Italy
just elected a far-right leader. Is this the
beginning of a
resurgence of fascism, or the beginning of
the end?
The
telegenic star of Europe’s far right,
Giorgia Meloni, released a
video last August that was designed to
dispel all the fears that
Europeans were voicing about the potential
“return of fascism” to
Italy. Meloni’s short speech was a triumph
of misdirection.
Meloni’s
party, the Brothers of Italy, had previously
not been much of a
player in Italian politics, having failed to
receive more than 5
percent of the vote in any national
election. But in 2019, it managed
to capture 6.4 percent in European
Parliament elections and, the
following year, achieved even better results
in local elections in
regions such as Marche and Tuscany. After
that, the party seemed
almost unstoppable.
As
I
wrote
here
in December 2021:
The
party that’s only recently surged to the top
of the polls, Brothers
of Italy, has its roots in a group started
in the wake of World War
II by diehard supporters of Fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini. It
promotes an anti-vaxx “Italy first” agenda
and, if elections were
held today, would likely create a ruling
coalition with the alt-right
Lega Party and right-wing populist Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forward
Italy.
So,
for the last year, the same Europeans who
quaked at the prospect of
Marine Le Pen becoming president in France
have been bracing for the
impact of her sister-in-arms winning in the
September elections in
Italy. And indeed, that worst-case scenario
has come to pass, with
the Brothers of Italy coming out on top last
month with 26 percent of
the vote. A coalition government with Lega
and Forward Italy is in
the offing.
One
of
the reasons for this electoral
victory was surely Meloni’s
strategic pivot to the center. In
her video message, a six-minute
speech
released on August 10, she
demonstrated her cosmopolitan
credentials
by moving seamlessly from French to
English to Spanish. The content
was consistently, almost defiantly,
center-right rather than far
right. Meloni refuted as “absolutely
absurd” the notion that she
and her party posed any danger to
Italy or threatened the stability
of the EU. “A great Italy can better
contribute to creating a great
Europe,” she proclaimed.
Meloni
further insisted that her party stood
“unambiguously” against
Nazism and anti-Semitism and embraced
democracy without reservation.
She unequivocally condemned Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine and backed
NATO. She compared her party to the British
Tories, the Israeli
Likud, and the U.S. Republican Party. It is
a measure of the
rightward drift of global politics that
references meant to suggest a
more accommodating stance— to the Tories
(which pulled the UK out
of the EU), the Likud (ever more extremist
under Benjamin Netanyahu),
and the Republicans (currently deranged by
Trumpism)—are not
reassuring in the least.
Indeed,
Italy is about to embark on its own
roller-coaster MAGA ride—let’s
call it a mega-MIGA—that threatens not only
to upend Italy but the
EU as well.
Euroskepticism
Reimagined?
In
the
run-up to the election, Meloni
sounded some of the traditional
themes of the Italian far right,
namely opposition to immigration,
support for “family values,” and a deep
mistrust
of redistributive economic policies.
As Europe’s third largest
economy, Italy has been doing pretty
well by conventional measures,
with substantial post-COVID-shutdown
growth
last year of 6.5 percent and
projected 3.3 percent expansion this
year. But like much of Europe, Italy
faces spiking
inflation
as well as an unemployment rate
that, even on its recent downward
trajectory, remains higher than the
EU average. High debt, low birth
rates, and a sclerotic state
bureaucracy have all put Italy in a
difficult bind.
Fortunately,
however, Italy is part of the European
Union.
Ordinarily
a
right-wing populist of Meloni’s ilk
would be expected to be a
Euroskeptic who takes easy potshots
at Brussels while asserting
Italy’s superiority. And indeed,
that’s certainly how she has
tacked in the past with broadsides
against the euro and an
effort to remove all
references
to the EU from the Italian
constitution. “The fun is over” for
the EU, she promised
shortly before the elections.
