The surprising rise and victory of Giorgia Meloni: A view from Italy

Some remarkable things happened in the recent Italian elections. Not only is the winner—and therefore the prospective Prime Minister—a woman, but she is the head of an unabashedly right-wing party, the first such party to claim victory since the National Fascist Party won the elections in 1924.

On the other side, equally surprising is the fate of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), heir to the powerful Italian Communist Party, which was shunned by the working-class electorate while attracting the bourgeois, industrial, and college-educated vote.

Added to this upside down scenario, or rather because of it, are the fevered, nightmare visions of a return to fascism in Italy, fed to the outside world’s mainstream media by the unseated Left and their networking partners across the globe. All are greatly worried that a resounding success of the right-wing in Italy, a crucial lynchpin in their globalist strategies, coming immediately after a turn to the right in Sweden (of all places), could spell trouble for their hegemony over the European Union.

Inside of Italy, however, the idea of a return to fascism is laughable, seen as a knee-jerk reaction that some politicians regularly resort to whenever at a loss for how to best label and smear their opponents.

Context and consquences

Fascism in Italy has been relegated to the history books and occasional minor news events since 1945. Mussolini was executed 32 years before Giorgia Meloni was even born and reviving the Fascist Party in any way, shape, or form was made a crime in the Italian Constitution back in 1946. Spreading fascist propaganda or praise for fascism is punishable under a law that passed in 1952, whose reach was further expanded in 1993. And the party that Meloni belonged to as a young girl publicly condemned fascism as “absolute evil” in 1995.

In fact, as anyone with a minimum of familiarity with current Italian events knows, Italy today is a stronghold of the Left which, although more representative of multiculturalism and diversity rights than of the proletariat, owes its hegemony over the centers of culture to a relentless application of methods expounded by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a founder of the Italian Communist Party.

A source of inspiration for many of the world’s intellectuals (Columbia University’s School of Journalism Library, for example, includes over a hundred entries for Gramsci and related works) the recommendations of this philosopher-politician from Sardinia included joining the Catholics in their associations and biding time until they can take over smoothly. “Democratic Catholicism does what socialism could not do,” wrote Gramsci, “it amalgamates, reorders, enlivens and commits suicide.”

Gramsci believed, in short, that Catholics would eventually “merge with the conscious Socialist masses […and] will comprehend the superiority of the Socialist motto: ‘the emancipation of the proletariat will be the work of the proletariat itself’ and will want to be on their own; they will no longer want any go-betweens, they will no longer want Pastors as their authorities, but will realize that they can move on their own initiative: they will become men in the modern sense of the word, men who draw the principles of their action from their own conscience, men who shatter their idols, who decapitate God…”

Such political rhetoric was part of a recipe for strategizing in a covert cultural war and helps explain how Catholic Italy wound up hosting one of the biggest and most affluent Communist Parties of the Western world.

A century later, millions of Catholics in Italy have diluted their creed to somehow accommodate Socialism, and they make up the backbone of the Partito Democratico. And that Party is well entrenched in the soft power of mainstream media, school boards, universities, publishing houses, trade unions, professional guilds, show business, cooperatives, “social centers”, the boards of banks and big businesses, and the judiciary (which is non elective).

But if the majority of the cultural agencies are in the hands of the Left, how did the conservatives manage to garner all those millions of votes?

First, it appears that ideology no longer suffices to win over the minds of the people. In the long run, the masses can see through the scam of politicians carefully appointing each other and their henchmen to positions of influence while quietly excluding all the non-compliant. Secondly, the working class no longer feels represented by the “caviar gauche” whose rhetoric involves doling out taxpayer money to selected categories of “victims”, thereby running up the public debt, with immense opportunity for graft, while pushing Italian workers aside.

The convictions of the complicated Giorgia Meloni

“I am Giorgia. I’m a woman. I’m a mother. I’m a Christian”. This, from a speech pronounced by Meloni at a rally in Rome, was made into a pop song by opponents seeking to ridicule her. But far from making a caricature out of Meloni, the song made her hugely famous and popular, while bringing home to young people the folly of leftist demands such as substituting “Mother” and “Father” on documents with “Parent1” and “Parent2″.

