The Nice Italian Fascist

Seeing the Washington Post treat far-right Italian fascist Giorgia Meloni's "meteoric rise" towards Prime Minister as a good thing is bad enough, but it's pretty obvious that like Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Meloni is lying about being an authoritarian, and the Post is falling for the lie yet another time. 

 

The favorite to be Italy’s next prime minister has rocketed almost from out of nowhere.

Her party, until recently, was on the fringes. She was overlooked for years by Italy’s male-dominated political class. She is an unmarried mother with a heavy Roman accent, always casual and blunt, gesturing with hands to the sky, lambasting “woke ideology” and cancel culture.

By any account, Giorgia Meloni’s rise is astonishing. In a matter of weeks, if all goes as expected, she stands to become Italy’s first female leader. She’s also set a benchmark for a far-right politician in Western Europe, earning a level of power that’s been out of reach for her counterparts in Germany and France, and doing so even after the forces propelling nationalism on the continent — a migration backlash and Euroskepticism — have waned.

But Meloni’s profile is distinctive, as is the path she’s found for political success.

Amid war in Europe, she has notably avoided the pitfalls of nationalist figures elsewhere. She’s a strong NATO supporter and shows no affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin. She has pledged not to disrupt Italy’s stability and Atlantic alliances. The country, she says, won’t take some authoritarian turn.

What will surely change, though, is Italy’s tone. Meloni takes shots at the “LGBT lobby” and the “globalist” left. She highlights anecdotes about immigrant crime. She has said that “everything we stand for is under attack” — Christian values, gender norms. Some of her stances — like opposition to gay adoptions, for instance — don’t get much traction among Italian voters, but she cites them as evidence that she cares more about principles than popularity.

“In a political world where everyone’s saying one thing and doing another, our [party’s] system of values is pretty clear,” Meloni said in an interview with The Washington Post. “You may like it or not, but we aren’t misleading.”

If Meloni, 45, prevails, she’ll wind up with a hard job: running a country in a generation-long economic decline that is somewhat wary of her powers.

Those on the left have sounded the alarm, saying that Meloni could push Italy into Europe’s illiberal bloc, alongside Hungary and Poland, fighting against diversity and agitating against Brussels. Her opponents argue that her views can veer into the extreme. They cite past remarks — such as a speech from 2017 — in which Meloni said mass-scale illegal immigration to Italy was “planned and deliberate,” carried out by unnamed powerful forces to import low-wage labor and drive out Italians. “It’s called ethnic substitution,” Meloni said at the time, echoing the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

Her allies, on the other hand, say Meloni has the kind of serious plans her predecessors have lacked, and that she chiefly wants to address Italy’s economic woes. Her stump speech is theatrical, but it deals mostly with ideas about boosting investment and curbing welfare. Her party’s recently released platform has 25 proposals — everything from extending high-speed rail lines to jump-starting university research. Voters inclined toward Meloni tended to cite, in interviews with The Post, her perceived honesty and coherence as the reasons for their support.

For now, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party — the Brothers of Italy, a name that echoes lyrics in the national anthem — is the most popular in the country, favored by roughly one-quarter of voters. It has a coalition agreement with other parties on the right, giving it overwhelming odds to prevail against a fractured and reeling left. The right-wing bloc has said that the premier job should go to the leader of the party with the most votes. Still, following the Sept. 25 general election, the president, Sergio Mattarella, has final say on who gets the mandate. 

 

The bad news, Italy is about to get a hell of a lot more hostile toward immigrants, Muslims, and of course, Jewish Italians. Meloni cozying up to Viktor Orban is inevitable if she takes power, and she's already letting everyone know her government is going to target LGBTQ+ folks from day one.

Sounds like every GOP politician in America, and the Post is like "But she's different!"

No, she's not.