Italy lurches to the far-right as Giorgia Meloni takes power
There’s a reason one woman is being described as “a danger to Europe”. Her fascist roots and radical far-right beliefs have many worried.
A woman who believes in a wild conspiracy theory about the “great replacement” and who wants to outlaw surrogacy just took the helm of one of Europe’s most powerful democracies.
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Eurosceptic populist Brothers of Italy party, swept to victory in general elections over the weekend.
It puts the one-time Mussolini admirer whose party tried to cancel a Peppa Pig episode featuring same-sex parents on course for a history-making achievement.
But at the same time that Meloni becomes the first woman to lead Italy, she simultaneously pushes the country as far to the far-right as it has been since WWII.
The implications of her victory will not be truly realised for some time but critics say it is all bad.
The Atlantic has described her victory as “the return to fascism in Italy”.
The Guardian says Meloni is “a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe”.
Before we look too far forward, let’s first look back at some of the reasons people are worried.
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‘It’s called ethnic substitution’
Benito Mussolini declared at the height of the National Fascist Party in 1927: “The entire white race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of colour that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.”
The closest Italy has come to echoing those remarks was in 2017 when Meloni used the phrase “ethnic substitution”.
“What we have seen in Italy — 500,000 immigrants in three years — is, here, too, a planned, willed invasion,” she said.
“The reason they bring (them) in is to have a cheap workforce for big capital … It’s called ethnic substitution, and we won’t allow it.”
She has tweeted her thoughts about it on numerous occasions since 2017.
As The Washington Post reports, Meloni believes mass-scale illegal immigration to Italy was “planned and deliberate” and that it was a plot to drive Italians out of the country.
Her controversial remarks range from immigration to race and gender.
She once told Italian television program Le Lene that she would “rather not” have a gay child.
In a 2019 speech that went viral, she rallied against anything that does not resemble the nuclear family.
“No to parent one and parent two, we defend our names because we are not codes,” she said.
“I am a woman, a mother and a Christian and you will not take it away from me.”
Adoption, euthanasia and same-sex marriage are also on the list of things Meloni is against.
The New York Times reports that her culture spokesman urged state broadcaster RAI in recent weeks to get rid of an episode of Peppa Pig because it featured a bear with two mothers.
The Meloni team called it “gender indoctrination”.
They said same-sex adoption was being presented as some “normal” when “it’s not”.
On the matter of surrogacy, Meloni’s thoughts are very clear. On Twitter, she shared an image of a baby’s hand with a barcode and the words: “Surrogacy is an abomination that wants to reduce human life to a bargaining chip.”
She concluded that a “rented uterus is a universal crime”.
La maternità surrogata è un abominio che vuole ridurre la vita umana a merce di scambio. Firma anche tu la petizione a sostegno della nostra proposta di legge per rendere l’utero in affitto reato universale👇https://t.co/bGaHuziOFzpic.twitter.com/piDEWwHm3k
— Giorgia Meloni 🇮🇹 Ù† (@GiorgiaMeloni) November 20, 2021
Italian author Roberto Saviano wrote in The Guardian that Meloni’s admiration for Mussolini is only ever just below the surface.
“Meloni’s real beliefs and goals may not appear exactly the same, but her words can often carry echoes of Mussolini,” he wrote.
“Her speeches play on the need for identity, on the very human fear of being marginalised or going unrecognised.
“In her hands identity becomes a propaganda tool for dividing the world into Us and Them, where ‘they’ are LGBTQ+ communities, migrants or those who don’t see themselves represented in established structures or the labels imposed by others.”
Italy’s most right-wing government since WWII
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, which has neo-fascist roots, is set to win around 26 per cent of the vote from Sunday’s election, while her wider coalition secured a clear majority in parliament.
With former premier Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini’s far-right League, they will now begin forming the most right-wing government since World War II, a process likely to take weeks.
Meloni’s success represents a seismic change in Italy — a founding member of the European Union and the eurozone’s third-largest economy — and for the EU, just weeks after the far-right performed strongly in Sweden’s elections.
Meloni used her first public statement to emphasise unity, saying she would govern “for all Italians”.
But the 45-year-old, whose party has never held office, has huge challenges ahead, from soaring inflation to a looming energy crisis and the war in Ukraine.
Congratulations flooded in from Meloni’s European nationalist allies, from Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to Spain’s far-right party Vox.
“Meloni has shown the way for a proud, free Europe of sovereign nations,” Vox leader Santiago Abascal tweeted.
But Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares warned that “populist movements always grow, but it always ends in the same way in catastrophe”.
— with AFP
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