The first thing a fascist does who uses democracy to try to gain power is to deny that he is a fascist. “Fascism has been history for decades,” Giorgia Meloni (Rome, 45 years old) said during the Italian election campaign. The next step of post-fascism consists of throwing oneself into the winds of modernity typical of social evolution and allowing oneself to be rocked; mix with the Democrats and empower a woman to hunt in that female electoral preserve that would hardly elect a man whose speech vented about cutting rights to those of her gender. It happened with Sarah Palin and her tea party in United States; with Marine Le Pen in France; with Pernille Vermund in Denmark; and, despite reaping strident failures, with Rocío Monasterio or Macarena Olona in Spain.
The truth is that Giorgia Meloni, the candidate of the Brothers of Italy, heir party to the National Alliance and the Italian Social Movement (MSI) -founded in 1946 after the death of Mussolini-, can become prime minister in the general elections on Sunday . Things from Italy.
Meloni’s formation leads the polls with more than a quarter of the intention to vote, to whose credit the singular growth in support operated among the female electorate must be taken into account. In the 2019 European elections, 50% of the votes for Brothers of Italy came from women, thirteen points more than those received in 2014. The female support for the ideas of Giorgia Meloni is more striking the more one thinks that we are talking about a A state in which equality laws always arrived at the wrong time, politics is tremendously patriarchal and only one woman is president of the region. However, the harsh reality is that in the two areas where Meloni’s party shares a government, many women who wish to interrupt their pregnancies must travel to other areas to acquire the abortion pill. Meloni represents, therefore, the opposite of feminism.
Although no articles of hers are remembered beyond what was written in media related to the National Alliance, the biographies of Giorgia Meloni present her as a journalist. Ideologizing journalist, in any case. The coming-out at the age of 15 in the youth of the MSI already pointed ways. His awakening to adolescence could have been like that of so many young people heading towards adulthood dazzled by the symbology of fascio and the Hugo Boss uniforms of the SS, only to discover, before the age of 18, that this was nothing more than the glitter of puberty. But Meloni remained firm in that path traced decades ago by the Black Shirts of the Duce, in which a part of Italy has been traveling for a long time to no one knows where.
Black shirt, lambskin. In addition to denying the importance of her ideology, the leader of the Brothers of Italy has tried in this campaign to sweeten her message with the old tactic of confronting ideas in the same speech; denying some things to reaffirm others; confronting concepts so that they do not seem what they really are to be confused among the bunch of undecideds; discarding some options in favor of others; and introducing the ingredients in the same shaker in order to achieve a combination to suit any palate. We will tell people what they want to hear and when they want to hear it.
We did not see the most obvious implementation of this strategy in Italy, but last June in Marbella, where Meloni spoke at a Vox rally during the Andalusian campaign: «Yes to the natural family, no to LGBTi lobbies; yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology; yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death; yes to the universality of the cross, no to Islamist violence; yes to secure borders, no to mass immigration; yes to the sovereignty of the peoples, no to the bureaucrats in Brussels; and yes to our civilization, and no to those who want to destroy it».
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Originally from Garbatella, one of the most degraded neighborhoods in Rome, Meloni grew up in a humble family, an emigrant from Sicily and with a single mother abandoned by her husband. She broke up with her father very soon, when she was barely 11 years old, and she found in the neo-fascist youth “a larger family than mine of origin,” she says in her autobiography. In public office since she was 21 years old, her emergence has occurred, like so many European populisms, in the shadow of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Prior to both events, in the general elections of 2018, Brothers of Italy obtained just over 4% of the votes; the polls give him between 24 and 26% in the voting next Sunday. She has no qualms when it comes to stringing together her anti-immigration policy and a few weeks ago she broadcast on networks the video of the rape in the middle of the street of a Ukrainian refugee whom she described as “an asylum seeker.”
History condemns us to repeat our mistakes and Italy is no exception. As if he had returned to the loop that began after the end of the Second World War, with Mussolini shot and his body hanging on display in Milan’s Loreto Square, a victory by Meloni threatens to make Pavese’s maxim come true, confined in 1935 by antifascist: «The future will come from a long pain and a long silence».