69th was in fact the best, or at least the most promising. Led by Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank and one of the continent’s leading economic thinkers, he was the consummate technocrat—just the individual Italy needed to shepherd the country out of the deep economic hole the covid pandemic and years of profligate spending had left it. The problem is that Italians and especially the politicians they choose to lead them have only rarely embraced with any fervor the concept that the first thing to do when trapped in a hole is to stop digging. So, despite the efforts by Draghi that can only be called Herculean (son of the Roman god Jupiter and the mortal Alcmene, and known for his strength and daring) efforts, Italy still has the second highest debt-to-GDP burden in Europe.
With the European Central Bank following the lead of the U.S. Federal Reserve and beginning to ramp up interest rates across the EU to tame inflation, that burden is going to bite in debt-burdened Italy with frightening ferocity. The path Draghi seemed to be hewing as a path toward salvation promised little more than added pain and suffering. Grumbling had begun to mount. By July, Draghi had enough, his coalition failing to provide the 100% support he’d demanded. Twice offering his resignation, it was finally accepted, only with the greatest reluctance, by Italy’s Christian leftist president Sergio Mattarella, who certainly knew what could be in store for his country that he led in name only.
Somehow, Meloni has managed to keep largely in pectore her most extreme plans for Italy’s future under her reign. But occasionally she’s telegraphed some frightening hints. “The fun is over,” Meloni told a recent campaign rally in Milan. “Italy will start to defend its national interests.” Her protectionist instincts, preventing international buyouts of trademark Italian brands, are all in sharp contrast to the single market without borders that is the hallmark of the EU. Slowing the structural reforms Draghi had just begun to implement suggests Italy could lose eligibility for the post-pandemic recovery funds the country desperately needs. Tabling or torpedoing these plans is one reason ratings agency Moody’s slashed Italy’s credit rating to “negative” from “stable,” which will make future borrowing that much more expensive just as Meloni and company arrive in power.
And then there’s the time Meloni took on Peppa Pig.
It seems that Peppa, the cartoon pig beloved by generations of children around the world, especially in Italy, recently introduced a friend named Penny, a little polar bear who happens to have same-sex parents. Penny announces proudly: “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor, and one mummy cooks spaghetti.” The Turin-based daily La Stampa, observed last week, “the anthropomorphic pig loved by children: Giorgia Meloni's party does not share the choice of the authors of the popular cartoon to have embraced a couple [consisting] of two lesbian mothers.” Not surprisingly, Salvini is very much on board as well: “We will be a bit old-fashioned, but mum and dad are called 'mum and dad'. Mom is the most beautiful word. And from here I send a greeting to my mom and dad, who are a bit 'elderly', but they are following us from home and next Sunday with the electoral card they will be the first to vote.”
And we’ll be up late Sunday night and early on Monday at Andelman Unleashed to tell you who’s won and what it all means.
Extraordinary coverage. Thank you. I have been writing about k-12 education for kids with disabilities in 13 countries. Italy is one. I fear for these children, although Italy ihas been strongly pro mainstream schools and education rights
Alas, Draghi never won an election, no?