The real question about Giorgia Meloni, the overwhelming winner of Italy’s general election, isn’t whether she’s a fascist in sheep’s clothing. She’s not. She does not have a major policy solution that hasn’t been tried before… and failed.

The key to her political identity is who she beat and why.

She didn’t just beat the Democratic Party, whose leader, Enrico Letta, told voters it was a straight choice between him and her – only to see voters emphatically reject him.

She also beat her right-wing rivals, Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini, obtaining 10 per cent more votes than both of them put together. She trounced Salvini, growing her vote at his expense.

Hers is the only political party that increased its vote, exponentially, since the last general election. Technically, the Democrats increased their vote by a sliver but had disappointing results. The rest slumped.

In part, she won because she’s not an utterly new kind of politician. She’s a familiar figure, not just to Italians but to the EU. Her voters know that the EU has managed to live with, on and off, politicians like her for a long time.

Yes, Meloni has been less than critical of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. But she’s condemned the invasion of Ukraine. Besides, years ago, Berlusconi’s praise of Putin was oilier. Gerhard Schroeder, ostensibly of the centre-left, was downright sycophantic. As chancellor, in 2004, he called Putin a ‘crystal-clear democrat’.

We have to see what she’s going to do about irregular immigration. But, in 2009, Berlusconi’s Italy practised illegal interception at sea and, more recently, the Lega’s Salvini also took a hard line.

Malta’s policy on sea rescues, in practice, has also been scandalous, especially in the last couple of years. But the pandemic was good enough cover. This, too, the EU has so far lived with.

But isn’t she fascist? Isn’t that shocking and unprecedented?

Meloni’s slogan – God, Country and Family – was indeed used by Benito Mussolini. But it’s also been used, and still is used, by many other figures and institutions, conservative and liberal, from the 19th century through the late 20th.

In the British Conservative Party today, there’s a small high Tory faction – hardly fascists, given their emphasis on a small state and tradition – whose motto is Faith, Flag and Family. No one objected.

When Osama bin Laden was assassinated on the orders of Barack Obama, the coded transmission confirming the kill began with “For God and country”.

A version of the slogan – For God, for Country and for Yale – is even an informal motto of that liberal bastion, Yale University. It’s carved into several buildings and chanted during sporting encounters with Harvard.

Many commentators have pointed out, correctly, that it’s not the same thing when a slogan used by Mussolini is re­itera­ted by a direct descendant of Italy’s first post-fascist party.

We have to see what she’s going to do about irregular immigration- Ranier Fsadni

Meloni has exploited the wide range of meaning of the slogan. She’s enabled far-right voters to read what they want into it while arguing that the slogan has roots in 19th-century Italian nationalism.

Her success, however, isn’t that she fudged the slogan. She’s managed to make it come across as anti-fascism. You must listen to her speeches to see how she made “God, Country and Family” sound like a clarion call for equality.

Her political opponents on the centre-left naturally think of themselves as the champions of equality against nascent fascism. But she’s managed – hats off to her political skill, even if, like me, you detest her politics – to make them sound like a sinister alliance of state and corporate power using censorship and bullying tactics.

When she says “God”, her voters hear someone who wants to defend freedom of conscience and of religion, not someone trying to impose doctrine on others.

When she says “country”, they hear someone ready to defend national interests in European discussions – patriotism rather than far-right nationalism. She’s said she wants an Italian government to behave like the French and German governments.

When she says “family”, her voters hear her say that the tail should not wag the dog: it’s one thing to live and let live, it’s another for a minority to dictate to the heterosexual majority how a woman or a mother can describe herself.

She’s achieved this rhetorical success partly through mendacity. For example, she has misrepresented draft European Commission guidelines, on communication for its own employees, as a brazen attempt to eliminate Christian names and abolish Christmas throughout the European Union.

That document said no such thing. Not even close. But even the Vatican fell for it and that counted far more than Pope Francis’s recent veiled warnings against the far-right.

The Democratic Party didn’t help itself either. Letta is a thoughtful politician with a firm grasp of policy details. But he played into his opponents’ caricature of him. In the debate with Meloni, he crossed his arms and listened like a headmaster. He looked like someone who only pretends to listen.

Worst of all, his own party is obviously internally divided. It could agree only that it opposed Meloni. There was no big idea that summed up what the Democrats stand for.

Meloni won because every other major rival was rejected – having been tried and tested before. She won because an increasing number of Italians can’t be bothered to vote while a plurality of those who do are ready to try anyone.

The meaning of her victory cannot be understood if you look only at her meteoric success. You need also to look at the meteoric success of her anti-establishment predecessors… and how they crashed in just a few years.

She must know she risks the same fate. Whether that makes a more dangerous, reckless politician – ready to try anything herself – or a more flexible one is the real plot line in what is to follow.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.