Italy Is About To Get Its First Female Prime Minister & That's Actually Bad News
Giorgia Meloni is a fascist who is openly anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, pro-Russia and anti-EU. The election is this Sunday. Yes, the world should be alarmed.
If you put a badger into a box with a wolverine and taped it shut, you would have some approximation of Italian politics. If you put Sarah Palin into a town car with Steve Bannon and started a food fight using red wine and linguine, you would have some approximation of Italian politics. Since the end of World II in 1945, Italy has had 69 governments, roughly one per year—14 prime ministers and 19 different governments in the last 30 years alone. One party will launch into the political firmament like a firecracker, ally itself with various other parties and form a coalition, and then it will spectacularly implode. Italian political parties have a talent for self-destruction that rivals that of badly indulged, drug-addled rock stars. It’s impressive.
On 2 June, 1946, Italy bounced its royal family out of town (***knocks on window*** Hey, Britain, you awake in there?) and replaced monarchical rule with a democratic republic that, frankly, looks nothing like our two-party system in the U.S. Sure, Italy’s parliament consists of two houses like ours, in this case the Chamber of Deputies (630 of them, although that will drop to 400 due to a recent amendment to Article 56 in the Italian Constitution) and the Senate (that number will go from 315 to 200).
But only 37% of the seats in each house are directly elected by the people. The remaining 64% are indirectly elected, depending on how well each party does in an election. This isn’t completely unlike our electoral college, where Americans vote and our electors, in a sense, vote on our behalf (a vulnerability former president Trump tried to exploit to his advantage by appointing fake electors and then organizing an insurrection). Ultimately, the Italian president chooses the new prime minister and the prime minister’s council, which means—in the most Italian way possible—something as simple as electing representatives to office becomes Interstate 5 during Friday afternoon rush hour when there’s a rain storm and a tractor-trailer has jack-knifed right where Interstate 5 turns into the 605, which is of course equally gridlocked.
Italy’s political parties are as follows:
Fratelli d’Italia or Brothers of Italy: Neo-fascist rightwing. They’re about to win big.
Lega: Federalist/Libertarian rightwing with many bickering provincial factions.
Forza Italia: Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, right, but more center right. Pro: Bunga Bunga parties, but only if there are underage prostitutes.
L’Alternativa: Smallish group of populist, Euroskeptic, 5-Star rejects.
Italexit: A joke of a sliver of a conservative party that wants Italy to leave the European Union, even though that would spell disaster for the country and plunge it into a deep economic depression.
Partito Democratico: Center-left, deeply disappointing to me personally, and riven with internecine warfare.
Partito Comunista or Communist Party: All-talk-no-walk Marxist-Leninist workers’ party that at this point mostly hosts pot luck “ragers” and Che Guevara calendars.
Partito della Rifondazione Comunista or Communist Reformation Party: A party so small, it hasn’t been represented in the Italian Parliament since 2008. It is also proof that lefties are loyal only to their own ideals.
Unione di Centro or Union of the Center: Christian and social conservatives who are delusional enough to think they can productively work together. Even though they’ve been around since 2002, it is only a matter of time before they go the way of La Margherita, The Daisy, another defunct centrist party.
Potere al Popolo! or Power to the People!: Self-described “social and political, anti-liberal and anti-capitalist, communist, socialist, environmentalist, feminist, secular, pacifist, libertarian and southernist left-wing”—so, in other words, a party that has only the vaguest notion of what it stands for.
Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra or Greens & Left Alliance: A two-month-old left-wing political alliance that is already doomed to failure.
ManifestA/Unione Popolare: Neapolitan left-wing 5-Star rejects.
Cinque Stelle or Five Star: Anti-vaxx, Libertarian-at-heart, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo (the surname means “cricket,” which is what you hear when you go to a 5-Star rally these days), and massively disorganized.
Since Italy is a majority-rule political system, parties must form coalitions, which is when one party teams up with another party (or parties) to clobber a rival party. Politically, it’s like herding cats, and is the single biggest reason Italians can’t seem to get anything done to help this amazing, beautiful, magnificent country. This coalition system is also why the rightwing parties are about to take over Italian politics.
In the snap election this Sunday, September 25th, the neofascist leader of the ultra rightwing Brothers of Italy party, a woman named Giorgia Meloni, is expected to grab the top spot. Electing a female prime minister is a first for Italy, which might ordinarily be a cause for celebration (Italy has miles to go before it can claim gender parity), but it is widely believed that Meloni is masquerading as a pro-EU centrist in order to secure the vote. If she takes the largest share overall (estimates say 25%), she will be giving the neofascists the greatest amount of political power they’ve had since World War II. Her alliance, composed of Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, and her own “God, family, and fatherland” party, the Brothers of Italy, is about to be handed the reins of power at one of the most fragile moments in European history.
