[Yesterday’s Italian election brought victory for Giorgia
Meloni’s far-right Fratelli d’Italia — and record-low turnout.
The opposition between technocrats and the far right is the symptom of
a deeper decline.]
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IN ITALY’S DESERTED DEMOCRACY, FAR-RIGHT GIORGIA MELONI HAS EMERGED
VICTORIOUS  
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David Broder
September 26, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Yesterday’s Italian election brought victory for Giorgia
Meloni’s far-right Fratelli d’Italia — and record-low turnout.
The opposition between technocrats and the far right is the symptom of
a deeper decline. _

Giorgia Meloni is seen during a press conference on her party’s
victory in the Italian elections, held on September 25, 2022, at Parco
Principi Hotel in Rome. , Valeria Ferraro / SOPA Images / LightRocket
via Getty Images

 

Italy’s election result is another far-right breakthrough — and
another indicator of the radicalization of the Right. The right-wing
coalition scored 44 percent, but the big winner was just one part of
it: Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, whose 26 percent score was
far up on the 4 percent it took in 2018.

Meloni’s allies performed feebly. In the case of Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (8 percent), this was expected. Yet the
Lega led by Matteo Salvini (9 percent) — just a few years ago the
rising star of anti-immigrant politics — slumped well below poll
ratings and did badly even in its old Northern heartlands.

Part of Meloni’s success lay in the sense she was an “outsider”
— or at least, she used this framing to rally the right-wing
electorate. Fratelli d’Italia was the only one of the three
right-wing parties not to join Mario Draghi’s “national unity”
government in February 2021; throughout the last eighteen months she
combined outward respect for Draghi with a promise that only she could
lead a government directly chosen by Italians.

Yet this result, including the dismal performance of what passes for
the Left, is also the product of a wider desertification of the
political field. While Meloni’s party has definite ties to the
neofascist tradition, its success is also due to a distinctly
postmodern phenomenon, which has increasingly dominated Italian public
life over the last three decades: the reduction of political horizons
to the alternative between technocratic crisis resolution and a far
right that is reactionary in its both economic and civil rights
policies.

The grimness of this choice is also visible in massive popular
disengagement from the electoral process. Italian democracy in postwar
decades was based on mass parties with millions of members; electoral
turnout consistently stood above 90 percent until the 1980s. In
yesterday’s election, it was below 64 percent, with massive
abstention in the South and (judging by previous similar contests)
among working-class and younger Italians in general.

In this, Meloni’s opponents have grave responsibilities. Part of
these lie in the so-called Rosatellum electoral law passed in 2017
(granting the largest coalition a large majority of seats even with a
minority of votes). Added to this was the failure to form a broad and
radical alternative coalition that could have made this election
competitive.

But the underwhelming results for supposedly “progressive”
parties, from the liberal-Europeanist Democrats (19 percent) to the
Five Star Movement (15 percent) — are also symptoms of a decades-old
undermining of the connection between working-class life, left-wing
politics, and even democratic participation itself.

Illustrative, in this sense, is the rapid rise and fall of Five Star.
The big winner of the 2018 election, it had taken 32 percent support
promising to put Italians back in control of the democratic process.
Instead, it proved eclectic and unaccountable, forming coalitions with
first the far-right Lega, then the centrist Democrats, then both plus
Draghi. All this exploded its internal contradictions and dropped its
poll numbers into single figures. While leader Giuseppe Conte’s
focus on its social programs in the 2022 campaign produced a small
rebound, it was still under half its 2018 vote.

In many European countries we have seen that historic center-left
parties are no longer able to mobilize their bases through the fear of
the Right alone. This, even when as in the Italian case, the
right-wing parties combine a reactionary stance on civil rights issues
with regressive economic policies, such as introducing a flat income
tax rate and getting rid of unemployment benefits. Italy is a land of
great labor and anti-fascist history. The last-minute appeal to this
tradition in the bid to stop Meloni at the gates could mobilize only
small minorities.

Dismal Campaign

The day that the Italian election campaign was launched, I published
an opinion piece entitled “The Future Is Italy, and It’s Bleak
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It cast Italy — as I have done here — as a country caught in
permanent stagnation and a narrowing of political horizons between
technocrats and far-right “outsiders.” It said that this is not
because Italy is odd but represents a broad trend in the West, an age
of hollowed-out democracy and perma-crisis.

In Italian media, my mention of Fratelli d’Italia’s neofascist
roots was widely cited as evidence of US fears over Meloni. Despite
her record campaigning for foreign far-right parties like Spain’s
Vox, Meloni three times damned
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my article as foreign interference; her blowhard colleague Ignazio La
Russa claimed to have gathered “various pieces of evidence
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opinion piece was the product of a “conspiracy to damage Italy.”
Some online commenters even worried about the hand of the State
Department.

Surely most international media coverage told a somewhat different
story. With the right-wing coalition’s victory near guaranteed from
the start of the campaign, many accounts instead focused on Meloni’s
personal charisma, leadership skills, and break with the fascist past.
Such accounts seemed to have a hard time reckoning with her repeated
defense of “great replacement theory
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is, the literal claim that the Left, in cahoots with “usurers,”
plans the destruction of Western civilization.

As Fabio Chiusi
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out, the more fawning coverage of the latest rising star was a typical
“miracle of those who narrate Italian politics: the closer to the
prime minister’s office she gets, the more moderate she becomes.”
This bandwagon effect has also drawn previous members of other more
center-right parties into her camp
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and earned indulgent comments even from Hillary Clinton
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Meloni’s supporters often seem to think she needs congratulating for
distancing herself
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from Fascist dictatorship and antisemitism. Yet the insistence that
she respects the electoral process is a very low bar. The risk from a
Fratelli d’Italia government is not the end of democracy but a
worsening erosion of the public realm, this time in the hands of a
political force that has always despised the postwar republic created
by antifascist parties.

This will likely take multiple forms: undermining social spending,
rewriting the constitution, and using the heights of government to
deride those who fought in the World War II resistance
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Indeed, it would seem that the more mediocre the outcome of Meloni’s
rule, the more necessary it will be for her to lean into identitarian
themes, from calls for a “naval blockade” in the Mediterranean to
moves against “LGBT lobbies” and “gender ideology.”

Such obsessions have roots in fascism but also belong to a wider
nativist agenda, also represented by figures of such diverse
traditions as Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. In this sense, the
bearer of the old neofascist flame is not a return to the past but a
herald of something rather new.

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Contributors

David Broder is Jacobin’s Europe editor and a historian of French
and Italian communism.

* Italy; Conservatism; Giorgia Meloni; Fratelli d'Italia
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