An Essay on the Italian’s Far Right’s policies
In all probability, at least for the opinion polls, today Italians will vote a far right leader in power. Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Brothers of Italy, should not be demonized as a person, not at all. After all she is passionate and a believer in her country. Instead are her policies, unpractical and too simplistic, the ones to be fought against.
Today Italians are voting for the national parliament and, as opinion polls are predicting, a far right coalition will triumph.
Technically speaking it is a center right coalition composed by three major parties, two of which, Brothers of Italy and the League, are solidly on the far right of the political spectrum while the center of the coalition is occupied by the party of fading former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia or Go Italy.
Despite losing consent amid a string of scandals with investigations and trial hitting him in the past, Mr. Berlusconi could be the king maker and ensure that a far right coalition in power maintain some pro liberal Europe positions.
While it is still astonishing and to many persons still incomprehensible how the Italians got to this sudden elections that were actually scheduled for the spring 2023, what worries me the most is the appeal of political parties who makes simplistic propositions and play with the people’s emotions.
This is particularly true for the Brothers of Italy guided by Georgia Meloni who will be probably become the next Prime Minister.
Her party was the only one that deliberately chose to stay out of the government of national unity led by Mario Draghi and now is leveraging its tough tactics and drama in the opposition to its own advantage.
While I do not have sympathies for the League and his populist leader, Matteo Salvini, at least he had the guts to be in the government in a very difficult time for the country.
Instead of banging the table and screaming and shouting slogans blaming the European Union and migrants and the globalists as Brothers of Italy did, at least Matteo Salvini decided to be responsible and influence the Draghi’s government from the inside.
Maybe it was just an opportunistic move on his side, staying close to power, after all, is far better than staying away from it.
Apparently Mr. Salvini is paying the consequences as voters’ preferences for the League are considerably down while Brothers of Italy is riding towards a big landslide.
Yet, perhaps all the forecasts are wrong and while Giorgia Meloni will do very good at the election, perhaps her coalition will not have enough votes to govern alone.
Perhaps people will understand and realize that policy making is a challenging arts and many propositions that have been made by the far right parties are actually unrealizable and totally unpractical.
Yet it is true that people are upset with what’s going on.
First Covid that massively hit the country, then the Russia’s aggression to Ukraine.
A lot of the political campaign centered on Europe and the role of the European Union.
Being Italy one of the founding members of the Union and once, one of the countries with highest support for further political integration, now we might have to deal with the prospects of having a government that will be closely aligned to Prime Minister Orban of Hungary and his peers in the Polish Government.
While it is true that the EU was very slow and ineffective at the outset of the pandemic, European leaders were able to take unprecedented steps to alleviate the suffering of the people, including the Italians who are now receiving an unprecedented amount of money from Brussels to “reform and rebuild” the country.
We are talking about a staggering amount, almost 200 Billion Euro under the so called National Recovery and Resilience Plan that is supposed to help the country modernize and covers all the areas of policy making, from physical infrastructure to digitalization to education and inclusion.
Yet almost incredibly the narrative pushed by the far right parties is that the EU is to be blamed and what is needed is a different type of Europe, one in which the member states take the lead and where Brussels is taken away from many of its competencies.
Their mantra is “less areas managed by the EU but way better managed”.
It is way too simplistic (and misleading) to propose some improvements to the European Project that is still a working in progress but, at the same time, it is vital for the progress of the entire continent.
At the same time the political manifestos of Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia that is clearly pro Europe is practically irreconcilable with the ones of its two far right allies.
While criticizing the EU for being undemocratic, the far right parties in Italy, Hungary and Poland are not proposing anything concrete, forgetting that the EU Parliament is democratically elected by the European people and it is a body that should have more powers, especially in terms of proposing new legislations.
While its competencies vastly increased in the last few years, especially in terms of being now mandatory for a wide array of issues to have the backing of the EU Parliament, still it is a body that cannot initiate legislation as a normal parliament would do.
Then why aren’t those parties screaming for more bottom up democracy at EU level proposing for an expansions of power of a body that directly gets its legitimacy from the European Demos?
Why can’t they propose to directly elect the powerful President of the European Commission, the EU executive that, in some ways, plays the role of a federal government in the making?
Issues like EU integration or immigration, another boogeyman of the far right parties, are complex to be understood and even more difficult to be resolved, especially because other nations are involved.
Yet demagogues have an easy game at accusing others and propose solutions that simply do not stand.
For example Brothers of Italy wants the EU to be turned into a Confederation of sovereign states. What does it mean in practice?
Actually a confederation is something not too dissimilar or distant from a real federation or certainly achieving such status would be a milestone that inevitably would require a much deeper integration, a process itself that, by default, would ultimately lead to a real federation.
