Italy is often thought of as a political laboratory, anticipating events in other countries: fascism in the 1920s; the showman-businessman turned politician in the 1990s; populism in the 2010s. Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of pundits and, increasingly, politicians, it suggests that the far right can become more moderate when in power. Both views are misleading. While Meloni has proved to be shrewd on the national and the international stage, she is also operating in a country where the normalisation of the far right has been advancing for decades.
Italy after the Second World War had a unique political landscape. It was home to both the most powerful communist party in Western Europe and the most successful right-wing parties that openly identified with a fascist forebear. Communists were always excluded from power at national level, but the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), formed in 1946, was also outside the arco costituzionale. (In fact, a capacious reading of the 1948 constitution, which prohibited the refounding of the Fascist Party, could have resulted in the MSI being banned.) It brought together Italians nostalgic for fascism – whether for the early days of fighting or the paternalist modernisation drives of the 1930s – as well as those mourning the abolition of the monarchy following a referendum in 1946. The party’s flame symbol was widely understood as referring to the eternal fiamma above Mussolini’s sarcophagus in his home town of Predappio. The letters MSI could be read as M for Mussolini followed by ‘sì!’, as an abbreviation of his name, or as an allusion to the puppet regime set up by the Nazis after 1943 and nominally led by him: the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, better known as the Republic of Salò. The MSI’s founder, Giorgio Almirante, was a veteran of Salò and editorial secretary of Difesa della Razza during the ventennio, the twenty dark years of fascism.
In the 1950s MSI leaders, pursuing the strategy of inserimento, tried to present the movement as a legitimate partner for other parties. The Christian Democrats, who were in government continuously from 1948 until the early 1990s, relied on its support only once, in 1960, prompting widespread protests that forced the resignation of the prime minister, Fernando Tambroni. The postwar anti-fascist consensus seemed to hold across the major political divides, but the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s led to the collapse of what is now called the First Republic. The only parties left untainted were those that had been excluded from government: the MSI and the successors to the Communist Party, which had been dissolved in 1991. By that time, a dapper young man, Gianfranco Fini, had replaced Almirante as leader of the MSI. Fini promised to rejuvenate ‘fascism for the year 2000’, which didn’t stop Berlusconi from endorsing him when he ran for mayor of Rome in 1993. This was the first and, in retrospect, decisive stage in the normalisation of the Italian far right. Berlusconi soon decided to form his own party, Forza Italia, conceived by his companies’ marketing departments and modelled on a football supporters’ club – a move motivated, above all, by his desire to use public office to keep himself out of prison.
An unlikely alliance brought Berlusconi to power in 1994. In the north he partnered with the secessionist Lega Nord, whose founder, Umberto Bossi, said that it was ‘the party of those seeking to continue the partisans’ struggle of liberation against the partitocracy. Never with the fascists!’ In the south he partnered with the MSI, the fascists Bossi condemned. Berlusconi’s government lasted just eight months, but the missini had been brought into the system for good. In 1995 they renamed themselves the Alleanza Nazionale. The AN’s strategy was to distance itself from the ventennio while simultaneously trying to discredit the postwar anti-fascist consensus (as so often, the right portrayed itself as a victim – in this instance of self-righteous communists, or what Meloni today calls the ‘anti-Italian left’). Fini was still prone to making occasional statements such as ‘Berlusconi will have to work hard to prove that he can make history like Mussolini.’ But he stopped addressing people as camerata and announced that his party was not neofascist, but post-fascist – like all Italians, he said, since fascism constituted their collective heritage.
Fini’s gestures towards moderation culminated in a 2003 visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, where, wearing a kippa, he declared that fascism had been an ‘absolute evil’. That same year he floated the idea of giving voting rights to immigrants. For hardliners this was too much; Alessandra Mussolini claimed that Fini was betraying her grandfather’s legacy and left the party. In another sign of his new-found respectability, Fini became president of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, in 2008. The next year the AN was absorbed into the Popolo della Libertà (PdL), co-founded by Fini and Berlusconi. Soon after the merger, Fini accused Berlusconi of having moved too far to the right and founded a new party, Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI), which failed miserably at the polls. Berlusconi used the power of his media empire to hound Fini out of politics. Fini had hoped that the PdL’s most talented young politician would follow him into FLI. But Giorgia Meloni stuck with Berlusconi.
