What a difference a few months can make.
Ahead of Italy’s election last fall, Giorgia Meloni was widely depicted as a menace. By this summer, everything — her youthful admiration for Benito Mussolini, her party’s links to neofascists, her often extreme rhetoric — had been forgiven. Praised for her practicality and support for Ukraine, Ms. Meloni has established herself as a reliable Western partner, central to Group of 7 meetings and NATO summits alike. A visit to Washington, which takes place on Thursday, seals her status as a valued member of the international community.
But the comforting tale of a populist firebrand turned pragmatist overlooks something important: what’s been happening in Italy. Ms. Meloni’s administration has spent its first months accusing minorities of undermining the triad of God, nation and family, with dire practical consequences for migrants, nongovernmental organizations and same-sex parents. Efforts to weaken anti-torture legislation, stack the public broadcaster with loyalists and rewrite Italy’s postwar constitution to increase executive power are similarly troubling. Ms. Meloni’s government isn’t just nativist but has a harsh authoritarian streak, too.
For Italy, this is bad enough. But much of its significance lies beyond its borders, showing how the far right can break down historic barriers with the center right. Allies of Ms. Meloni are already in power in Poland, also newly legitimized by their support for Ukraine. In Sweden, a center-right coalition relies on the nativist Sweden Democrats’ support to govern. In Finland, the anti-immigrant Finns Party went one better and joined the government. Though these parties, like many of their European counterparts, once rejected membership in NATO and the European Union, today they seek a place in the main Euro-Atlantic institutions, transforming them from within. In this project, Ms. Meloni is leading the way.
Since becoming prime minister, Ms. Meloni has certainly moderated her language. In official settings, she’s at pains to appear considered and cautious — an act aided by her preference for televised addresses rather than questioning by journalists. Yet she can also rely on colleagues in her Brothers of Italy party to be less restrained. Taking aim at one of the government’s main targets, L.G.B.T.Q. parents, party leaders have called surrogate parenting a “crime worse than pedophilia,” claiming that gay people are “passing off” foreign kids as their own. Ms. Meloni can appear aloof from such rhetoric, even suggesting unhappiness with its extremism. But her decisions in office reflect zealotry, not caution. The government extended a ban on surrogacy to criminalize adoptions in other countries and ordered municipalities to stop registering same-sex parents, leaving children in legal limbo.
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Journalists, too, are under pressure. Sitting ministers have threatened — and in some cases pursued — a raft of libel suits against the Italian press in an apparent bid to intimidate critics. The public broadcaster RAI is also under threat, and not just because its mission for the next five years includes “promoting birthrates.” After its chief executive and leading presenters resigned, citing political pressure from the new government, it now resembles tele-Meloni, with rampant handpicking of personnel. The new director general, Giampaolo Rossi, is a pro-Meloni hard-liner who previously distinguished himself as an organizer of an annual Brothers of Italy festival. In the aftermath of his appointment, news outlets published scores of his anti-immigration social media posts and an interview with a neofascist journal in which he condemned the antifascist “caricature” hanging over public life
This is not his concern alone. Burying the antifascist legacy of the wartime Resistance matters deeply to the Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in its fascist forefathers’ great defeat in 1945. As prime minister, Ms. Meloni has referred to Italy’s postwar antifascist culture as a repressive ideology, responsible even for the murder of right-wing militants in the political violence of the 1970s. It’s not just history to be rewritten. The postwar Constitution, drawn up by the Resistance-era parties, is also ripe for revision: The Brothers of Italy aims to create a directly elected head of government and a strong executive freer of constraint. No matter its novelty, Ms. Meloni’s administration has every chance of imposing enduring changes in the political order.
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Success is hardly inevitable. Ahead of last week’s election in Spain, Ms. Meloni addressed her nationalist ally Vox, declaring that the “patriots’ time has come”; in fact, its vote share fell and right-wing parties failed to secure a majority. Even so, Vox has become an enduring part of the electoral arena and a regular ally for conservatives. Despite their growing success, such forces have for years been painted as insurgent outsiders representing long-ignored voters. The more disturbing truth is that they are no longer parties of protest, but increasingly welcome in the mainstream. For proof, just look to Washington on Thursday.
I’d say this swing to the hard right in Europe is partly the fault of the left. In many countries left wing parties were in power during the 80’s and 90’s. During their reign they failed to properly address the immigration and integration issues that came from the previous governments inviting lots of uneducated people over from North Africa and Turkey for cheap labor. People were already raising concerns that immigrants not integrating well could lead to problems. Yet the left would always put these people down as racists and then did nothing. Lo and behold thirty years later, 3rd gen immigrants from those countries lead the stats of unemployment, high school drop out and crime rates. Even if you correct those numbers for social economic backgrounds. Yes crime rates are overall falling but the crimes committed by these groups are very visible, like for example armed robberies, break-ins, blowing up ATMs, assault and even stabbings. Plus these immigrant youths who loiter all day and night make people feel unsafe in their own neighborhood since they often harass people and participate in vandalism. And the ranks of crime organizations are filled with these immigrants. It’s not really surprising that Europe is creeping to the right even the centrist liberal parties haven’t done enough to address those concerns, they probably made it even worse since all they cared about is the economy and the stock exchange and their tough on crime approach hardly did anything.
One of the biggest problems when it comes to integration is that those immigrants were massed into certain places, usually poor neighborhoods where they formed their own somewhat closed communities and didn’t intermingle with the local population. So the local population didn’t “have to” interact with them and vice versa. So, they didn’t learn the language as fast, didn’t form connections to get somewhere… those areas plummeted deeper into poverty… which radicalizes both sides.
It would’ve been better to sprinkle them among various areas so they could have taken part in the existing communities, they would’ve learned the language faster and prejudices would’ve dissolved faster.
Why didn’t that happen? People with more money and power didn’t want them among themselves. Classism, racism and also capitalism at work. Government can try to change those but it can take decades.
Yes that’s true. Especially in countries like France and Sweden where poor neighborhoods are entirely segregated from the rest of the city. But I live in the Netherlands where social housing works different. Affordable social housing is often mixed between middle class housing. Even in those mixed neighborhoods these problems are occurring. I think the biggest root of the problem is that the governments back in the days specifically looked for very very cheap labor in Morocco and Turkey and thus the immigrants that came over were uneducated and illiterate subsistence farmers from tiny backwaters and were religious conservatives. If they only invited educated urbanites with a college degree I think the problems Europe is having now with these immigrants wouldn’t have occurred to the same degree