when they are fulfilled hundred years of the March on Rome it is inevitable to look back and look for similarities and differences between the Italy that made possible the rise of Benito Mussolini to power and the one that has made Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy party. Because despite the fact that on Tuesday Meloni assured in the Chamber of Deputies that “he never felt sympathy for authoritarian regimes, including the fascist one,” it is impossible to forget his statements from a few years ago in which he dedicated himself to highlighting how much was positive for Italy saw her then in the regime founded a century ago now.
If a rampant social crisis between 1919 and 1922 led to the siege of fascism in power curdling in an assault on the institutions and the liquidation of the parliamentary system, the current social fracture brings together many ingredients to seek a new playing field that facilitates things to the heirs of the Mussolinian experience. But, also, many more counterweights. As much as he denies it, between the MSI of George Admiralconfessed administrator of the fascist legacy in the postwar period, and Brothers of Italy there is an indisputable link that goes through the National Alliance of Gianna Fini, who came to preside over the Chamber of Deputies and was Minister of Foreign Affairs. It is also true that the Fini experience was precisely the first step in acclimatizing that political space to the rules of the game of the democratic system. But not everything ends with the formation of Meloni: the family tree of the Italian far-right completes a no less than part of Forza Italia, the party of Silvio Berlusconiand The Lega of the Falcon Matteo Salvini.
With everything, Italy’s dual commitment to NATO and, above all, to the EU, and the precautions imposed by the factual powers of Italian society limit Meloni’s room for maneuver. In fact, she herself has been busy emphasizing that she supports to the last comma the Western position on the Ukraine crisis – the danger here comes more from Berlusconi’s side – and has stated the intention of her government to respect the rules that apply in Brussels although “without being subordinate and without inferiority complexes.” It remains to be seen if this tagline is just a statement for internal consumption or if Meloni will leave the orthodoxy in fiscal matters and spending control when the recession settles in the Eurozone.
There is immediate justification for the fear that a heavy hand will already be imposed on policies that directly concern respect for human rights. The experience of Matteo Salvini in the Ministry of the Interior, with his merciless management of migratory flows, is too recent; the opinions of Romano LaRussa, an advisor to Meloni, who has repeatedly expressed his admiration for fascism and has lashed out at the LGBTI community. She is too close to her own Meloni’s intervention at a Vox rally to assume that, above all, domestic politics will not be affected by the ideological bias of the new government, although the prime minister now defines herself as someone whose decisions will always be of a practical nature.
The rise of the far right in Europe makes this double game possible: European discipline in foreign policy, with many nuances at the moment of truth, and ideological accentuation in the interior. The successive debacles and reorganizations in the Italian party system since 1992 facilitate such duplicity to the highest degree in the face of skeptical public opinion and a middle class impoverished by the crises chained since 2008, which have eroded the social pact beyond all forecast. Meloni is possibly more of a danger to coexistence and freedoms in his country than to the stability of the EU. What is not little.