Fascism with a facelift

Giorgia Meloni (Photo: Presidenza della Repubblica, via Wikimedia Commons)

Italy has never had a female Prime Minister, but this will soon change.

Giorgia Meloni, the 45-year-old anti-establishment politician from Rome who led the right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) to a first-place finish in this year’s Italian General Election, is set to break the glass ceiling later this month when she will be appointed Italy’s first female Prime Minister.

She is expected to form a controversial coalition with the right-wing parties Lega (League), led by the polarising former Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia (Forward Italy), headed by the scandal-ridden former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This alliance is, according to the BBC, likely to be the most right-wing government Italy has seen since the fall of dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime during the Second World War.

This connection between Meloni and fascism is worth keeping in mind. During her rise to prominence, she has been forced to confront many, often legitimate, accusations that she belongs more to the far-right political tradition than to the political mainstream.

Giorgia Meloni’s ascent to Prime Minister-in-waiting status has raised many questions about whether Italy has fully broken with its fascist past. Despite marketing herself as an anti-establishment populist, Meloni is no stranger to mainstream politics, having served in the Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s lower house of Parliament, since 2006 and having held the role of Youth Minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government from 2008 to 2011.

She became involved in politics at the young age of 15 when she joined the youth section of Movimiento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), a far-right party created by supporters of the brutal, Nazi-sympathising dictator Mussolini. Fast forward a few decades and this party is no more.

Although Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia, can be described as an indirect descendent of it, she likes to distance herself from the racial discrimination and persecution associated with Mussolini’s brand of fascism. ‘I have never spoken of fascism because I am not a fascist’, Meloni stated in an interview, this year with the Spectator.

It is true that Meloni is desperate for Italians, and for Europe more generally, not to view her as a dangerous fascist in the mould of Mussolini, preferring for us to think that she is a typical, centre-right politician. She has distanced herself from positive comments she made in the past about Mussolini’s legacy.

She has also moderated her stances on other issues, for example, on Russia. Having previously been somewhat supportive of Vladimir Putin, upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she began to voice solidarity with the Ukrainian people and has supported arms provisions to the country.

Conscious of the fears of Western European leaders, many of whom view her as a far-right threat, she has addressed these worries head-on. Meloni went as far as to release an English-language YouTube video before the election entitled ‘We are ready to govern Italy’, in which she stated that accusations that she is a fascist are misinformation from biased far-left media sources, and that right-wing Italian parties stamped out fascism decades ago.

These actions by Meloni reek of desperation, as she attempts to walk-back previous comments and policy positions in a fickle attempt to gain more support, whilst her true feelings on many social and economic issues likely haven’t changed.

There’s no getting away from the fact that Meloni is an extremist whose retrograde views ought to be confined to the pages of history books. Despite her acceptance of same-sex civil partnerships, currently legal in Italy, her policy positions on LGBT+ rights paint the portrait of an unapologetic woman determined to prevent this community from enjoying some of the basic rights which she has as a cisgender, straight woman.

For example, Meloni, along with vast swathes of her party, is steadfast in her opposition to same-sex marriage and adoption, claiming that every child should have a mother and father. She has also opposed anti-homophobia legislation, railed against what she calls the influential ‘LGBT lobby’ at a rally for the Spanish far-right party Vox, and even went as far as to say that she’d ‘rather not have a gay child’ in an interview with Italian TV show Le lene in 2016.

Perhaps this is not surprising rhetoric from a person who stated in 2020 that ‘there is no homophobia in Italy’. If harmful and blatantly inaccurate comments such as that don’t disqualify someone from office, then it’s hard to see what else would.

However, Meloni’s extremism doesn’t just stem from the fact that she is a perennial homophobe, it extends to many of her other policy platforms. Although there’s a fair argument to be made in terms of safely minimising legal immigration, her plan to introduce naval blockades to prevent boats containing immigrants from landing seems ill-conceived and cruel.

Many of these migrants will be desperate and will have been trafficked and crammed onto unsuitable boats by people smugglers, and all of them will have made a long and arduous journey. Surely European nations ought to offer immigrants a chance to apply for asylum, rather than leave them stranded in the Mediterranean as Giorgia Meloni would do?

Meloni’s extremism is also highlighted by her support of the Great Replacement Theory. This debunked white nationalist conspiracy theory argues that non-white immigrants are replacing native white European populations due to falling birth rates and mass migration, and it has been voiced by some of the most far-right supporters of former US President Donald Trump. Surely this dangerously xenophobic line of thinking makes it impossible for Giorgia Meloni to ‘govern for everyone’ as she promised to do after winning?

In short, you don’t have to look too closely at Giorgia Meloni and her views to conclude that she is an extremist whose intolerance towards minorities echoes that of Italian fascists who came before her.

Meloni wants us to believe that she is centre-right because she wants people to become complacent enough that she can put her radical views on social issues into law.

She does not want people to wake up and see her for what she truly is and what she represents: the new torchbearer of Italian fascism, or, in other words, fascism with a facelift.