ITALY JOINS THE 21st CENTURY
September 25, 2022 -Durt Fibo
To prevent everyone around me from burglarizing my home when I’m away, I shall balance this anvil atop my front door frame. When I return, happy or irate, I will fling open this stupid door, having completely forgotten about the anti-theft apparatus now embedded in my skull. Tomorrow I shall do it all exactly again. And every day thereafter.
Welcome to Italy, the land that never learns. The land of passion and bravado, which doesn’t like to end wars on the same side it began on. Where a dinner invitation to your antic friends’ homes reveals giant Mussolini calendars -not memorabilia, but for the current year. There is always a longing for that which devastated their own land.
Today’s election was the rehabilitation of Italian fascism, and the penalty for 77 years of degradation engineered by 73 (some reckon 74) centrist or rightist governments since the end of WWII, which had tried to keep the black shirted plague quarantined, but ultimately failed because of their applied negligence. The last of those was the government of Mario Draghi, which ended in July after 17 months of misery.
Draghi is a former President of the European Central Bank, and former Governor of the Bank of Italy. For his supposed financial acumen, Draghi was sworn in as Prime Minister February 11th, 2021 to replace Giuseppe Conte, who’d held the position since June of 2018. Conte had become Prime Minister when the 2018 general election gave birth to a two-headed freak of populist revolt, the coalition government of M5S (the Five Star Movement, of which Conte was a top member, and is now president) and La Lega, (the League, of which Matteo Salvini was and is the party leader). Five Star represented the disgruntled left, and Lega the demagogic right. As their election successes were roughly equal, the two biggest winners embraced and agreed to a division of duties –or unhelpful positions, as it were; Conte as Prime Minister, and Salvini as Deputy Prime Minister with the added salary of Minister of the Interior. The gene-splicing didn’t take, however, and the two strands of their original DNAs came unraveled.
Conte, a law professor who had never sought any political employment apart from his appointed membership in the Chamber of Deputies’ Bureau of Administrative Justice, was shoved into the Prime Minister’s seat as a compromise after the Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio and Salvini spent weeks wrestling with various proposed allotments of cabinet positions. Di Maio reduced himself to co-Deputy Prime Minister, as did Salvini. Salvini, as stated, also became the Interior Minister and Di Maio Minister of Economic Development, Labor and Social Policies. Salvini concentrated his energy, resources and ambitions on blocking ships of dying refugees from docking in Italian ports, and Di Maio threw his behind introducing a basic income (reddito di cittadinanza; “Citizens’ Income”), which saw 2.7 million applications pour in by the end of April.
At each stage, on each day, the two parties rejected each other based on the strengths of the multitudinous other parliamentary factions fortifying them. The party of Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli di Italia (FdI; Brothers of Italy), had been spliced in with the rightist coalition on 4.4% of the vote, but asserted itself as a party of opposition to the actual government. At the start of August, 2019, Salvini calculated that he had enough backing to rid himself of the troublesome priests of M5S and launched a no-confidence motion against Conte –obviously so that he might himself win a forced snap election. The announcement crashed the Italian stock market, Italian bank stocks went into convulsions, and Italian government security bonds (Btp) lost 240 points against German bonds. But Meloni had a cure: she whispered that her party together with Salvini’s La Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia were already numerous enough to grab the government. She was premature through, and, with the encouragement of President Mattarella, Conte simply formed a new government in alliance with his hitherto detractors, the centrist social-democratic PD (Democratic Party). But by January of 2021, the Florentine Machiavellian, Renzi, drew his own sword of covetousness and severed his PD sub faction’s connection to this second Conte government, which left it one-legged, so it fell.
Thus, February 2021 began with an exasperated President Mattarella appointing Mario Draghi Prime Minister to form a “government of national unity,” now with the active support of the PD, M5S, Salvini’s Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Meloni’s party refused to participate, which got her attention from the disheartened Italian public.
