Thursday, April 25, at the national monument to Victor Emmanuel II, better known as the Altar of the Homeland. The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, goes together with the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, to lay a wreath at the monument of the unknown soldier on the occasion of the liberation festival, the day on which Italy commemorates each year the triumph against the nazi-fascism.
After dragging the controversy over the censorship of public television to a monologue by the famous writer Antonio Scurati – where he called the premier’s party, Brothers of Italy, post-fascist – this April 25, Meloni could have declared himself anti-fascist, as requested by the opposition. Instead, he subtly avoided it again. He limited himself to condemning “all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes,” an expressly ambiguous formula to please both his traditional electorate and the moderate right that he aspires to represent.
“She’s the best,” said Daniele, a gym instructor in the center of Rome, who has recently voted for the Brothers of Italy. “Everyone tries to break her, but they can’t.”
During the year and a half that he has been in power in Italy, Meloni has demonstrated his ability to balance political pragmatism and his far-right origins. She has convinced her allies in Washington and Brussels that she is a trustworthy partner on key issues such as the economy, her support for the Ukrainian cause or the exit from Beijing’s massive infrastructure plan. At the same time, with more discretion, she is imposing at home some of the identity policies defended by the most ultra-conservative parties in Europe.
“Meloni’s approach is structurally ambivalent,” explains University of Modena sociologist Massimiliano Panarari. “In Europe, he intends to show the face of the classic conservative right, while in Italy he has a program markedly more to the right so as not to deny his origins,” he adds. That is why he cannot clearly condemn fascism.”
In recent weeks there have been two very clear examples. The first has been his green light to anti-abortionists in Italian clinics. As he promised during his election campaign, Meloni has not banned abortion, aware that it would be tremendously unpopular in a country that legalized it in 1978. However, he does encourage pressure on women who wish to terminate a pregnancy to change their mind. .
It has not done so with a law announced with great fanfare, but by hiding it with a brief amendment within a very extensive package of projects financed by the European recovery plan. The amendment established that the regions may use these funds to pay so-called pro-life groups to enter the clinics where pregnant women go to obtain abortions, or to obtain information about how to do so. Instead of presenting it as a restrictive measure, Meloni defended it as a way to give women more rights. “To guarantee a free election, you must have all the information, which is something already provided for by law,” she assured before the microphones at the last summit in Brussels.
The same has happened in the communication field. Rai journalists are about to start a strike to protest the “suffocating” control of the Meloni Government over their work, ensuring that they intend to turn public television into a “megaphone” for the Executive. According to Panarari, the key to all this is “an authoritarian propensity, the daughter of an authoritarian political culture, which is also explained by the desire for revenge against a left that feels that they had been ignored.” The latest example was the censorship of the monologue of Scurati, the well-known author of a trilogy about Benito Mussolini, in a Rai program. After enormous controversy, once again, Meloni effectively went ahead by publishing Scurati’s entire text on the networks and suggesting that its cancellation was motivated by an economic and not an ideological issue, highlighting that Rai did not want to pay 1,800 euros, “the monthly salary of many workers”, for a minute of monologue.
“The last Italian leader with this communicative capacity was Matteo Renzi, but he did not have absolute control of his party, as Meloni does,” says Marco Valbruzzi, professor of Political Science at the Federico II University of Naples. “It is doing the same with the constitutional reform project for the direct election of the prime minister: it is presented as a democratic advance, when in reality it is a risk of strengthening authoritarianism.”
Valbruzzi refers to what Italians have already baptized as the premierato, the mother of all reforms, with which Meloni wants to leave his mark in Italy. This is a constitutional reform to elect the prime minister by universal suffrage with which the president intends to end the chronic instability of Italian politics, but which, according to the opposition, is dangerous, because it limits the rights of the parliamentary chambers.
All this will begin to be talked about strongly after the European elections, an event in which Meloni plays much more away from home, depending on how his allies fare, such as Law and Justice in Poland or Vox in Spain, than in Italy. . In his country, it is already clear that he will win comfortably.
