{"id":7586,"date":"2022-09-25T09:50:49","date_gmt":"2022-09-25T13:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=7586"},"modified":"2022-09-26T21:23:23","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T01:23:23","slug":"italy-fascism-for-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/09\/italy-fascism-for-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Italy: fascism for the 21st century?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Y<\/span>esterday (at the time of writing), I sent off my ballot for the upcoming Italian elections. In-person voting will take place on 25 September and the polls consistently suggest a win for the far-right Fratelli d\u2019Italia party, along with its right-wing coalition partners. It wasn\u2019t an easy ballot to fill in because there is no strong Left in this election, and not one overtly left-wing party running for Senate in my seat.<\/p>\n

The international press has often focused on the fact that\u00a0Fratelli\u2019s likely win will mean Italy will be the first major Eurozone economy to be led by the far-right, as if the worst consequences will be felt by Brussels and Frankfurt. But, if the polls prove right, it is workers, migrants, women and LGBTQ+ Italians who will really feel the consequences \u2013 and there\u00a0will\u00a0be significant consequences.<\/p>\n

How did Italy \u2013 a country that had the largest communist party in the West for much of the 20th century \u2013 get to an election where the likely-winning proposals are incredibly regressive, and the likely-winning party is post-fascist?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Left?<\/h4>\n

Italy\u2019s radical Left has been weak since major corruption scandals shattered the party system in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Outside electoral politics, there have been recent wins in the trade union struggle, such as for Amazon workers and farmworkers in the south. However, despite not suffering the same antiunion laws as Britain under Thatcher,\u00a0Italian trade union membership has declined significantly since the 1970s<\/a>. The struggle for worker\u2019s rights is not as central in the national discourse as it used to be. This has impacted election campaigns throughout Italy\u2019s financial and health crises of the last decade.<\/p>\n

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci explained how crises tended to unmask the capitalist state to reveal “a narrow clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or even stifling oppositional forces.” 1

Electorally, it is the\u00a0Unione Popolare<\/em>\u00a0who come closest to that, but it is an infant party. After the national unity government collapsed in July, the former Mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, pushed to unite several small left-wing parties under the\u00a0Unione. With such a low base of support and small apparatus, the\u00a0Unione\u00a0has found it difficult to compete with the established parties and is only polling just above 1%.<\/p>\n

Some left-wing voters see their best hope in the\u00a0Movimento 5 Stelle<\/em>\u00a0(M5S \u2013 Five Star Movement), a big-tent party set-up by comedian Beppe Grillo during the sovereign debt crisis. M5S is often labelled a \u2018populist party\u2019 by Anglophone mainstream media \u2013 sometimes a \u2018right-wing populist\u2019 one \u2013 with little attempt at further explanation. It is a bit more amorphous however, with a history of pushing forward progressive proposals like the \u2018citizens\u2019 income\u2019 (a conditional benefit payment, not unlike Jobseeker\u2019s Allowance), as well as a history in government with the right-wing\u00a0Lega\u00a0(previously the Northern League), where it was complicit in an inhumane policy towards cross-Mediterranean migrants.<\/p>\n

Its 2022 campaign has focused on protecting public services from privatization and introducing a national minimum wage \u2013 Italy lacks one \u2013 and its standing in the polls has increased as a result. But given its amorphous nature, and the fact that it has not subscribed to a holistic progressive ideology, it is difficult to predict how M5S would govern in a necessary coalition.<\/p>\n

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of\u00a0Fratelli, claims Italy has already experimented with a decade of left-wing governments because that is how she \u2013 along with much of the mainstream media \u2013 describes the\u00a0Partito Democratico<\/em>\u00a0(PD), another large party with a history of some socially progressive policies (and the indirect successor to the Italian Communist Party).<\/p>\n

The PD\u2019s program is really a pro-business one, however. Its recent Prime Ministers \u2013 Matteo Renzi and incumbent Enrico Letta \u2013 were former Christian Democrats and they raised Italy\u2019s retirement age and removed workers\u2019 protections against firing. As David Broder, Europe editor for Jacobin<\/em> who is writing a book about fascism in contemporary Italy and was interviewed for this article, explains, they lack a working-class base because:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been some decades since Italian labour has won important victories. Most working class and young people would see the [PD] as a party that hasn\u2019t brought them material benefits.<\/p>\n

[Thus,] what we see is very high abstention among working class people [and] unemployed people., even among those who voted for the first time last time.<\/p>\n

\u2026 It just means that people are unlikely to imagine that politics is going to do anything worthwhile for their participating.<\/p>\n

The populist right<\/h4>\n

The PD is thus not a party whose base lies in poorer neighborhoods. This month, those constituencies are more likely to go to the Lega (especially in the north), and Fratelli (especially south). Both position themselves as anti-establishment in order to achieve this, though only Fratelli was absent from the previous coalition government. This has given it a greater credibility and has helped it overtake all other parties in polling (where it tends to poll in the mid-20s%).<\/p>\n

Despite Meloni\u2019s rhetoric against the establishment and the powers that be in Rome, Brussels and elsewhere, her claims lack substance. Fratelli has in fact proposed numerous policies that act in the interests of capital, both materially (such as a 15% flat tax proposal) and through signaling (for instance, Meloni explained she would visit City of London financiers soon after the election). This summer, the party even considered using an algorithm to match graduates up with jobs and fine those who refused them.<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019re very much posing as a Thatcherite party\u2019, says Broder. \u2018They literally pay homage to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.\u2019<\/p>\n

While pandering to business,\u00a0Fratelli\u00a0has also used cultural attacks on what it sets up as \u2018wokeism\u2019, including gender fluidity, and rights for migrants and other LGBTQ+ people. In Marche, a region it already governs, it has even made it harder for women to access abortion medication. Despite gratifying capital, Meloni has even used the disillusionment many Italians feel with capital and institutions\u00a0to support the conspiratorial white nationalist theory of \u2018the great replacement\u2019, or as she puts it \u2018ethnic substitution\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is through these cultural attacks that Meloni has positioned the\u00a0Fratelli\u00a0as distinct from the establishment, while being careful not to threaten it in any material way. Meloni argues vehemently about the European Union (EU) for instance, calling for a system where nation-state power remains sovereign, even though that is no contradiction with EU policy.<\/p>\n