Meloni was born in a bourgeois neighbourhood in Rome in 1977. Her mother was on the right; her father had left-wing sympathies. He abandoned the family when Meloni was one, an experience she credits with making her tough. A few years later, according to a much repeated story, she and her sister accidentally set fire to the family apartment, forcing her mother to sell up and move to the working-class neighbourhood of Garbatella. Meloni has made much of the hardships of her youth. (Her autobiography, Io sono Giorgia, sold 150,000 copies in its first year, an unusually large number for an Italian politician.) As a teenager she was bullied for being overweight. While her mother made a living by churning out more than a hundred romanzi rosa under the pseudonym ‘Josie Bell’, Meloni took on jobs from babysitting to working behind the bar at the Rome nightclub Piper. She studied languages at a tourism school, setting her up for her assured appearances on the international stage: perfect, impassioned Spanish when giving a speech against LGBTQ rights in Marbella; perfect, nuanced English when paying tribute to the political philosophy of self-declared Burkean ‘national conservatives’.
At fifteen, Meloni joined the Fronte della Gioventù, the MSI’s youth organisation. She became leader of the AN’s student wing four years later. These youth organisations were more radical than the mother parties, more open in their worship of Mussolini, and didn’t shy away from violence – they were also themselves subject to violence from the left, which created martyrs still celebrated today. A French TV report on the 1996 election shows Meloni organising a group of young activists, almost all men, in Garbatella. Wearing a black leather jacket, she tells the reporter in passable French that Mussolini had been a good politician because everything he did had been for Italy. Later in the clip, she appears under a poster declaring Mussolini ‘uomo del popolo’. Two years later she was elected as a councillor in Rome; that same year she founded the Atreju Festival, named after one of the heroes in Michael Ende’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story, an enduring influence alongside Tolkien (MSI activists had set up a Camp Hobbit in 1977). The festival continues to be held, featuring international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán and inevitably – or so it feels nowadays – Elon Musk.
By 2004 Meloni had been elected president of the AN’s youth wing, the first woman to lead any such political organisation in Italy. She entered parliament two years later and was soon appointed vice president of the Chamber of Deputies; she also joined Berlusconi’s cabinet as minister for youth, making her the youngest minister in Italian history. When a clearly fading Berlusconi cancelled the PdL primaries and declared himself prime ministerial candidate in the 2013 election, Meloni quit the party alongside Ignazio La Russa, an MSI veteran. They founded Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), taking its name from the beginning of the Italian national anthem. The party won 2 per cent of votes in the election, ending up with nine deputies.
The following year Meloni took over the leadership of the party from La Russa (today he is president of the Senate and occasionally boasts about the Mussolini busts in his living room). She was re-elected in 2017 by delegates to the party congress, without a vote from FdI members. As the political scientists Salvatore Vassallo and Rinaldo Vignati stress in their illuminating book, which was called Fratelli di Giorgia in the Italian edition, the FdI is extraordinarily centralised, and its rules about internal democracy – fairly weak in any case, given the absence of a proper law on political parties in Italy – are mostly ignored. Key positions are held by figures who joined the MSI in the early 1990s; there are no real factions or infighting.