At
the
same time, however, she and her
party have abandoned any thought
of exiting the EU or even abandoning
the euro zone. Meloni’s not
stupid. She knows who butters
Italy’s bread. The country currently
stays afloat thanks to a significant
influx of COVID stimulus funds
from Brussels. Hannah Roberts and
Jacopo Barigazzi write
in Politico:
Italy
needs
cash from Brussels. The new
government has until December
to
meet 55 milestones and targets
set by the European Commission
in
order to secure the next
tranche of funding from the
EU’s €750
billion post-pandemic economic
recovery plan.
Even
Meloni’s fellow right-wing fanatic, Silvio
Berlusconi, called an
earlier Brothers of Italy proposal to
renegotiate the EU deal
“illogical and dangerous,” prompting Meloni
to backtrack.
Here’s
the rub: Brothers of Italy are still a
minority force in European
politics and Meloni can count on only a few
sympathetic governments.
Viktor Orban in Hungary of course supports a
whittling away of
Europower in Brussels. The Polish Law and
Justice Party largely sides
with Meloni’s alt-right messaging (though
PiS might be out of
office come next fall if the Polish
liberal-left can stay unified).
Then
there’s
Sweden. In last month’s elections,
however, the
deceptively named Democratic Party
came in second, dislodging the
Social Democratic government. A
right-wing coalition will likely
take
power in the coming weeks. Like the
Brothers of Italy, Sweden’s
Democratic Party has fascist roots
and has taken pains to distance
itself from its past. But changing
the party icon from a flaming
torch to a gentle flower has not
fooled anyone in Sweden, not even
the other members of the winning
right-wing coalition who probably
won’t
even invite the Democrats
to participate in the new
government.
Meloni’s
tempered Euroskepticism, in other words, is
pragmatic and tactical.
She just doesn’t have enough allies in
powerful positions.
Meanwhile, the far right in Europe has
largely shifted away from
opposing the European Union to a more covert
effort to transform
European institutions from within. Toward
that end, far-right parties
began some time ago to compete seriously in
European Parliament
elections. They have simultaneously built
power bases at a local
level, often in rural areas and often, with
a program of economic
populism, at the expense of communist or
neo-communist parties in
urban areas. They have even grown in
influence in countries like
Germany and Spain that, because of their
fascist pasts, have put
significant barriers in front of neo-fascist
parties.
Eurohijacking
is infinitely more dangerous than
Euroskepticism. Meloni, Orban, and
their co-religionists are biding their time
as they build power at
the national and European levels. Their goal
is that of the political
termite: to eat away at the foundations of
the common European home.
For
the
time being, the Brothers of Italy,
the Swedish Democrats, and
Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary are on the
ascendant. The grand
vision that Steve Bannon
put forward after Trump’s victory in
2016—of an alt-right
trans-Atlantic alliance—was
initially inspired by the victory of
Lega and the Five Star Movement in
the 2018 elections in Italy.
Bannon is similarly pumped about
Meloni: “I’ve said for years
that Italy is the worldwide
laboratory for the
populist-nationalist
revolution,” he said
recently.
“The world needs to be watching very
attentively to Giorgia Meloni,
and taking note.”
A
Republican Party still subservient
to Trump has also embraced Meloni,
regardless of her past. Rand Paul
(R-KY), for instance, was
“cheering” her victory. “I think
people probably reacted in an
unfair way to her,” he said.
“For goodness’ sake, calling the
woman Mussolini is a little bit
over the top.”
But
then,
both Bannon and Paul continue
to support
Donald Trump, an obviously
over-the-top figure who is a great
deal
closer to Mussolini than Meloni will
ever be. As Italian philosopher
and activist Lorenzo Marsili points
out,
Meloni has not been following a
historic model of Italian fascism so
much as the current model of
American neo-fascism, courtesy of
Trump
himself.
Through
such
positive reinforcement loops—Orban
to Trump to Meloni and
potentially back to Trump—the far
right aspires to build its
Nationalist
International
against the “globalists” who preside
over the European Union and
the United Nations.
Goodbye
Fascism?
The
victories
of the far right in Europe do not,
however, necessarily
represent a major swing in public
opinion toward neo-fascism. The
liberal-left parties in Italy
received more votes than the
far-right.
