What’s Happening in Italy Is Scary, and It’s Spreading
What’s Happening in Italy Is Scary, and It’s Spreading
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
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I'm sorry but does that say to weaken anti-torture? Did I read that right?
Yes, Meloni and Salvini see anti-torture laws as an unnecessary obstacle to the work of police officers. Here is an article (in Italian).
very very big yikes
The world is changing, the golden decades of our parents' post-war reality are over, the sun is setting once again on European soil.
I don't know exactly what kinds of nightmares await us in the darkness, but I do know that the bloodlust of the European populace will not be sated easily.
Expect extraordinary efforts to subdue, abuse and eventually exterminate people once again. The European populace will not be a bastion of humanitarian ideology in the face of climate migration. It will instead declare war on them, and brutalize them.
I wonder what the timeline would have looked like if European nations had gone after the banks and bankers in 2008 rather than all pushing austerity as a solution.
This stuff comes in cycles of about 100 years (interestingly there are similar sayings in many cultures about how wealth gets built and destroyed in 3 generations) and invariably when we get to the stage of things being shit for most and wealth being in the hands of only a few people, those "few people" naturally make sure there's plenty of money for politicians willing to blame the worse off for the problems of the worse off (as otherwise the many would naturally get together and take the stuff that the few have hoarded).
This is when you get the far right (remember the 1930s?!), though in the present day (maybe because this is the first time the cycle has been at a low point in an Era when Marketing and PR are based in the science of Psychology) we also seem to have a lot of the divisive fake-left (you know the kind: "the path for Equality is to treat this group defined by their genetics differently than this other group") which is doing a wonderful job of keeping the many fighting for crumbs amongs each other whilst "strangely" never, ever, EVER even mentioning the single biggest inequality there is and the pathway via which most other inequalities cause the most pain, that of wealth and the staggering differences in treatment depending on wealth.
So yeah, expect every single political idea that blames people that are not rich for the ills of society and doesn't even mention that access to resources is extremelly uneven, to "somehow" get funding and find lots of airtime in privatelly owned Newsmedia were they blame entire groups of people based on their genetics or geographical place of birth for all the problems everybody else (but the ultra-rich) have and use a handful of individual cases to "prove" that everybody who looks like that or comes from places like that are "bad people" - there has never been this much investment in hypocrisy and leading useful idiots by the nose because there has never been this much wealth at stake.
Bloodlust? Try self-preservation. It won't be long before countries will be willing to do whatever it takes to protect themselves from being overrun by migrants.
whatever it takes
like lusting for blood, for example
That makes no sense. Intentions are not actions.
The point is that you see genocide on the horizon, too. You just don't object to it.
I don't speak italian, could you tell me what stuff the article covers?
Basically a reform of the Italian penal code that would delete the dedicated articles in penal code and leave only an aggravating circumstance
Yes, but the those laws cover a lot more than banning waterboarding. Its stuff like how to search prisoners when they enter the prison system and so on. The full tile of anti-tortue institutions right now is something like "European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment". For now the problems in the EU are something that should be filed under "degrading", which is still bad but not as bad as outright torture. But if we stop caring fighting the lesser evils we might come back to a point where we actually have to fight torture.
The thing is, as long as they stay in the EU they can't do that much about it. I'm pretty sure that the EU banned torture.