Religion is not a prominent topic in Meloni’s speeches, but ethics certainly are. “In the eyes of the mainstream I am a bigot,” she writes in her autobiography, “because I am committed to fighting against things like gender theory, surrogate motherhood or terminal abortion. I do believe in God, but I don’t wage these battles from a religious standpoint… I wage them out of my convictions and common sense. I’m not against progress; on the contrary, I’m against a return to Barbarianism.”

Meloni’s approach to issues is that of a legislator who must not allow herself to be led by feelings but must foresee unintended consequences. “If you generalize a particular case in order to protect someone’s feelings,” she writes, “you risk creating new injustices, like in the case of the laws made to accommodate the feelings of men who wish to be women, which have led to the unfairness of allowing huge men to compete with biological women. If it were enough to feel you are a women to be one, then we can say goodbye to affirmative action.”

On the apparent contradiction between her being a single mother yet a staunch defender of traditional mother/father families, it is common knowledge that the decision to not marry isn’t hers but her partner’s, who isn’t religious. “If I were to marry, I would do so in church,” she says, “One can decide not to and that’s what I’ve done so far, although I realize that I am missing something. But I don’t expect to be allotted the same privileges that the Government reserves to those who have put that commitment in writing.”

Yet it would be an oversimplification to attribute Meloni’s landslide victory entirely to her principled attitude towards the issues on the table, or to her imaginative approach to life seen through the lens of ancient history, world literature, and fantasy characters taken from Tolkien, Lewis and Ende. It is the dire material situation of the country, including the consequences of the COVID lockdowns and brutal vaccination mandates—and more recently inflation and soaring energy bills—that have led so many Italians to make new choices.

The daunting road ahead for Meloni and Italy

It appears safe to say that most of Meloni’s electors voted for her party as being the only one that did not support the Draghi Administration. Although called in to save the country from its own supposed ineptitude and inherent chaos, Mario Draghi has deepened the national debt, raising it by €116 billion.

One thing that commentators concur on is that Giorgia Meloni faces almost impossible odds, economically and politically. Every possible financial limit to Italy’s actions has already been decided on. And two days before the election, the President of the EU Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, publicly uttered a very mafia-sounding threat. “We’ll see the outcome of the elections in Italy. If it is difficult, we have tools.”

Hungary has often been threatened with EU sanctions because of its policies. But never has a country been told who to vote for, not even tiny Greece at the lowest point of its economic disaster. So why would the unelected leaders of the EU prefer the Left to Giorgia Meloni, the President of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party since 2020? Mainly because she stands in the way of the dilution of national identities into a sea of multicultural syncretism, with Italy in particular fast becoming a hub for multiple civilizations, due to its plunge in birth-rates, massive illegal immigration, and progressive levelling out of religions ever since the Concordat of 1984 deprived Catholicism of the status of official state religion and Italy began the funding of others.

Von Der Leyen’s “tools” threat reminded Italians of the combined financial pressure that pushed Silvio Berlusconi out of office eleven years ago, bringing in Mario Monti, another technocrat, who had promptly sent the debt soaring as well. Yet Italy was at the time far from a charity case, and despite disparaging accounts in the press, it always had (and still has) chipped more into the EU than it took out.

Italy has now been promised 200 billion euros from the EU coffers. It sounds good, but it constitutes mostly more debt and interest to be paid back, with relatively little allotted to current needs such as hospitals and schools. Moreover, the sums are already bookmarked to predetermined projects, which are required to follow detailed rules, or else be forfeited.

Two years down the line from almost completely unrelieved lockdowns and taxes, with rising inflation and soaring energy bills, many Italian families are at the end of their rope. But while Germany has doled out 200 billion to help its people, Draghi, still in office for at least another month, has expressed an oblique criticism of such measures, implying that there will be no help until the new government kicks in a month or so from now. If, of course, it manages to find the money.