The political laboratory of Brothers of Italy

A group of three pensioners enjoy taking the fresh air in Piazza Roma, in the center of the Adriatic city of Ancona.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 September 2022 Monday 11:44
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The political laboratory of Brothers of Italy

A group of three pensioners enjoy taking the fresh air in Piazza Roma, in the center of the Adriatic city of Ancona. They have fun watching a group of teenagers with raging hormones. Others listen to rap while taking a few puffs. The little ones drag scooters. The cafes are overflowing.

It was in this same square where, on August 23, the candidate of the Brothers of Italy (HdI), Giorgia Meloni, kicked off her electoral campaign. She “she filled everything with buses that brought people from the towns. What I remember is that he screamed a lot, a lot!” emphasizes the eldest of the group. Will they vote for her? It seems that she will win the elections, hand in hand with the League and Forza Italia. "Never! She is very dangerous. I know what fascism is, I lost my aunt”, indicates Aldo, at 86 years old.

Meloni did not choose Ancona by chance. This pretty port city is the capital of Marche, a region in central Italy ruled by HdI's Francesco Acquaroli since 2020, and seen as a laboratory for the politics of the far-right party preparing to rule Italy. Las Marcas was considered a fief of the left, but the internal fights for power between different sectors of the local Democratic Party (PD) favored the right-wing coalition to prevail.

Acquaroli's candidacy had already generated controversy. A year before the regional elections, he participated in a dinner in the town of Ascoli Piceno commemorating the anniversary of Benito Mussolini's march on Rome.

"The first HdI electoral boom was not in Umbria or Abruzzo, it was in the Marches," boasts Carlo Ciccioli, leader of the HdI group in the regional Parliament. One of the problems that the party drags, like any other party that has gone from 4% to 25% of the vote (according to polls) in five years, is the lack of a ruling class. From the box in the Piazza de Roma, Meloni evoked a model of government that could be transferred to Rome. In Las Marcas, in his opinion, it had been shown that "the ruling class of HdI is perfectly capable of giving the answers that the left has not been able to give in decades."

“The Marches had never told anything in Rome, but since Acquaroli is here, we have told a lot,” says Ciccioli, noting that reconstructions of the 2016 Amatrice earthquake – which also hit this region – have begun and have been stopped for years. "But we are also building large infrastructures, much needed in central Italy, such as a new hospital, a suitable variant for the port of Ancona that we have been waiting for 30 years - he points out - we are going to build a motorway to Tuscany".

The Marche model that has shaken the Italian electoral campaign has been quite another. The press has reached the withdrawal of regional sponsorship to LGBT Pride. Or the statements of the president of the Equality Commission, who, when she came to power, proposed favoring women to shorten their working hours so that they could spend more time in the kitchen.

But above all, the biggest controversy has been the decision of the Acquaroli government not to apply a directive from the Ministry of Health that extended the period in which the abortion pill RU-486 could be taken. In other regions it is possible up to the ninth week of pregnancy, here up to the seventh, which makes it very difficult for a woman to arrive in time to abort with the pill if she discovers her pregnancy late, taking into account the week of reflection mandatory by law. Nor can it be supplied in clinics, only in public hospitals. Everything is complicated because 70% of gynecologists are objectors. In the province of Fermo there is no doctor in the hospital willing to perform an abortion. You must travel to Macerata.

“They are incapable of governing. The Las Marcas model is a model that has not only made it more difficult for women to abort here than in Texas, but it is also destroying the economic and health fabric. They have burned 1,000 jobs in an Amazon logistics hub”, denounces the representative of the PD Manuela Bora. Because of her ideas, anti-abortion groups sent her 1,450 diapers, one for each abortion that had taken place in the region in 2019. “The most serious thing – she remembers – is that they were given to children.”

The Brothers of Italy version is completely different. Ciccioli replies that in no case have they restricted access to abortion, and that the decisions about the pill had to do with "the safety of women." He has already made headlines by going so far as to speak of an "ethnic substitution" of Italian children in schools. He insists on it: "I started from a problem in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in the port of Ancona where Italians must go to other neighborhoods because they are a large minority."

A psychiatrist by profession, this local leader started out in politics in the youth of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement. On the distant Christmas Eve of 1975 he fired five shots in the heart of Ancona, wounding a communist militant. He now hopes that Meloni will soon be Italy's prime minister. "She has a determined character and she does not allow herself to be distracted by what happens around her", values ​​one of the first who followed her at the birth of HdI in 2012.

There are still some tourists wandering in front of the church of San Domingo in the Plaza del Plebiscito, although there is no one on the beaches anymore. The beach bars are closed. At the port, the noise of a huge Greek ferry startles a woman waiting for the bus. Several dozen people line up outside a local Church that distributes food in an alley.

"I am going to vote for Meloni," says Paolo, a commercial. “She is consistent and says things as they are. In the region they are not doing badly”, he indicates. Her partner will also bet on her. “The abortion thing? There are more important things, like bills.”