By July of this year (2022), Conte was the one voicing resentments, but he was canny enough to bundle them in complaints against Draghi’s lack of compassion for the poor, which, in fact, Draghi had previewed during his time leading the European Central Bank in a program of excising social protections for the impoverished, unemployed and even pensioners, driving poverty numbers up to historic high levels and gravely weakening states’ resources for natural emergencies. Not that these things disturbed any of the right-wing parties, as we shall see (and will always see), but they could use them as contrast to promote fantasy versions of their own alternative campaign platforms. Conte was citing the inadequacy of a 23 billion euro aid package for families and business –and another dispute we will come to. At the moment of the economic aid vote on Thursday, July 14, M5S Senate leader Mariolina Castellone said: “We are not taking part in the vote under this provision.” The party’s abstention from what had become a crunch confidence vote was a clear sign that it would be quitting the coalition with the PD. Draghi, although winning the vote, was left with a skeletal left wing, and, seeing their opportunity, Salvini and Berlusconi, with Meloni’s prompting, then withdrew their parties, thus forcing Draghi’s resignation and today’s election.
Conte’s other dispute with Draghi was regarding the war in Ukraine. Like an increasing number of the Italian populists, Conte and other M5S figures were loudly sympathizing with Vladimir Putin and objecting to the 774 million euros worth of aid Italy had given Ukraine since February 24th. Salvini has called Putin, “one of the great leaders of the 21st Century,” and La Lega signed a cooperation pact with Russia’s ruling United Russia party in 2017 to, amongst other unspoken things, fight illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism, and to end sanctions against Russia. Salvini opined that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was legitimate. Berlusconi, of course, is an old close friend of Putin. I do not have at hand records showing what financial interactions Berlusconi, Salvini, or others might have with Putin or his cohorts, but it is known that the United Russia party has signed agreements akin to the Lega pact with similar parties in Austria and France. During Steve Bannon’s 2019 tour to unite the far right groups in Europe, he scrutinized the financials of LePen’s National Front and was surprised to find that almost all its funding had come from Russians, which he feared might look bad when the Front campaigned for the coming European Parliament elections. And however well LePen might conceal it, Bannon had expressly hit Europe to unite everyone into his “Movement” [sic], which had buy-in laws forbidding financial input from non-European sources. He learned during his messianic journey that Russians had been financially carrying many of the right-wing parties. Despite finding what he considered rickety politicking by the European right-wingers, Bannon did manage to inflate himself at the time, when Eduardo Bolsanaro, the Brazilian President’s son, pledged his allegiance to the cause in February, saying “I’m very proud to join Steve Bannon as the leader of The Movement in Brazil, representing Latin American nations.” Meloni, maintained a puzzlingly hard-soft stand on Bannon’s ‘Movement,’ utilizing anti-globalist and anti-EU paranoia while calling for Italians and everyone else in Europe to “Defend our Christian identity!” and simultaneously holding membership in the globalist Aspen Institute.
Meanwhile, back in povera Italia (poor Italy), those who had broken the republic scrambled to collect all the shards for themselves. At that point Meloni quickly informed the public that under a previous agreement with Forza Italia and La Lega she alone can claim the right to be or choose the leader of a new government as head of the party with the most votes. In the long view, her posse is chattering about a potential ‘supermajority’ of two thirds of the seats in both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, which by law would allow them to alter and amend the Republic’s constitution without a secondary public referendum, as Meloni has long desired to do. She trumpeted that power aim again at Friday’s mass rally in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo; speaking alongside Berlusconi and Salvini, she inveigled the crowd to “Give us the numbers,” so that they could “do it on our own.” Naturally, much would depend on how many minutes the three could tolerate one another.