Moreover a confederation would require, at the minimum, “united” foreign and defense policies, not just “common” ones like those being tried to be pursued at the moment, a mammoth task when member states still have a veto on foreign policy.
And you know what?
Brothers of Italy does not want to get rid of such veto while, instead, there is an increasing consensus on many fronts that doing away with it would be the only path for the EU to have a truly common (not yet unified) foreign policy.
Another contradiction: Brothers of Italy wants a stronger defense pillar in the EU but how to achieve it?
Do its members know that the EU has already a Common Security and Defense Policy, CSDP, with already a “structure” supporting it like the Politico-Military Group, the Security and Defense Directorate, the European Union Military Committee (EUMC), The European Union Military Staff, Civilian Planning and Conduct Capability (CPCC) and the Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC)?
Details are the kings and simplistic statements like “ensuring a stronger EU defense policy” do not mean anything without a proper vision and the vision for a different EU proposed by the Brothers of Italy won’t bring any positive change at the European defense level.
At internal levels, it is not that problems are not there. A country like Italy has plenty of issues but at the same time there is an intentional design at depicting a very dark image of the situation on the ground.
Sure, we should avoid an influx of illegal migrants because we would save many lives that risk to get lost in the Mediterranean Sea and do a better job at supporting developing nations.
Yet there are no quick fixes because we also know that international development aid is not a magic wand and it is a sector with many pitfalls and inefficiencies.
The problem is not the fact that extremist parties, both on the right and left of the political spectrum, emphasize and highlight real issues.
The problem is the lack of coherent remedies from their side, an approach leveraged by a sophisticated use of social media, including a high number of fake news pushing their agenda as proved by an investigation by Politico Europe.
I do not believe that neither Ms. Meloni nor Mr.Salvini are behind such deceits but what matters are the “signals” that these politicians are giving to those willing to go the extra mile and come up with extraordinary lies on the web that are going to be believed by the citizens.
We see this process unfolding in an extremely effective (and dangerous) way in India with Prime Minister Modi and his BJP party where a strong fervor for nationalism and cultural and religious identity means a different narrative about who is a true Indian.
As we all know, the same happened and is still occurring in the USA in relation to the conspiracy theories supporting former President Trump.
The same also occurred in the Philippines in the recent election and he same occurs in other countries as well.
Remarkably, we are talking about a global phenomenon.
What are the remedies to such situations that is really risking to weaken the fray foundations of liberal democracies around the world?
I would say “do less” social media but I do understand that it is too simplistic solution as well, especially when youths’ lives are so embedded with them.
Yet for sure social media have to be fixed and made really a tool to connect people for positive and meaningful reasons.
That’s why we need much more stringent regulations towards them, a much more vigorous scrutiny towards their working modalities.
But focusing on social media alone will not suffice.
We need to retool the way democracy works and make it more effective and more participatory.
We need to find ways for people to be listened and channels for them to vent out their frustrations.
We need a politics that is able to turn this anger and disillusionment in something more prepositive.
Only if we create a space for people to be able to discuss, talk and find some common grounds, then populist politicians will be forced to tone down their extremist rhetoric.
In short only more civil discussions and more awareness will take away the “license” used by the far right parties to spread their dangerous policies.
Ms Giorgia Meloni is not a monster. I truly believe she is a patriot, someone who gave a lot for her nation, someone who sacrificed a lot of her life and someone with an incredible amount of passion for politics.
Some of her party ideas are positive like support to the families but also on this case, the problem lies with the ideology behind such propositions that could, potentially, be welcomed by everyone: it is the idea that such families centered policies (obviously we are just taking about “traditional families”) are indispensable to avoid that the Italians as a group would get extinguished by a wave of migrants who settle in the country.
Actually the country is much more diverse than people might think.
In terms of diversity, be sure, that Italy is not Orban’s Hungary.
You can look at the national female volleyball team or at many young emerging basketball players who are second or third generations Italians.
Those opposing her should not attack her at personal level because, as we know, demonize a political opponent can be very counterproductive.
What is needed is to break down her policies and show how impractical and ineffective they can be while, at the same time, doing a better job at addressing the problems that are fueling the surge of the far right.
I believe Giorgia Meloni could be a great Prime Minister but with different policies, policies anchored to level of moderation that suddenly she started showing only during this electoral campaign.
It is a real pity she chose the easy way, staying at the opposition and raising her voice, turning populist and extremist for the sake of gaining political support.
But it is not surprising, after all.
We should not forget that just before the start of the Russia’s invasion, she was the one saying that “we are neither with the Ukrainians neither with the Russians. We are with the Italians”.
