Tag Archive for: Giorgia Meloni

Meloni’s balancing act

When Giorgia Meloni delivered her maiden speech in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies on 25 October, it was hard to know what to believe—the language or the body language, the message or the choice of words. Meloni, a former Benito Mussolini admirer and teenage neo-fascist activist, whose Brothers of Italy party leads the new government coalition, now reigns over the decaying political class of an ageing country. How does Italy’s first-ever female prime minister (and, at 45, its second youngest), raised by a single mother in a rough Rome neighbourhood, intend to govern a country famous for its low social mobility and the European Union’s second-lowest female employment rate?

Meloni called herself an ‘underdog who upended predictions’, adding, ‘I plan to do it again.’ But, as ever with Meloni, it’s all about what you choose to look at. Form and content are so much at odds that both moderates and the far right can find something to like. The sharp gestures, the fiery eyes, the screaming into the microphone are all trademark fascist devices. But she then quotes Montesquieu and denies she ever had any sympathy for illiberal regimes—even after inviting Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, as a special guest to the Brothers’ two most recent annual gatherings.

Her government’s first decree showed the gulf between her background and what she can possibly achieve in a constitutional democracy. Allegedly with the aim of preventing rave parties, the decree made unauthorised gatherings of more than 50 people punishable by up to six years in prison if deemed ‘dangerous’. The outcry that ensued, even in parts of her majority, will force her to backtrack.

Meloni’s lexicon and historical references all seem as if they were lifted from another era: ‘nation’ and ‘motherland’ now replace ‘country’; ‘a patriot’ now means to her and her supporters what others might call ‘a right-wing chauvinist’; and Italy’s unification in the mid-19th century is suddenly being dusted off to replace, as a founding national myth, the Resistenza, the popular anti-fascist uprising that helped defeat Mussolini and Nazi Germany in 1943–45.

While Italy’s prime minister creates the impression that the political and cultural grounds are shifting, she also understands that, financially and politically, she cannot afford to change Italy’s pro-EU, pro-NATO path. So, she tries to sound simultaneously revolutionary and conventional, correcting her past leanings. In 2018, she congratulated Vladimir Putin on his ‘unequivocal’ victory in Russia’s unfree and unfair presidential election. As late as June 2021, she was still questioning the wisdom of sticking with the euro.

But as soon as she secured her government mandate, she signalled continuity with much of what former prime minister Mario Draghi’s technocratic government stood for. She swore by the Western alliance and promised to keep supporting Ukraine. She vowed to work ‘within European institutions … not in order to pull the brakes on European integration, but to help it become more effective in facing today’s crises and external threats’. She did take a swipe at the European Central Bank’s tightening of monetary policy, but pledged to abide by EU rules because, she declared, ‘only a country that fully respects the rules has sufficient authority to demand that the cost of the international crisis be more equally divided’.

Meloni’s balancing act is an arduous one, and her reference to Ukraine suggests that the war is a litmus test. By saying that the cost of ‘the international crisis’ must be ‘more equally divided’, she is signalling that Italy may demand compensation for the economic sacrifice of implementing sanctions on Russia. But her real purpose is to square a circle within her right-wing coalition and electoral base.

Her government partners, Matteo Salvini of Lega and Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia, are openly much more pro-Russian. When Berlusconi was prime minister, Russian gas company Gazprom signed big long-term contracts with Italy, including an important one in 2005 with a company that had no previous experience in the gas industry but was owned by a Berlusconi family friend. As for Salvini, his party has long been linked to Putin’s United Russia party by a formal partnership, and a close Salvini ally was recorded discussing financial deals in Moscow in 2018.

Meloni has distanced herself from such entanglements and reiterated her support for Ukraine. But she must know her supporters are not with her on this issue. According to a recent Ipsos poll, 12% of Brothers of Italy voters side with Russia—the highest share for any party. Of more immediate concern, 51% of Meloni’s voters disagree with sanctions against Russia and 71% think they are ‘ineffective’.

In taking her brand of hard-right nationalism to the hearth of EU and Western institutions, Meloni thus must navigate treacherous political waters. She won’t be able to remain under the radar for long, though. The EU Commission has launched procedures to freeze Poland’s and Hungary’s EU funds for their governments’ attacks on democratic institutions. Italy will have to take a stance on the issue, including in a vote this month in the EU Council on funds for Hungary. But both Orban and Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party regard Meloni as an ally and expect support, all the more so as she chairs the European Conservatives and Reformists party that includes PiS itself.

If Meloni sides with Hungary and Poland, she will signal that Italy is now politically far away from the core EU countries; such a stance may even fuel mistrust in financial markets for Italy’s high debt levels. The dilemma for her is that if she sides with the EU Commission, she may trigger a broad realignment toward the political centre, rather than gaining legitimacy within EU institutions as a nationalist firmly rooted in the far right. She will likely try to sidestep the matter altogether.

