A petite woman. I flew with him from Brussels to Rome in the spring of 2021.
He was returning from his European Parliament contacts in Brussels.
He was wearing ordinary sports trousers, a gypsy-pink tunic, and sneakers, as he usually does. She wore long blonde hair and minimal make-up.
If you didn’t know Meloni at all, you might think she was an ordinary traveler.
There was a female assistant and a gentleman with her.
Even then, when the Draghi government was in place, Meloni; He was the main opposition leader and was known to be a possible future prime minister in Italy. However, throughout the flight, no one treated him like a privileged passenger. He never said, “Do you know who I am?” didn’t get in the mood.
This is how post-modern fascism can present itself as ordinary, everyday, quite “one of us”. This is the most dangerous part: “Oh, it doesn’t look threatening at all!” you can think. I know I caught myself thinking that way several times during that trip.
Meloni fascist? Is it possible to compare today’s fascism with the fascism of a hundred years ago? Confused about Meloni as can be.
In the tables where the election results are announced, for example, the “right coalition” led by the Italian politician continues to be referred to as the “centre right” due to conditioning or “normalization” efforts.
However, there is no one in the center in Meloni’s coalition.
The pendulum is back
The “Lega” led by Salvini, allied with Giorgia Meloni’s “Fratelli d’Italia/Italy’s Brothers” party, which became the 1st party with 26 percent of the votes, is on the right as Meloni.
The “Forza Italia” of former Prime Minister Berlusconi, who is notorious for corruption scandals and gifted Meloni to politics during their government, is also the third partner of the coalition.
None of them have anything to do with the centre-right.
A Mussolini fan, Meloni first appeared on the political scene as “youth minister” in the Berlusconi governments.
Berlusconi also brought the post-fascist origin “Italian Social Movement” party, which had been kept away from coalitions until those years, to power partnership for the first time under his leadership.
He legitimized the aspirations of fascism, who were excluded from politics, by bringing them into the mainstream with his own hand.
In this respect, the September 25 elections present a picture in which the “center” has completely disappeared.
Charles Kupchan, an expert at the influential US think tank “Council on Foreign Relations”, draws attention to this most worrying aspect of the elections and says that “the moderate center that embraced the most fundamental values of liberal democracy has evaporated and melted away”.
“The pendulum is back. We thought that with the victories of the SPD in Germany and Macron in France, the far-right and populisms were curbed. We were wrong. As we saw in the last Swedish example, there is a clear rebound. The most concrete example of this is that a party whose roots are clearly based on neofascism is the first party in Italy under the leadership of the right coalition.”
You have the right, the left
his castle is empty
Stefano Feltri, one of the writers of the “Domani” newspaper, who draws attention to the same issue in Italy, writes that many things have already changed since 25 September:
“Some things have already changed (since the election)!” he adds:
“The right marching to the prime minister knows that there is no competitor of the caliber to compete with it from now on. We have a new right, but not a new left.”
“How should the left versus the right restructure itself?” debate will stagnate.
The “Partito Democratico/Democratic Party (DP)”, which fell short of all expectations with 19 percent, fell 7 points behind the FdI and immediately entered the “new leadership debate”, caused a serious disappointment.
So much so that there are those who say that DP gave the victory to Meloni on a gold platter due to lack of foresight.
One of them is the famous thinker Massimo Cacciari.
“What is the point of not coming together with other forces of the left, while persistently drawing attention to the threat of fascism during the election campaign, like the DP, in the face of the declared victory of Meloni (months, years ago)?” Cacciari asks angrily:
“At the time of Mussolini’s fascism, both monarchist and revolutionary communist fought with a common front of resistance. This was not done today. A front of democracy could not be established against the right. Left, pear stalk, grape litter, decomposed. And he lost all credibility.”
Anger is high among the social democrats.
The party that has changed 9 leaders in the last 15 years, with the future 10th leader, will it be a cure for extinction?