The guest of honour at the 2014 party congress where Meloni became leader was Almirante’s widow, Assunta. Meloni herself insisted at the congress that she would ‘never presume to be on the same level as Giorgio Almirante’. Soon afterwards the FdI obtained the rights to use the MSI’s flame, which had appeared in the AN’s logo but not the PdL’s. ‘The flame remains to recall our genesis,’ Meloni declared, ‘but with an eye on the future.’ Yet, as Vassallo and Vignati write, at first the party’s programme didn’t diverge greatly from Berlusconi’s (it even included elements of Catholic social thought, the legacy of the once dominant Christian Democrats having been scattered across the political landscape). It wasn’t long, however, before Meloni made a decisive turn to far-right populism, with its predictable features: nativism, Euroscepticism and an identitarian view of Christianity (as she writes in Io sono Giorgia, ‘the Christian identity can be secular rather than religious’). In other respects, the ideological mix was less conventional. At the party’s 2013 gathering in Rome, images of John Paul II, Thatcher, Gandhi and Mother Teresa were projected beside those of bona fide fathers of fascism such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti. The 2022 congress displayed cardboard cut-outs of Hannah Arendt, the Fellini collaborator Ennio Flaiano and Pasolini, whom the FdI has claimed as a conservative. The official line became that the party wasn’t post-fascist, but afascist – another not so subtle distancing from the anti-fascism of the First Republic.
The FdI doubled its vote share in the 2018 election but was overshadowed by the triumph of Matteo Salvini’s Lega (which had dropped the ‘Nord’) as well as the strong showing of the Five Star Movement (M5S). Salvini had abandoned Bossi’s secessionist agenda and even apologised for the Lega’s comments about southerners. He was appointed interior minister of an incongruous coalition between what were often described as right-wing populists and left-wing populists, headed by an independent, Giuseppe Conte. Salvini’s draconian measures against migrants ended up dominating the headlines. In the summer of 2019, with the Lega leading the polls, he overplayed his hand by leaving the coalition. He had intended to trigger an election; instead, President Sergio Mattarella brokered a coalition between the M5S and the centre-left, followed in 2021 by a coalition of almost all the parties, headed by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank.
Vassallo and Vignati argue that conventional accounts of FdI’s success in the 2022 election need to be treated with caution. It was in 2019, they point out, that the Fratelli began rising in the polls. Still, some of the commonly cited factors were surely relevant. Meloni followed the path beaten by Berlusconi when her fiery speech at a rally for ‘Italian pride’ in 2019 – ‘I am a woman, a mother, an Italian and a Christian ... you won’t take it away from me!’ – was turned into a techno song. What had been intended as an attack on her became a wildly popular meme. Far more important, the Fratelli was the only party that didn’t join Draghi’s coalition in 2021 (Meloni said that ‘North Korean conditions’ had to be resisted). As the only source of opposition, she was well placed to capitalise on discontent with anti-Covid measures, which were especially tough in Italy after the traumatic experiences of places such as Bergamo.
Also significant was Meloni’s decision to tone down her anti-EU rhetoric in the run-up to the 2022 election. In 2017 the FdI had called for a ‘controlled abandonment of the Eurozone’ and for Southern Europe to be compensated for its suffering during the Eurocrisis. But following the agreement in 2021 of a €191 billion package for Italy as part of Brussels’s post-pandemic Recovery and Resilience Facility, it was clear that maintaining a hostile stance towards the EU would be political suicide. Meloni, in other words, profited from what is now often called ‘anti-incumbency’ sentiment and then, once in power, from access to the money her predecessors had negotiated (never mind that Italy might not have the administrative capacity to spend it all).
When the Fratelli first entered the European Parliament, they joined the European Conservatives and Reformists (in part because the Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck for Meloni: a savvy member of the FdI positioned her as the new leader of the group, which helped her appear to be centre-right – even if far-right parties such as Poland’s Law and Justice, Spain’s Vox and the Sweden Democrats are ECR members. She has often said that were she British, she’d be a Tory.
Her victory in 2022 led to warnings about a ‘rebirth of fascism’, but Meloni didn’t have to do much to prove the pundits and left-wing politicians wrong. In contrast to Salvini, who has a long history of pro-Putin statements, she supported Ukraine. She also made overtures to Ursula von der Leyen about working together on migration, a strategy that has resulted in the EU’s paying €255 million to Tunisia’s authoritarian, openly racist president, Kais Saied. While the number of people entering Italy actually increased during Meloni’s first year in office, it fell by more than half in 2024. Tweaks to the law have made it more difficult for NGOs to operate in the Mediterranean: they can carry out only one rescue operation before they must return to port, and are only allowed to use ports in the north. Italian judges blocked Meloni’s plan, backed by von der Leyen, to ship asylum seekers to Albania, where Italy has built detention centres that can hold up to three thousand; she responded by removing the case from the jurisdiction of the judges, and in January an Italian navy vessel transported 49 migrants to the centres.
