MILAN — While Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni adopts a reassuring foreign policy allied with the West, internal culture wars are preserving its far-right credentials in the face of a crisis. European Parliament electionswhere his Brothers of Italy party, with neo-fascist roots, is expected to make significant progress and a possible coalition role.
In less than two years at the helm of the EU’s third-largest economy, Meloni has become Europe’s most powerful far-right leader, a position emphasized in a fiery speech in May to a Vox demonstration in Spain, which included French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Hungarian Viktor Orbán and pro-Trump Republicans.
Still, his pro-Ukraine and pro-Israel policies have proven reassuring to centrist U.S. and European allies as Italy prepares to host U.S. President Joe Biden and the country’s other leaders. group of seven most industrialized nations by the end of June.
The European elections on June 6-9 could begin to tip Meloni’s balancing act.
“I think there are two Meloni, and the Meloni that is getting the most attention is the pragmatic, pro-Ukrainian Meloni,” said Wolfango Piccoli of the London-based consultancy Teneo. “There is another Meloni, there in Italy, where the European elections could be a moment of truth. “It has never been forced to adopt a clear ideological stance.”
After campaigning on a anti-EU platformMeloni has adjusted his rhetoric as Europe invests more than 210 billion euros ($228 billion) in pandemic recovery funds in Italy. As prime minister, Meloni has a potential political ally in EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has not ruled out including Meloni’s party in a grand coalition if necessary.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is forecast to grow from six seats to at least 20 when Italians vote on June 8-9, and Meloni will personalize polls by asking voters to write their name, “Giorgia,” in addition to verifying the party symbol.
Even as their popularity grows, Italian opposition leaders, activists and journalists are sounding the alarm about the spread of far-right policies that are curbing LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, while believing what some see as a climate of xenophobia and intimidation.
Senator for life Liliana Segre, a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor, told the ANSA news agency that she is “really very worried” about the outcome of the European elections.
So far in his mandate, Meloni has delegated most social-cultural policy to his ministers, giving him a degree of separation on many hot-button issues.
Migration is the exception, as she defends the so-called Mattei Plan fund projects in African countries along migratory routes in exchange for better controls, while moving forward with plans to implement asylum reception centers in Albania – winning von der Leyen’s consensus, a development she boasts about during the election campaign.
“Italy can change Europe,” Meloni said at a rally in Pescara on Wednesday.
Whether or not he will be able to exert more influence in Europe remains to be seen.
“When it comes to Meloni and the potential impact on EU politics after the European elections, that depends on the numbers and the chemistry that emerges,” said Simone Tagliapietra, an analyst at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. She noted that the type of sociocultural policies that her government has been most interested in addressing in Italy fall largely within national, not EU, competences.
The Meloni government prohibited municipal administrations from legally registering a non-biological father in same-sex couples, effectively limiting their parental rights, and made access to abortion This is made even more difficult by allowing anti-abortion activists into abortion clinics, which activists say creates an intimidating environment. His government has also spoken out against gender theory and is pushing a law through parliament that ban surrogacy.
Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano is unapologetically defeating foreigners and leftist appointees to run as a landmark. museums, institutions and opera theaters, showing a desire to dominate the cultural debate in a way that has not been seen in previous ideological shifts between the left and the right. The late Silvio Berlusconi, a three-time conservative prime minister, never batted an eyelid at Italy’s cultural institutions.
Under Meloni, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has dropped Italy five places in its annual press freedom index, placing it in the “problematic” category alongside Poland and Hungary. In a recent episode, Journalists from RAI state television. accused the new leaders installed by the government of censoring a monologue planned for Liberation Day denouncing fascism.
More recently, the editor of the Turin newspaper La Stampa, Massimo Giannini, said four police officers woke him up in his hotel room at 4 a.m. to file a defamation complaint for comments critical of Meloni’s government made on a program television the night before. Giannini told private television La7 that this treatment is usually reserved for “drug traffickers, not journalists.”
The new Made in Italy The Ministry has used bombastic tactics, such as the recent seizure of dozens of Fiat Topolino microcars emblazoned with the Italian flag emblem despite being manufactured in Morocco.
Such operations serve a dual purpose, Piccoli said: to distract attention from Italy’s ongoing structural problems and stagnant economy, while attracting Brothers of Italy stalwarts.
“The beautiful thing about all this, in my opinion, is that we are almost halfway through his mandate and none of the structural problems in Italy have been addressed,” he said, including the right-wing issue of demographic collapse or reform of pensions. “One wonders if they are simply opting for easier things, which help mobilize public opinion, rather than addressing the structural problem in this country, including the lack of economic growth.”
Some analysts say Meloni’s pragmatic streak calls into question the extent to which she personally believes in the far-right social and cultural agenda.
Political analyst Roberto D’Alimonte points out that the growing popularity of the Brothers of Italy is incorporating fickle voters who do not necessarily have the same ideology, which could give Meloni room to relax far-right orthodoxy if he increases his mandate in the upcoming Italian parliamentary vote.
“It’s a shrewd policy,” said D’Alimonte of Rome’s LUISS University. “If she wins the next election, we could see a Meloni who tries to change that, becoming more conservative even on cultural issues, instead of being far-right.” .”
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