Italy: the dangerous rise of the populists

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Posted Oct 2, 2022, 12:00 PM

“You French people are very lucky. Your Marine Le Pen – even if she is making progress – is less serious and less hard-working than our Giorgia Meloni. And your Emmanuel Macron is much better than our Enrico Letta. In a few words, my Italian friend summed up what he thinks explains the divergent political developments of the EU’s second and third largest economies. But, he adds in the form of a warning, “the noose is tightening in Europe: what has just happened in Italy may very well happen again in France”.

Giorgia Meloni’s success is significant: a quarter of voters who voted did so for his Fratelli d’Italia party. One hundred years after the march on Rome which brought Mussolini to power in 1922, a party which draws its ideological sources from fascism, comes to government in one of the founding member countries of the Union. An illiberal axis thus seems to be growing in Europe, bringing together Budapest, Warsaw, Stockholm and now Rome in a nationalist and conservative vision, very far from the values ​​of the EU: in reality close to the societal visions carried by Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the States -United.

The Italians had tried everything except her

However, the financial markets do not seem to have been unduly disturbed by the resounding victory of the extreme right coalition in Italy. The first explanation for this quasi-serenity is the absence of surprise. The success of Giorgia Meloni is the chronicle of an announced victory. Its novelty has been its main weapon.

Faced with the disenchantment of an Italian society which no longer expects anything from politicians – and which has resulted in a high rate of abstention – Meloni had a decisive weapon: the Italians had tried everything except her. She had certainly held a junior position at a very young age in the government formed by Berlusconi in 2008. But she was careful not to participate in the coalition government around Mario Draghi, thus preserving her innocence in a way.

A new generation of populists

The second reason for the relative serenity of the markets is due to the cynical judgment they pass on Italian political life. Successive governments in Italy since the end of the Second World War have had an average lifespan of eighteen months. Giorgia Meloni won’t have time to do too much damage. And all the more so since the economic and international contexts strongly limit its room for manoeuvre. His coalition is fragile, with the Ukrainian question as a contentious issue: to simplify, Meloni is Atlanticist, Salvini and Berlusconi pro-Putin.

Economically, a weakened Italy needs Europe’s help more than ever. She will put water in her protesting wine. It will undoubtedly criticize the Union and support Hungary and Poland in their distancing from the principles, rules and values ​​of the Union. But above all, the pragmatic Giorgia Meloni intends to demonstrate that she embodies a new generation of populists, a culture of alternative government more than a simple culture of protest.

Could it be that we are on the eve of a handover between two generations, with, if one dares to say, an “upgrading” of the populists? The basic model, embodied until now by flamboyant, deliberately provocative and fundamentally incompetent personalities, has shown its limits.

Figures like Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil can win power, but are unable to keep it. After one mandate, they are unanimously against them. According to the polls, the only uncertainty that remains in Brazil for the current presidential elections is whether or not Lula will be elected in the first round. The “everything but Bolsonaro” is supposed to prove as effective as the “everything but Trump” was two years ago in the United States.

Vladimir Putin or the populist foil

The populists have integrated the causes of their failures and are beginning to learn from them. And all the more so since the evolution of the planet’s agenda does not really favor them. Faced with the challenges of global warming, the return of war in Europe, not forgetting COVID 19 and other pandemics, what do the Populists have to offer? They do not have – to say the least – a comparative advantage.

Worse still, Vladimir Putin, the godfather of many of them is starting to get embarrassing with his new loser profile. Their favorite agenda, that of the migration crisis, the fight against Jihad, without forgetting the denunciation of corrupt elites, has lost at least part of its relevance and topicality.

At a time when Putin threatens to use nuclear weapons against his European neighbors, the knives of the Jihadists are less fearful. In Italy, “the great replacement” is not so much that of Europeans by non-Europeans as that of one extreme party by another. The remarkable results obtained by Giorgia Meloni’s party in northern Italy were achieved to the detriment of the League (formerly the Northern League) and are particularly revealing of this phenomenon of intra-party substitution.

The Italian elections must challenge us

These variations, in the almost musical sense of the term, of the Italian electorate, should not make us lose sight of the essential. Pragmatic or not, populisms are characterized by a visceral distrust of the elites: “The people are good, the elites are bad. But also and above all, by a rejection of the values ​​of openness to others, and tolerance of differences, which constitute advances in our democratic societies. Demonstrating calm and resilience in the face of the arrival of these “new populists” is undoubtedly legitimate; to resign oneself to the fact that the future of democracy in Europe passes through illiberal democracy is not.

The results of the Italian elections should challenge the French. Especially at a time when “the left” seems to have – with the exception of a rational minority – abandoned its culture of government, and when the National Rally seeks to acquire it.

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