The story of the FdI tends to be subsumed by the conventional wisdom that a ‘wave of populism’ is washing over Europe. But the strategy of doubling down on far-right rhetoric originated with Berlusconi. By 2022, the EPP leader, Manfred Weber, was appealing to Berlusconi as a reliable centre-right leader who would rein in the post-fascist upstarts; few seemed to recall that in the late 1990s the EPP had refused to admit Forza Italia because it was clearly a right-wing populist party. Berlusconi was also the first prime minister to include in his cabinet a veteran of Salò, Mirko Tremaglia, euphemistically referred to as ‘l’ultimo ragazzo di Salò’. What looks like a dramatic win for the post-fascists has in fact been a result of major movement within the right-wing bloc: the right as a whole won a greater share of votes in the 2008 general election than in 2022. The simple fact is that the Italian right, unlike the left, has always managed to come together for elections, with the exception of 1996. At the same time, competition between parties has provided an incentive to push ever further right within the bloc: when a reporter suggested to Meloni that Salvini was more right-wing than she was, she responded that ‘no one is further right than me.’
Vassallo and Vignati concede that the FdI is characterised by nativism and populism, and recognise that it is now the ‘third party of the flame’ (after the MSI and the AN). Yet they reject the ‘fascist’ label. In their view, the FdI is Italy’s first genuinely ‘national conservative’ party. It’s true that the kind of culture war Meloni has been waging is no longer alien to the centre-right. She vilifies the ‘LGBTQ lobby’ and has passed a law making it illegal to have a child through surrogacy outside the country (it has never been legal inside Italy). She also keeps insinuating that the ‘armed left’ is in cahoots with the multinationals and the grande finanza whose agenda is to destroy all local identities. According to one of Meloni’s ministers – who happens to be the former partner of her sister, Arianna, the party secretary – the aim is nothing less than the ‘ethnic substitution’ of real Italians. (This is where Atreju comes in: the hero of The Neverending Story fought against the forces of the Nothing, shorthand for the eradication of identity.) Meloni says she opposes abortion because her mother came close to having one when pregnant with her; she has claimed that the multinational forces of the ‘indistinct’ have as their ‘real, unstated, goal ... the disappearance of women as mothers’. This rhetoric is all the more charged because the leader of the opposition, the Democratic Party’s Elly Schlein, has a female partner. (‘I am a woman,’ Schlein shot back, ‘I love another woman, and I am not a mother. But that does not make me any less of a woman.’)
Italy is 87th in the global rankings for gender equality. The few women in Meloni’s cabinet have posts traditionally associated with women, such as the renamed ministra per la famiglia, la natalità e le pari opportunità. Meloni has also made a point of being addressed with the male article as ‘il presidente del consiglio’. She dismisses feminism as ‘a left-wing ideology harmful to women because it advocates for gender quotas in candidate selection and the introduction of gender ideology into schools’. Her government has increased support for working mothers and, in the vein of other natalists like Orbán, tax relief for large families. Yet despite the incessant invocations of ‘Dio-Patria-Famiglia’, the birth rate has fallen to a historic low.
Meanwhile, pro-market rhetoric and calls for lower taxes – so far, all talk and no action – have been combined with unashamed clientelism. The balneari, who hold ludicrously cheap concessions to operate twelve thousand lidos along the eight thousand kilometres of Italy’s coastline, have been sheltered from EU attempts to create more competition. The signature legislation of the M5S, the reddito di cittadinanza, has been repealed. Sometimes mischaracterised as basic income, it was essentially a modest social benefit of €750 per month for the worst-off – four million people in total, two-thirds of them in the south. Meloni claimed it had mostly gone to migrants or was ‘pocket money’ that kept healthy 25-year-olds from getting a job.