Like all political parties, Meloni’s seems to have selected ts name using an irony algorithm. Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) was co-founded by former nightclub girl Giorgia Meloni in 2012, with Berlusconi’s blessings, to include members of Berlusconi’s own Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL; The People of Freedom) who were outraged at his replacement by Mario Monti. On September 28, 2020 she was elected, by 40 parties, president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR Party), which I’ve elsewhere explained is the largest anti-European Union coalition within the European Parliament. Meloni has formally been an avowed fascist since she was 15 years old, when she joined the Youth Front of the Movimento Sociale Italiano which was created in 1946 by members and supporters of Mussolini’s Fascist Government and his last-gasp pseudo government, the nazi redoubt infamous as the Republic of Salò. One of her illustrious MSI colleagues was the granddaughter of Il Duce, Alessandra Mussolini. Alessandra, like Giorgia, was eventually absorbed by Silvio Berlusconi’s PdL, which was melded into Forza Italia (Go Italy!). Alessandra moved up to to the European Parliament in 2014 as part of the core Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty coalition made up of nationalists and neo-fascists, while Giorgia Meloni similarly followed her party’s name changes, as MSI became Alleanza Nationale (National Alliance) in 1995 (dropping the overt fascist branding), then in 2009 amalgamated with her friend into the People of Freedom and Forza Italia.
Although she was scouted and boosted by the ever salacious Berlusconi, who has a history of maneuvering showgirls into political placeholders, Meloni looks like Steve Buscemi, senza trucco (without her makeup), and thus was only able to attract attention by hustling drinks at the Piper Club, the Studio 54 of Rome in its time. But her lifelong devotion to Italy’s fascist glories and her talent for aggressive manipulation quickly convinced Berlusconi to appoint her Minister of Youth by 2008. All her official political CVs claim she was a journalist (“Professionista”, meaning under contract in print, radio, or television –mere publicity stunts are categorized separately) at various times since 2006, but the official Italian Order of Journalists for Lazio –her geographic regional base– was removed, erased, or sequestered sometime around 2021, and no proof of her purported journalism can be found. The same official biographies state that Meloni, from 1991 to 1996, earned a “Diploma di maturità linguistica from the Instituto Tecnico Professionale di Stato Amerigo Vespucci; both statements are untrue. As can be seen on the Vespucci website, this school was never a “linguistic high school”, but a state-level tourism and hotel school (L’istituto alberghiero statale “Amerigo Vespucci” di Roma). Sadly, for Meloni, her scholastic inventions have been disproved by Pagella Politica, a Milan-registered fact-checking member of International Fact-Checking Network since 2017.
Her political career was demonstrably erected on the foundations laid by Silvio Berlusconi –the prototype for Donald Trump– and Matteo Salvini, who rescued the Northern League from the insane Umberto Bossi who had started the party to fight for the independence of an imaginary north Italian land he called Padania (until he was struck down for embezzling the party’s funds), and rechristened it the less divisive Lega. Both men broadened their voting bases by assuring the people they loathe that they love them. Meloni watched carefully and learned, but she knew that, while adhering to their formula, she would have to develop a style that could flash her name like lightning in a dark field.
Without any positive programs to offer, Meloni has made her name and her life synonymous with contrarianism. Although ‘boycotting’ the government, when, on July 22, 2021 Draghi introduced a ‘Covid passport’, also known as the Green Pass, Meloni’s party alone fought against it; Meloni used the issue to promote herself and perfect her raging rhetoric, declaiming: “The idea of having to use this Green Pass to be able to participate in communal life is chilling, and the ultimate step towards the realization of an Orwellian society, It is an unconstitutional act of madness that Fratelli d’Italia rejects outright, for us individual liberty is sacred and inviolable.”
