If the polls are any guide, the far-right Brothers of Italy party would likely win the next election. Their leader, Giorgia Meloni (which is supported by Matteo Salviniformer Home Secretary, and former Prime Minister for three terms, Silvio Berlusconi), has benefited greatly from opposing the outgoing Mario Draghi.
According to the Italian newspaper The Republicin the latest polls, Fratelli d’Italia, Meloni’s party, comes first in voting intentions, followed by the Democratic Party. The League is below 15% (with Salvini), while the 5-Star Movement is around 10%. In fourth or fifth place, depending on the poll, is Forza Italia (Berlusconi’s political space).
Giorgia Meloni does not come from a liberal tradition like the media mogul, but nationalist. She is a lukewarm Europeanist, but she is not allied with the French Marine LePenlike Salvini. And his opponents, especially on the left, recognize his coherence and popularity, but fear his character and radicalism on civil rights issues.
And they anticipate that with the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) controlling the Roman legislature, a change of perspective would be felt even in Brussels. They would undo a lot of what Draghi has achieved from February 2021, and the markets would panic at the possibility, once again, of a dreaded Italexit (the “azzurra” version of the British Brexit that still causes headaches in London and facilitated this week the end of the cycle of Boris Johnson, chosen to mitigate these effects).
Fortunately only a small fringe of Italians seriously want itand the politicians who raise the Italexit they use it mostly as a bargaining chip to ask for concessions to Brussels.
Seen this way, perhaps the greatest achievement of the was Draghi is to have functioned as a retaining wall for the nationalist turn: In 2018, Italy was shaken by a populist earthquake that gave both the right and the left a chance to gain power and influence, as voters pressed to transform what they saw as a government that no longer delivered.
The new powers promised transparency and the end of political intrigues. It’s didn’t work. Draghi was appointed (never elected) to fix things. And so he did, but his cycle ebbed early.
The Italian hope is that, in the next elections, whenever they come, the electorate does not return to the parody of the politics it has already voted to dismantle.
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