THE leader of the “post-fascist” party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), Giorgia Meloni, is now the youngest and the first female Prime Minister of Italy, the EU’s third largest economy. The victory on Sunday of the right-wing coalition that her party leads will send shock waves beyond Italy’s borders.
The Centre-Right Alliance, led by Ms Meloni, comfortably scored victory in Sunday’s election, gaining 44 per cent of the popular vote, compared with just 28 per cent for the rival Centre-Left bloc, according to preliminary results published on Monday. This translates into a sizeable parliamentary majority.
A concentration of power might reassure voters who have been wearied by a succession of unstable administrations, especially after the Governing Crisis in July, when the technocratic administration led by President Mario Draghi, a former President of the European Central Bank, collapsed.
Centre-Right Coalition accurately translates coalizione di centro-destra, but it misleads as a description of the coalition’s political position. Although the bloc includes some mainstream conservative groups, the hard Right predominates. Brothers of Italy will be the single largest party in the Italian parliament, having secured 26 per cent of the popular vote. Within the coalition, it is followed by Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forze Italia, which each secured eight per cent. This is a remarkable achievement for Brothers of Italy, which scored a mere four per cent in the previous General Election, in 2018.
THE party derives its flame emblem and its political lineage from the Italian Social Movement, established in 1945 to continue the legacy of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party, which was formally proscribed after the Second World War. Lega is officially allied with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia, while, in a television appearance last week, Mr Berlusconi claimed that Russia had been “pushed” into invading Ukraine.
The alliance has struggled to free itself from suspicions of covert Russian funding after recent US State Department revelations of intelligence which indicated that, since invading Crimea in 2014, Moscow had provided about US$300 million to far-Right and far-Left parties in Europe. Ms Meloni’s belated adoption of a pro-NATO stance does not reassure.
The Abruzzo region, east of Rome, offers a glimpse of what Italy might look like under the governance of Brothers of Italy. “This is the first land we governed and the symbol of our good governance. . . This is how we want to govern Italy,” Ms Meloni told supporters at a campaign event in the city on 7 September.
Abruzzo’s example is not encouraging: the so-called Centre-Right has enacted openly xenophobic policies discriminating against migrants in the allocation of public resources.
“Thanks to Brothers of Italy, in Abruzzo the fast track for foreigners for social housing has been eliminated. . . Italians first is not just a slogan,” Ms Meloni wrote in 2019. L’Aquila’s city government, led by Brothers of Italy, has faced legal action for refusing food vouchers to immigrants during the pandemic. Blessed with federal-governance powers, the Brothers of Italy’s policy direction could prove alarming.
That danger is heightened by the party’s choice of partners. Its ally Matteo Salvini’s control of the Italian Interior Ministry from 2018 to 2019, during Lega’s separate coalition with the populist Five Star Movement, was criticised by NGOs concerned by increasingly harsh treatment of asylum applicants. In July 2020, the Constitutional Court of Italy ruled that Mr Salvini’s measures made it “unjustifiably difficult for asylum-seekers to access the services to which they are entitled”.
BROTHERS OF ITALY’s victory has profound implications for the Roman Catholic Church and the EU. For the first time since 1943, the papacy must cohabit with a far-Right government in Rome — a government with which Pope Francis has to engage not only on an inter-state (Vatican-Italy) level, but also domestically, as Primate of Italy. Given Pope Francis’s stance on migration, the potential for friction is significant.
The party’s victory could also have subtler and more worrying effects on papal diplomacy. Italians no longer predominate in the Secretariat for Relations with States (the Vatican foreign ministry) as previously, but their presence and the Secretariat’s sensitivity to local mood endure.
The church historian Massimo Faggioli says that it would be a mistake to overlook contextual factors, given that “the Vatican, papacy, and Roman Curia are located in Italy and interact with that environment.” Vatican diplomacy inevitably partakes of the “weaknesses of the Italian political and intellectual Establishment”. That includes a certain naïve but “deep-rooted Russo-philia among some Italian elites, both on the Left . . . and on the Right”. This subtle influence already “cashes out” in a muted Vatican response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine — an accommodating tendency that now may become more marked still.
A government led by Brothers of Italy can also be expected to offer support inside EU bodies to illiberal actors such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, while presenting further Rule of Law issues itself. “We need more than ever friends who share a common vision and approach to Europe’s challenges,” Balazs Orbán, the Hungarian PM’s political director, wrote on Twitter in response to news of the election.
That “populism has peaked” has been a cheerful maxim among some political scientists lately. Italy’s experience, however, suggests that obituaries would be premature.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist. He lives in Budapest and Cambridge. He reviews the new book The Radio Right here.