“It would be much easier for us if someone appeared on the world scene who said: ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the black shirts marching again in the Italian squares.’ But life is not that simple. Eternal fascism may return in the most innocent guise. Our duty is to unmask him and point him out in each of his new appearances, each day, in each place in the world.”
It is the most international Italian writer of the last fifty years who says so. Umberto Eco chooses these words on April 25, 1995. It is not for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Italy, on April 25, 1945. Eco stands before New York students at Columbia University. Six days after the attack with a truck bomb loaded with explosives that exploded in front of a public building causing 168 deaths in the capital of the State of Oklahoma, in the south of the country.
This Eco text was resurrected in the Italian elections of March 2018, when the political landscape suffered a convulsion, a couple of months before, with the jump of the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, towards the center-right coalition. Salvini was Vice President and Minister of the Interior of the Italian government between June 201 and September 2019.
Now it is the Brothers of Italy party of Giorgia Meloni, who leads a coalition between the right and the extreme right that, according to all the polls, will win the legislative elections this Sunday, September 25. Meloni, according to these polls, will be the next president of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Government.
In other terms, and playing again with the dates: a coalition with fascist overtones -a definition that puts into practice the recommendation of Umberto Eco in New York- can take over the reins of the Government of the third power of the EU on the 27th of October the 100th anniversary of the march of the members of the National Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini, throughout Italy to converge in Rome, where King Victor Emmanuel III commissioned the fascist leader, two days later, on October 29, to form a new government.
On election day this Sunday, moreover, highlights another element of the decomposition of European politics. On this occasion, the Italian coalition has obtained the official backing of the European People’s Party, whose president, Manfred Weber, gave his enthusiastic support in Rome, meeting on August 30 with Silvio Berlusconi and Antonio Tajani, of the Forza Italia party, and He supports that said party go to the polls in coalition with Meloni and Salvini.
“The program, from the European point of view, is completely from the EPP. The details will be discussed, but the start is good,” said Weber. The Popular Party (PP) of Spain has been a pioneer in forming a government with the far-right Vox party in the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León in March 2022. But Italy is more relevant. If they win they will govern the third country of the EU.
The most charismatic faces of that coalition today are not those of Salvini and Berlusconi, but that of Giorgia Meloni, who has tried to bring calm to the international media by presenting herself, in three languages, as a friend of the United States, an “Atlanticist”, a very dear word to José María Aznar, condemning yes to “anti-fascism”, to communism, and the left, whom he places in the “legacy” of fascism.
Precisely, the Italian writer Antonio Scurati (Naples, 1969) Antonio Scurati, who has just published in Italy the third volume of his monumental ‘M. El Hijo del Siglo’ on Mussolini and his time, clarifies it as follows: “Today’s society has crossed a serious historical threshold: to be part of society you had to accept that fascism was evil. And that is no longer necessary now. A decade ago there were nostalgic for fascism but they were on the margins of society. And now that preliminary anti-fascist condemnation is no longer in force.”
So there are no more complexes.
Giusseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa put into the mouth of Tancredi, one of the characters in ‘El gatopardo’, the famous advice to his uncle, Prince Salina, before Garibaldi’s revolution: “It is necessary to change everything so that everything remains the same”.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian filmmaker and writer, turned it on its head and generalized the idea. “Italy – he wrote – is a circular country in which everything changes to remain as it was before because it is a country without memory”.
A skinny dog, yes, it’s all fleas.
The crisis of the technocratic government of Mario Draghi it has not been able to provoke elections at a worse time, which may have, in turn, effects on the European situation, already destabilized by the war in Ukraine; inflation and the energy crisis; and the speculative movements against the Italian public bond that raise the ghost of the 2012 euro crisis, after the Great Recession that began in 2007-2008. A skinny dog, yes, it’s all fleas
All in all, hehe European Commission (EC) has a powerful weapon of deterrence regarding any temptation to breach the commitments made in the Rome agreement with Brussels to receive European financial aid aimed at relaunching the Italian economy after the coronavirus pandemic. The Rome government has received two advances in August 2021 and April 2022 totaling 45.9 billion. But it is only a small part of the total the 191.2 billion euros that Italy expects to receive until 2026.
But it does not seem that Meloni and Salvini, despite the clarity that the EPP sees in its program, agree on essential points. The former has promised to maintain the Draghi government’s policy of military support for Ukraine and to carry out sanctions against Russia. Salvini, reflecting the interests of Italian companies trading with the Russian market, has denounced during the campaign the disastrous effects of sanctions on the Italian economy.
Both of them are clear that their enemy is immigration.
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But the most dangerous flank in the Italian economy right now is not the deficit itself, nor the debt, which is largely in the hands of Italian residents. Recent governments have complied with the EU deficit rules. Even their budgets have enjoyed a primary surplus (that is, a surplus before paying interest on the debt that is equivalent to 150% of the Gross Domestic Product).
The great trigger of a crisis can be the permanent rise in interest rates in the United States and the European Union, and a recession linked to speculation against the Italian public bond (already underway) and the contagion that it can cause in other countries, for example, Spain.