It’s likely Meloni is looking forward to the 2024 presidential election in the United States. If Donald Trump or a Trump-like figure wins and takes the White House, she would have more powerful friends to challenge the existing EU balance of power. By then, an entente cordiale between nationalist Italy, Poland and post-Brexit Britain might be all a Republican White House may wish for in Europe. The EU would be so much the weaker for it.

How much will Italy change under Giorgia Meloni?

When a ‘shock’ or ‘extremist’ election result comes with record-low voter turnout and a big yawn from financial markets, it is time to find new descriptors. The decisive victory in Italy’s general election by the coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, putting her in line to be the country’s first female prime minister and the first to claim an unambiguous line back to Benito Mussolini, is certainly striking. But there’s little reason to believe it will change Italy’s course in ways that matter either to markets or to the country’s international partners.

This election was that rare modern case in which opinion polls got the outcome largely right. It has been clear for at least two years that if the three main right-wing parties held together, they would win an absolute majority. The only thing that has changed materially is the balance within the coalition: during the technocratic, national unity government led by Mario Draghi from February 2021 until July this year, votes shifted away from the right-wing party that joined Draghi’s government, Lega, and to the party that stayed out, the Brothers of Italy.

This shift continued right up to the election, with the Brothers of Italy ending up with three times the vote share of either Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, or Meloni’s other coalition partner, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. This will greatly strengthen her position when forming her government, making it likelier than not that her government will last several years, or even the full five-year parliamentary term.

The last time a coalition won a clear majority in an Italian general election was in 2008, when Berlusconi led the right to victory. Since 2011, there have been seven governments under six different prime ministers, two of which (Mario Monti and Draghi) were technocrats, while the other five relied upon creative and complex coalition negotiations. Compared with those, the Meloni victory promises simplicity and, at least in the medium term, stability.

In fact, Meloni’s victory largely reflects the instability of the last decade. And with Italy having been led mainly by leaders from the centre and left since 2011, it was arguably time for Italy to swing back to the right. And one of Meloni’s big attractions was that she is relatively young at 45 years old and untainted by any recent governmental decisions, popular or otherwise. The voter apathy that pushed turnout down to just 64% had a lot to do with disillusion with the old political guard.

Meloni’s most eye-catching characteristic has been fairly unimportant in her success. She leads a party that is unashamed of its origins among post-war supporters of Mussolini, the fascist dictator. The Brothers of Italy even keep as their party symbol a flame symbolising loyalty to the late Duce. Some members wear black shirts and even use the Roman salute most commonly associated with German Nazis, though it was Mussolini who popularised it.

For the time being, these neo-fascist associations are unimportant, because there is no sign of any upswell of support for violent methods or for subverting democracy. Meloni’s signature issues, which include a Trump-like ‘Italy first’ attitude towards illegal immigration and hostility to progressive social policies regarding LGBTQ communities or abortion, are essentially consistent with the programs of previous Berlusconi-led right-wing governments in 2001–06 and 2008–11, and of Lega in a left–right coalition 2018–19. Her opposition to foreign ownership of flagship national companies such as the former national airline Alitalia is also conventional.

So, despite many Italians’ disappointment that progressive social policies may now be reversed, there is little that is genuinely new in the program promised by Meloni. She will enter office not on a groundswell of enthusiasm but on a wave of disillusionment.

Unlike Salvini and Berlusconi, she has taken a resolutely anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine stance over the war, just like the outgoing Draghi. With Ukraine now making gains in that war, this is unlikely to change. Meloni may in the past have admired Russian President Vladimir Putin’s social conservatism, but she is not going to back a loser.

The big questions about the new government, at least for non-Italians, concern its economic policy. In his 18 months in office, Draghi put Italy’s economy in what might be described as a benign straitjacket: he wrote a public investment plan for Italy to receive €190 billion ($282 billion) from the European Union’s ‘NextGenerationEU’ scheme over five years, four of which still lie ahead. This entailed establishing a rigorous system for auditing and monitoring that expenditure, and agreeing to meet stringent conditions set by the European Commission before each tranche of payments is released.

As a self-declared ‘sovereigntist’, Meloni is no fan of strict conditions from Brussels. Nor, with the whole right-wing coalition backed by an array of vested interests among small and medium-size businesses, will she be a fan of pro-competition reforms or even rigorous auditing. But the large flows of cash from the EU will be crucial for Italy’s medium-term economic growth, implying that her sovereigntist instincts are set for a contest with pragmatic realism.

The new government will not be sworn in until late October and will immediately have to prepare a budget for 2023. Meloni’s choice of finance minister will be the most keenly watched appointment of all. It’s hard to imagine she will want to start her term by picking fights with the European Commission, especially with a tough northern winter of high energy prices and scarce gas ahead. But she is new and untested, so no one can be entirely sure.