When economic miracles don’t happen, the right resorts to culture war. Previous governments tried to place partisans in cultural institutions; it was the former Democratic Party prime minister Matteo Renzi, a populist manqué, who gave the government the power to appoint the head of RAI, the public broadcaster. But changes at RAI have been so rapid and thorough that it’s now derided as ‘TeleMeloni’; RAI journalists went on strike last year over the government’s ‘suffocating control’. Even more ominous, Meloni sued Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah, for libel after he called her and Salvini ‘bastards’ following the sinking of a boat of migrants. He was found guilty in 2023 and ordered to pay a fine. Meloni and her lieutenants have also tried to claim large chunks of traditional Italian culture: her former culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, hailed Dante as the father of right-wing thought.
Since coming to power Meloni has made aggressive use of decrees and votes of confidence to keep members of her coalition in line. But she has also promoted a long-standing goal of the MSI and the AN: the introduction of a presidential system. (At present the president is a nominally neutral figurehead appointed by parliament.) She isn’t the first person to point out that it’s dysfunctional to have two legislative chambers with equal power. But her solution is for the prime minister to be elected by a direct vote. Such a system has only been tried once before, in Israel from 1996 to 2001. No one considers that experiment a success.
Under Meloni’s proposals, which were approved by the Senate last June, the coalition that backed the winning candidate would also automatically obtain 55 per cent of seats in parliament. It’s unclear whether these changes will happen. If the bill fails to get a two-thirds majority in both chambers, as seems likely, the reform will have to be put to a referendum; such votes often become occasions to voice discontent with the sitting government. It’s equally unclear how far Meloni will go in resisting EU regulations in Italy. She is promising to follow the model of the Polish far right by having the judiciary determine whether regulations are compatible with ‘principles of sovereignty and democracy’. Such national checks would be the end of the EU as a supranational enterprise.
For a while, Meloni looked like she might become a de facto leader of that enterprise: close to Trump and especially Elon Musk (to whose Starlink system she has been trying to commit Italy), the only European head of government at the inauguration, she promised to be the bridge between Europe and the second Trump administration. Speaking at the American far right’s major annual gathering, CPAC, in February, she implored her audience not to consider Europe ‘lost’ and to defend the ‘West’ from the ‘globalist’ left that hates freedom and distrusts its own people – echoing J.D. Vance’s incendiary rhetoric at the Munich Security Conference. But she also sent a message to Trump, stressing the need for a ‘just and lasting peace for Ukraine’ and warning of ‘trade clashes’ that would play into the hands of non-Western powers.
Trump’s apparent realignment with Putin has made her transatlantic balancing act much more precarious. Salvini, seeing an opening to reassert himself, has come out blazing for MAGA geopolitics; meanwhile, Meloni has stuck with her support for Ukraine, but also made it clear that there will be no Italian troops on the ground there (Italy’s military spending is far below the 2 per cent of GDP to which Nato members are officially committed). Her calls to keep the West together now sound desperate; she has had to cede the European stage to Starmer and Macron.
In retrospect, the 2022 election may have marked the end of a period of exceptional electoral volatility, during which a tripolar political system seemed to be emerging. It was Salvini who brought voters with populist inclinations back from the M5S to the right, while the M5S itself has moved to the left (while refusing that label), restoring a bipolar system. Interestingly, there is no longer any real north-south divide within the FdI electorate – a significant difference with the MSI, which was always much more popular below the Gothic Line.
Does that mean Vassallo and Vignati are right to see the Fratelli d’Italia as a genuinely national and more or less normal conservative party? It depends on whether one finds it normal that the leader of the party tweets about Soros being a ‘usurer’, that the party’s youth wing enthusiastically read the works of the interwar fascist philosopher Julius Evola, and that, every so often, someone in the party brings up the spectre of ‘ethnic substitution’. But for many on the centre-right in Western Europe today, such things are no longer abnormal.