Meloni has incessantly lauded Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and early on fell mindlessly into his sales approach, holding up the soiled name of Soros as “the financier giving global support and finance to mass immigration and the plan for ethnic substitution”. Her party never hesitates to refer Soros as the “usurer.” In a February, 2020, Rome conference on National Conservatism, Meloni was a featured speaker. As a participant of the summit –or movement, rather– run under the auspices of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Meloni’s address was titled “God, Homeland, Family” (Dio, Patria, Famiglia), which was a popular fascist slogan in Mussolini’s time. A transcript of her speech, still available on the organization’s website, includes such succulent Meloni paradoxes as: “Modern national conservatism defends the identities of nations as the basis for new forms of cooperation. That is why, while defending Italian sovereignty, we cannot forget to defend Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Kaczynski’s Poland, once again under attack from the European progressive mainstream.” Anticipating the most right-wing Italian government since Il Duce, the conservative UK magazine, The Spectator, asked: “Is Giorgia Meloni the most dangerous woman in Europe?”
The paradoxes arise as quickly as she speaks She leads an anti-Europe gang in the European Parliament, but somebody must’ve informed her that Italy was now economically dependent on EU funds, so she tries to suppress her antipathy (sometimes). She was against sanctioning Russia when it stole Crimea, but for today sets herself apart from Salvini and appears to be supporting them, rapping that “If Ukraine falls and the West perishes, the big winner will not be Putin’s Russia, but Xi Jinping’s China. And those who are weakest in the West, namely Europe, risk finding themselves under Chinese influence. So we have to fight this battle.” As with all other subjects, Meloni becomes a dizzying zoetrope of caveats and alternate realities, saying at the beginning of this month that if Italy withdraws from the sanctions, “nothing changes for Ukraine but for Italy it does”, because its “credibility” at the international level would be at risk. Credibility does not fit easily with Meloni’s background. Having no genuine experience in governing, she is marching on Rome just when the country is wracked and staring into a future of no heat and no money.
Today is a celebration of the Mussolini Italy shot and beat to death but never repudiated. Both his acolytes and the mafias were the shadows which Berlusconi forged into a sun. A sun that parched the nation. Xenophobia, untenable bravado, and a manic compulsion to assign blame to another are all normal traits in Italy, but are exacerbated in people who do not know what to do in these calamitous times. Fundamentally, Berlusconi’s legacy is the destruction of culture, its total elimination. His showgirls replaced creation. As a side-chuckle he made absolute corruption a prize for clowns. Even after the EU air-dropped Mario Monti in to stomp the country into submission with his pointless austerity program (the minister in charge of pension reform broke down in tears when she attempted to announce the details of Monti’s new changes), by 2019 Transparency International’s corruption index had an improved Italy tied with Rwanda. The latest index report (for 2021) has it moved up to a tie with Poland, but still just one point above Botswana.
The archaeology of this election can be reconstructed from the bottom up, firstly through the layer showing the denudement of culture, then the ransacked social structures, leaving each citizen entombed, alone and enraged, desiring only a proximate neighbor to lash out at. The wisp of air drifting away from the ruins is the humanistic sense of self and others that once made Italy the most wonderful place to live, poor or not. The present popularity of Meloni is because she is more naturally confident than any opponents or challengers, and more fluent in details, sounding like a ‘policy wonk’ –even though she has no social policies at all– which all superficially appears as reliability. To boost her over the speed bumps of her true lack of knowledge, she has brought into the FdL 4-time ex-Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, a proven failure who was thrown out with Berlusconi when the EU imposed a salvation government on Italy. There is danger in her vapidity. She who squawks the word “nation” has nothing to bring to Italy because she herself is the result of depletion of the nation. Meloni, like all the other candidates, is running on image alone. There is nothing else.
Meloni kicks Italy into modernization, catching up with her exemplars, personifying the apolitical and the amoral, who become politicians and moralizers. Overnight, povera Italia will now with its re-found fortitude, join nations marching forward to disaster, in the vanguard alongside the former East Bloc ethno-religious ineptocracies and retrogressive nationalist autocracies, polishing their swords from Moscow to Turkey, from America to Brazil. Povera Italia voted for Berlusconi three times. Some people won’t learn.
“Nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria” (“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in the midst of misery”) — Dante Alighieri: Canto V, Inferno, La Divina Commedia.