If no unforeseen events occur, an alliance of right and extreme right can win the Italian legislative elections on September 25 and lead to a policy coming from the neo-fascist tradition, Giorgia Meloni, to the post of prime minister. The latest poll, published this week, gives 49.8% to the coalition made up of the extreme right of the Fratelli d’Italia (Meloni), the radical populists of the Legha (Matteo Salvini) and the conservative right of Forza Italia ( Silvio Berlusconi). Bearing in mind that this poll only gives 30% of the votes to the left, it does not seem that anything can prevent access to the head of government to the heirs of the Italian Social Movement (MSI). Consequently, it is not surprising that the dossier of Italy –the fourth GDP of the European Union– occupies high on the agenda of all European leaders and those responsible for the EU.
The replacement of a pragmatic and convinced pro-European ruler, such as Mario Draghi, by someone like Giorgia Meloni, of dubious European convictions, is indeed a source of concern for Brussels and many foreign ministries. If these electoral predictions are confirmed, Meloni will enter the Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Government, coinciding with the centenary of the march on Rome with which Mussolini’s black shirts established fascism in Italy. Although the date is the result of chance, since it was Mario Draghi who dissolved Parliament after the unity government fell apart, a victim of the cainism of Italian politics, many wonder if the leader of the Fratelli will be a prisoner of the anti-democratic tradition of the MSI in which he took his first political steps, or will assume the conservative but democratic postulates of the European right. who first discovered it by his furious intervention at a Vox rally, during the recent Andalusian electoral campaign, they may rightly think that it embodies values alien to those that allowed the European Union to be founded. However, as her acceptance in the polls increases, Meloni he has distanced himself from his political origins. Until publishing a video in which he affirms his commitment to democracy, freedoms and the EU itself. A shift from earlier positions in which she, and members of her party, flirted with xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes, accused the euro of all of Italy’s ills, and argued that Italian laws should always prevail over those of the European Parliament. .
To assess the scope and the sincerity of this political turn you have to look, of course, through the rear-view mirror of Italian history, but also at the rise of right-wing populism in several European countries. Meloni aspires to form an axis with the populist Hungary of Viktor Orbán and with the ultraconservative Poland of Mateusz Morawiecki. Politicians who are reluctant to accept the primacy of community laws in terms of minority rights, but who formally refuse to break the deck of their membership in the EU. To put himself in this situation, Meloni has distanced himself from Mussolini for the first time, has sent reassuring messages to Brussels, and has supported the intervention in Ukraine, setting aside previous flirtations with Vladimir Putin, who will continue to count, however, in the new government coalition, on his old friend Silvio Berlusconi. Perhaps Meloni does not want to act as the EU’s gravedigger: but it is foreshadowed as the trigger for a crisis that could shake its foundations and torpedo its governability at a critical moment.