The campaign in Italy is on and the far right is keen to rise to power

The final phase of the election campaign in Italy began on Wednesday. Only a month away from the general elections on 25 September which could lead the government with an overwhelming advantage, for the first time in a European power, to an extreme right tinged with neo-fascism.

The protagonist of this drama is Giorgia Meloni, 45, leader of the Brothers of Italy, who denies that origin. You said the right wing left the fascist legacy behind decades ago.

But a video broadcast on the networks a long time ago disproves this. In an interview with a French television channel when he was a youth leader in 1996, he declared that “Mussolini was the best politician of the last 50 years: everything he did was for the good of Italy”. Giorgia answered speaking in French.

“I’m not a fascist,” reiterated Meloni in recent months. He probably doesn’t lie. But her party, founded by herself, was the heir of the Italian Social Movement, founded in 1947 by Giorgio Almirante, high hierarch of the Republic of Saló, the last experience of the dictator Mussolini which ended with the shooting of the Duce in April 1945 at Milan, when the Second World War was dying.

The admiral and other fascist leaders and officials created the Italian Social Movement by inserting it into the democratic experience of the rediscovered Italian democracy. On the shield of the MSI he put the initials and a tricolor flame that according to some presides over the tomb of Mussolini in Predappio, his birthplace.

The tricolor flame on the shield passed from the MSI, which broke up after Almirante’s death, to another party, Alianza Nacional, in which Giorgia Meloni joined as leader. And when Brothers of Italy were created, Meloni kept the tradition, which was confirmed in the shield of these elections, in which the tricolor flame continues to burn.

legacy of fascism

There is a tradition and a political culture that are maintained. It is useless to deny it. In no other Italian party are there so many exponents of the vast post-fascist area, greater than the Italians are willing to accept, as in the Brothers of Italy, who will surely abandon the current forced silence if Giorgia Meloni’s victory is confirmed. ordered by party leaders when the time comes to celebrate victory.

Giorgia Meloni is the mother of a little girl, Ginevra, and her partner is the television journalist Andrea Giambruno.

When Fratelli d’Italia ran for parliamentary elections five years ago, he didn’t know who his political star had an extraordinary future. A small party that got 4.3% of the votes, while Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord got 17.4% and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia 14.4%.

Salvini and Berlusconi were his oldest partners in a center-right alliance, with only Berlusconi representing a liberal conservative center. Salvini, a right-wing populist, has been able to rise to 34.5% in popularity and from there, three years ago it has dropped to the current 14%, while Berlusconi does not exceed 8%.

forecasts

Giorgia Meloni, on the other hand, watches them from the top where it fluctuates between 23 and 25% of consensus, which makes her Brothers of Italy celebrate the most important in the country.

This speaks volumes because Meloni is now fighting for primacy with the Democratic Party, the center-left leadership group. But the PD lives difficult times. In the 2018 elections it suffers an unexpected defeat and drops to 18.7%. Today he is a little better, he is assigned at 22-23%. The center-left alliance is assigned 30% by the polls.

Experts not only predict a clear victory for the right-wing alliance, which could amass up to 45-48% of the votes.

Thanks to an electoral law distorted by political maneuvers, there is a third of the seats assigned with the single-member term, outside the proportional count. The defeat of the center-left would reach disastrous levels because the dominance of the right could lead it to control up to over two-thirds of the Parliament. This would allow them to pass constitutional laws without the requirement of a confirmatory referendum.

Meloni’s big moment came in February 2021, when the economic crisis created by the pandemic that began a year earlier forced the parties to create an alliance of national unity, with economist Mario Draghi as prime minister.

With considerable political acuity, Meloni favored the solitude of the opposition, which allowed him ample room for maneuver and a rapid rise in opinion polls.

A year and a half later, Draghi’s fall sees Giorgia in the lead with over 20%. A year ago the press pointed out that polls inexorably gave the news that if there were early elections, the right would go to the government in Italy.

This trend has been reinforced. The right-wing populism of Mateo Salvini’s League has half deflated, while the largest populist party born of the 2018 elections, the 5 Star Movement, has erupted several times due to internal divisions and today polls assign it around a 10-L 11% of the votes, led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

The start of the final race which will last a month until the elections on 25 September puts a mass of party politicians in the ring, who have fought tirelessly to win their candidacies.

Things are more difficult because, due to a recent constitutional law, there are no longer 920 legislators, including senators for life and those elected in the colleges where Italians residing abroad vote.

Deputies dropped from 600 to 400 and senators from 320 to 200.

Alliance with Salvini and Berlusconi?

This drought of benches will inevitably be an even tougher electoral campaign, but also bored with discussing problems. It is likely that on September 25 the number of those who do not vote will be the winner.

The victory of the center-right alliance seems assured. But Meloni’s triumph is probable, certainly not. His most tenacious opponent is his main ally, Matteo Salvini, who was the first to take to the streets. With Berlusconi and Giorgia Salvini it was agreed that whoever gets one more vote than the others will be the leader and head of the government.

Berlusconi reluctantly accepted because today he does not reach 10% of the votes, but he firmly believes that he deserves the leadership.

Salvini has to lose 15 or 16 points to capture Giorgia Meloni and believes the effort is worth it, even if it seems impossible because it is his last chance.

Salvini is the leader of the Northern Leagues, which they were autonomists and separatists. But he had bigger ambitions and managed to turn the League into a national party. he also became one of the European sovereign leaders, what are the right-wing forces in the Union of 27 countries that want to obtain a recovery of national sovereignties that have ceded powers to the European Community.

Since 1957, the year of the birth of the Union, this path of unity has given splendid results, which the right-wing nationalists want to exchange for a Europe of homelands.

Economic crisis

If Meloni or Salvini win the question of sovereignty, of a federal Europe, the Italians could agitate the entire continent. But Italy is the largest beneficiary of the Union’s Recovery Plan, which has granted it 200 billion euros in subsidies and loans at low rates. A confrontation with Brussels would jeopardize the procurement of these essential funds.

Times are difficult because Europe is fully entering the academic year second serious economic crisis without yet having emerged from the consequences of the first, caused by the virus pandemic that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths on the continent.

This second crisis is even worse, driven by the war that Russia started six months ago with the invasion of Ukraine. Italy so far is part of the western front which supports the Ukrainians, condemns Russia and approved a string of sanctions to which President Vladimir Putin responds with his own punishments.

And in his election campaign, Matteo Salvini, accused of being pro-Russian in strict compliance, now he uses a demagogic argument to have effect: sanctions harm the West more than Russia, they are useless.

This position coincides with Putin’s line. Berlusconi’s party is against it, it defends the European and North American position. And Giorgia Meloni is silent because it is not the time to show cracks on the western front with all the spotlight on her.

Today’s concrete and desperate crisis has a name: Power. Failure to control gas and electricity prices, plus fluctuations in oil and alternatives to sanctions against Russia and the retaliation ordered by Putin, promise a hellish autumn and winter, with the price of gas already reaching 20 euros per megawatt. the year is already close to 300 euros.

plus the inflation traveling towards 10% per annum, the growth of poverty and the general increase of raw materials and food, the economy is the first big problem that Meloni will have to face if he wins the elections.

Rome, correspondent

B.C