Italy: God, fatherland, family and Duce in the heart

Russia's invasion of Ukraine resulted in the Western anti-Russian embargo, which in turn resulted in a whole series of side effects and collateral damage, and all of these events were largely the cause of the birth of a new star in the anti-liberal European sky: Đorđe Meloni (45). A woman who, as a fifteen-year-old girl, began her journey through various pro-fascist parties, glorifying Benito Mussolini, with the slogans "God, fatherland, family" and "Italy first", has improved the result of her party Brothers of Italy since the last election four years ago by over 20 percent and came to power.

The populist right feeds on people's existential fears, when there is no reason for fear, it invents it, and now it is quite realistic, and existential, on the rise: enormous price increases, inflation, anxiety over gas and electricity shortages...

In the winning coalition of Giorgi Meloni, the four-time "bunga-bunga" prime minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi (85), who sees himself as the new president of the Parliament, and former interior minister Matteo Salvini (49), who in 2009 proposed the "racial separation" of migrants in public transport, and now he would like to be the chief of police again if he would not kick them out of the country. That group is anti-Brussels-minded - the coalition of the Brothers of Italy, the League and Forward Italy - which demands "less Europe" and "more national state", and in which it squeaks a little due to vanity, but which will not miss the opportunity to form a government...

"Meloni won convincingly, the left alliance experienced a debacle," Sofia Ventura, a political scientist at the University of Bologna, said in an interview for the German "Spiegel".

Commenting on the direction Italy will now move, she explains that one should not equate the "extreme" right, which does not recognize democracy, and the "radical" right, which claims to be democratic because it supposedly wants the voice to be heard and the will of the people implemented, which is the case with Giorgio Meloni...

Read on full text by Andrej Ivanji in the weekly "Vreme" from Thursday (September 29)