Despite being born and raised in Garbetella, a left-wing Roman neighborhood, Meloni has been involved in fascist politics since the age of fifteen. The opening quote of her bestselling autobiography, Io Sono Giorgia (I am Georgia), reads: “If this is to end in fire, then we should all burn together.”
Great comfort, that.
Like her good buddy, Hungarian fascist dictator prime minister Viktor Orbán, Meloni believes that EU rules shouldn’t apply to everyone. Consequently, her coalition is virulently anti-immigrant, even to the point of denying citizenship to children born in Italy to foreign parents.
In a country that’s already struggling to keep its young people from fleeing to other countries in pursuit of work, a country that has turned into a hopeless gerontocracy, a country that has near-zero population growth, that’s probably a tad shortsighted.
But immigration is what the whole rightwing sweep is about in Europe. From the ultra-nationalist Vox party in Spain, to Marine Le Pen’s bitterly anti-immigrant screeds in France, Sweden’s Sweden Democrats, ad nauseum, liberal ideals and democratic ones are losing ground at an alarming rate. It’s all a push against enforced immigration.
To be fair, Italy isn’t a multicultural nation of immigrants the way the United States is. The United States has the room and the jobs (cheap- or slave- labor is the foundational bedrock of capitalism), but places like Italy do not. There aren’t enough jobs here for everyone, including Italians. Immigrants are then relegated to picking crops or standing in front of supermarkets with a shopping cart full of cheap tchotchkes. What a horror it must be, knowing this is your life now. But Italy isn’t structurally prepared to absorb mass amounts of immigration. Italy is in ruinous debt. There are no funds for immigrants compared to France, Germany, and Northern Europe.
The immigrants themselves, of course, are desperate people fleeing violence and oppression. You would, too. Is there anything you wouldn’t do for your family? Many risk their lives coming to Europe because they have no other options. And let it be noted that the largest proportion of immigrants in western European states have come from former eastern bloc countries. In Italy, specifically, there is a huge Romanian and Albanian population, which serves the same cheap labor function as Mexicans do in America.
Per Wikipedia, “some 1,200,000 Romanians are officially registered as living in Italy, replacing Albanians (500,000) and Moroccans (520,000) as the largest ethnic minority group. Others immigrants from Central-Eastern Europe are Ukrainians (230,000), Polish (110,000), Moldovans (150,000), Macedonians (100,000), Serbs (110,000), Bulgarians (54,000) Germany (41,000), Bosnians (40,000), Russians (39,600), Croatians (25,000), Slovaks (9,000), Hungarians (8,600).” It is also estimated that around 1 million people are living illegally here in Italy, which is roughly 6% of the entire population. To be fair, Italy makes it almost impossible to migrate here legally, and they aren’t the only country that purposely inks the jurisdictional waters.
So, Meloni’s got a lot to work with. Italians are staggering under the weight of heavy taxation and sky-high energy bills. The Italian economy has flat-lined for nearly twenty years. Let’s face it—coffee bars aren’t a growth industry in a country that already has too many of them. Italians are rattled by the sheer amount of immigration they are seeing, and too many appear to suffer from collective amnesia about their recent past. Many of the same talking points Meloni uses while she’s on the stump are the ones Mussolini made eighty years ago.
Last fall, an Italian documentary made national headlines when it disclosed that Meloni’s party, the Brothers of Italy, worked in close collaboration with a neo-fascist militant named Robert Jonghi Lavarini. There were additional allegations of money laundering and illicit campaign financing, all credibly confirmed by U.S. Intelligences sources that say Russia has secretly siphoned $300 million into rightwing political parties in more than two dozen countries—Italy included.
Sating its hunger on all those tasty rubles, her coalition is nakedly pro-Russia, making it a danger to the European Union itself. If, in an attempt to curry popular support by lifting sanctions on Russia in order to lower energy bills, Italy will fracture the EU and play right into Putin’s hands.
Giorgia Meloni has made it abundantly clear that she will do anything and say anything to gain office. Whether she will be able to keep it remains less certain. If history is any guideline, her coalition government should collapse within the year.
But what then? More of the same? Or at some point will Italy shake off its learned helplessness and gimlet-eyed fatalism and demand better, more effective government?
Meloni is going to win this round. And yes, we should be afraid.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
What are your thoughts on Italian politics or politics in general? I want to hear them! Leave your comments in the comments section below.
Giorgia Meloni is what you might get if Marjorie Trailer Greene miraculously learned how to speak Italian (unlikely to happen, as she can barely speak English). Meloni appears to have all the compassion and charm that Trailer Greene possesses (which is to say none).
And there's nothing neo-fascist about Meloni and her party. She's just plain fascist and may well turn out to be Mussolini in a cheap dress. I can hardly wait to see her dangling from a lamp post- metaphorically speaking, of course. 😳
Donald Trump in a dress.