The Social Democrats remain the most
popular party in Sweden. Marine
Le Pen lost her bid for the French
presidency earlier this year, the
Alternative fur Deutschland saw a
drop in support in last year’s
German elections, and Austria’s
Freedom Party is no longer part of
a ruling coalition (though its
popularity has been edging
up again).
Further
to
the east, the most powerful fascist
politician in the world today,
Vladimir Putin, is facing a serious
challenge to his authority
because of his ill-considered
decision to invade Ukraine and the
frankly inept performance of his
military. No, I’m not just jumping
on the
Putin-as-fascist bandwagon.
I’ve been calling the Russian leader
a fascist since
early
March.
The war in Ukraine is not simply a
territorial grab, and it’s
certainly not, as the Kremlin
asserts, a covert effort by the West
to
use Ukraine as a proxy to defeat
Russia. Rather, it is an expression
of Putin’s fascist imperialism. That
phrase, “fascist
imperialism,” sounds an awful lot
like Soviet propaganda from the
Cold War era as applied to the
United States. But in his quest for
power and national glory, Putin has
transformed himself into
precisely what he accuses his
enemies of being.
The
Russian
president once aspired to lead an
axis of illiberalism with
his right-wing buddies Orban, Le
Pen, and Matteo Salvini of Lega. The
Ukraine war, however, has made Putin
politically radioactive even to
most of the European far right,
which has largely condemned the
invasion. Meanwhile, if the sheer
intemperateness and QAnon lunacy of
his annexation speech last week is
any indication—identifying the
West with “Satanism,” referencing
the “golden
billion” conspiracy theory,
veering off on a rant against the
LGBT community—the Russian leader
obviously feels the need to ramp up
his invective to compensate for
declining
public enthusiasm
for the war and his leadership.
Putin has extended his fascist
control over parts of Ukraine but at
the risk of losing grip over his
entire kingdom. Such are the perils
of imperial overstretch.
But
perhaps
the most exciting news for
anti-fascists around the world is
the impending loss of Jair Bolsonaro
in Brazil. The “Trump of the
Tropics” is perhaps more of a
traditional Latin American caudillo
than
a
fascist exactly, though he does meet
the necessary criteria to
qualify as the latter:
authoritarianism, militarism,
extreme
nationalism, and a far-right social
policy. He is only intermittently
a corporatist, given his
anti-statist and pro-free market
ideology,
but Brazilian activist Gabriel Landi
Fazzio makes a strong case that
Bolsonaro’s economic philosophy and
actions still
constitute
a form of neo-fascism.
Lula
just
missed winning the election in the
first round this weekend,
gaining 48.4 percent of the vote
versus Bolsonaro’s 43.2 percent.
Bolsonaro did better than predicted
by the polls,
but it’s still going to be difficult
for him to get enough votes
from the candidates who are dropping
out to beat Lula. A lot of
Brazilians didn’t vote, either
because they don’t like either
candidate or because they thought
their choice would win outright
(Lula) or lose anyway (Bolsonaro).
In any case, Lula might benefit
from the same tailwind that Emmanuel
Macron enjoyed in France when
people came out to the polls in the
second round to prevent Le Pen
from taking over.
Bolsonaro
could
still win in the run-off. And his
party—the equally misnamed
Liberal Party—is now the largest one
in the Brazilian parliament.
But perhaps the greater threat is
that, like his pal in the United
States, Bolsonaro might simply
refuse to leave office. He has often
talked of his fondness
for Brazil’s past military
dictatorship. Unlike Meloni in
Italy, he
is not scrambling to disavow his
connections to fascists of the past.
He could lose at the polls and
attempt a military coup in response.
And
that,
ultimately, is the biggest problem
with fascism. You say
“Goodbye,” and fascism keeps saying,
“Hello, hello, hello.”
It is the most undead of political
philosophies. Just when you
thought you’d put a stake through its
heart, fascism climbs out of
its grave once more to suck the blood
out of the body politic.
