Tomorrow, almost a hundred years after the March on Rome that brought Benitto Mussolini to power, Italy will probably have a fascist prime minister.
Giorgia Meloni says she is not and presents herself as a traditional conservative, but her party shares values and symbols with Italian fascism. Although he now denies it, he has said that Mussolini was a good politician, he admires Orban, Trump and Putin, defends the ethnic supremacy of white Europeans, considers that the euro is a mistake and that immigration “is an instrument in the hands of the great powers to weaken the workers”, he attacks Islam, “the Brussels bureaucrats” and international capital. Her rallies are high voltage, as Vox voters know.
Although she is a single mother, she vehemently defends the traditional family and denies the LGTBI community basic rights such as adoption. If she wins the elections, as the polls predict, she plans to promote a constitutional reform to strengthen the executive power, that is, her own, to the detriment of Parliament.
That Meloni is about to become prime minister demonstrates the deep decline of Italian democracy, of a country polarized to the maximum, where politics is a grotesque at times comic and at times violent, where radical ideology confronts the hobbies of the football teams football and high school students.
For two decades Italy has barely grown. Public debt is equivalent to 134% of GDP, territorial inequality is the most pronounced in Europe, the population is aging and almost one in three young people under the age of 25 cannot find a job.
Italians lost faith in traditional politicians decades ago. The mistrust of institutions is enormous. They yearn for a new face even if it is fascist.
Mussolini was assassinated and hung by his feet in a Milan square, but even today many Italians consider that his only mistake was to ally himself with Hitler. Spain and France, which have not dealt with their fascist past either, should take note.
Post-fascism was residual in Italy during the cold war, when power was monopolized by Christian democracy and the opposition was in the hands of the Communist Party. These political forces collapsed with the iron curtain and the void they left was filled by national populism, parties like Força Italia, led by tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, the Northern League led by Umberto Bossi –inspired independence of Pujolism in Catalonia– and the Italian Social Movement. of Gianfranco Fini, a fascist who was an ally of Berlusconi in three governments. Meloni worked for Fini and was Italy's youngest minister in the executive that fell in 2011.
Berlusconi, a friend of Putin, vulgarized politics and replaced debate with television spectacle. For a decade he alternated in power with Romano Prodi, leader of the center left.
Berlusconi and Prodi did not survive the euro crisis, but Italian democracy did, thanks to the pragmatism of the industrial tycoons.
However, the lack of solutions to the economic decline and social discontent opened the doors of power to protest parties such as the comedian Beppe Grillo's M5E, the ultra-nationalist Matteo Salvini's League and the Brothers of Italy, the neo-fascist force that Meloni founded. in 2012 after accusing Fini of betraying his principles.
The coalition formed by Salvini and the M5E in 2018 was unable to fulfill its electoral promises. Brussels did not allow him to increase social spending and the government failed to reform pensions or the labor market. Technocrat Mario Draghi came to the rescue. He formed a national unity government joined by almost everyone except Meloni, who had a free hand to attack ongoing institutional reforms while accusing Salvini and Berlusconi of abandoning the people.
As he gained integers, Meloni whitewashed his fascism. Today she claims to be an Atlanticist and Europeanist, a convinced defender of Ukraine and of Draghi's reforms that she criticized so much, as she assured the industrial class gathered as every year at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio. The businessmen know that it is a lie, but they support her coalition with Berlusconi and Salvini with a blind faith in the Lampedusian maxim that everything must change so that nothing changes. Meloni will not survive without her support, but neither will she without the vote of the desperate. That is why yesterday he closed the campaign among the poor of Naples.
Meloni is a farce, as are Berlusconi and Salvini. No one tells the truth, but deception is precisely what most Italians seem to want. They live in such an unreal reality that they see fascists as conservatives and failures as saviors. Italian democracy is a ruin and I wish it were at least Roman.
Another earthquake threatens Europe.
