“Do you think someone would just do that? Just go into politics and tell lies?”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is one of the most important case studies for understanding the current political order. She has undergone a trajectory from controversial hot topic neo-fascist to part of the EU political furniture in under eighteen months. Her party, Brothers of Italy, sit in an uneasy alliance with other populist right and centre right parties after a tumultuous period consisting of resignations, party splits and yet another Italian technocratic government of national unity. Italy has lacked political stability since the Berlusconi years, with Meloni being the seventh Prime Minister of Italy since 2011.
The problem with Italian politics and wider EU politics, especially on the right, is that parties splinter, reform and merge frequently—leaving larger parties consisting of eclectic alliances of various former parties. Brothers of Italy is one such amalgamation, making its internal identity up for some debate. Meloni herself on the campaign trail was outspoken about the need for order and control in an unstable Italy beset by political turmoil and periodilly humiliated by the beancounters at the European Union, but many members of her party are staunchly behind the very same EU managerial projects she was railing against.
Her ascendancy within the Brothers of Italy was portrayed as a takeover by the Italian National Alliance, a party with very loose ties to the neo-fascist movements of postwar italy. Since taking power, these unacceptable connections have all but been forgotten as Meloni sheds her political skin to become the shape EU politics demands of all its leaders.
The tale of how an insurgent, fiery Italian politician with much vaunted past links to Italian Fascist parties became one of the most cooperative national leaders with the European Union is a revealing one; it demonstrates how the most extreme political rhetoric can be captured, neutered and worn like a skin-suit to create a veneer of radical change over the continuation of the status quo.
First, let’s look at Meloni as presented to us pre 2022 election, a time when she was unafraid to touch third rail issues and appeared to delve stridently into verboten topics. The Great Replacement—officially still a fringe white supremacist conspiracy theory within EU doctrine—was one of the most highlighted talking points of her campaign. A western politician not only talking about The Great Replacement but winning an election after doing so was an unthinkable pipe dream a decade ago: “Giorgia Meloni is first west European leader to believe Great Replacement conspiracy theory” reads a September 2022 story in The Times, quoting a line from her 2021 autobiography that: “Identity itself is the principal enemy that the globalist ideology sets out to defeat.” The rest of the english speaking western media were equally alarmist: “Giorgia Meloni May Lead Italy, and Europe Is Worried” reads a New York Times article from Sept.15, 2022 “The hard-right leader has excoriated the European Union in the past, and she regularly blasts illegal immigration and George Soros. But she is closer than ever to becoming prime minister.”
The Atlantic went even further the day before the Italian election, declaring “The Return of Fascism in Italy:”
Once the election had happened efforts were undertaken to allay the fears of activists and technocrats that Meloni was indeed someone who would play ball and was not the existential threat to Europe she had been portrayed as pre-election. The Atlantic put out another article the day after the election declaring “Italians Didn’t Exactly Vote for Fascism.” Quite the turn around in a three day span. This constitutes a signal from media to both their fellow journalists and the activist class not to waste their time, energy and resources attacking Meloni.
The reason why became immediately clear: her track record since being elected has been middle of the road, Brussels aligned neoliberal governance. Meloni has not curbed immigration but expanded it and sanctified it with EU partnered programs. The media, for their part, have barely been able to contain their gloating:
“Before becoming Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni was one of the most strident voices on migration in the European Union. As an opposition politician, she warned darkly of efforts to substitute native Italians with ethnic minorities and promised to put in place a naval blockade to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
During her time in office, she has taken a markedly different tack — presiding over a sharp spike in irregular arrivals and introducing legislation that could see as many as 1.5 million new migrants arrive through legal channels.”
-How Italy’s far-right leader learned to stop worrying and love migration, Politico
Other policy areas also show a great degree of alignment, she has pledged money to North Africa, fully supports the NATO line on Ukraine and Israel and has embraced the European Union wholeheartedly. She has even been credited as instrumental in brokering a deal to unlock a $50bn EU aid package for Ukraine blocked by Víctor Orban. Political conditions in Italy are somewhat similar to those I described in Poland: she is part of a broad-church party which is part of an even broader coalition and, crucially, Italy’s repeated willingness to play along with the EU Technocrats has led to a boon is EU funding—money which Italy relies on to remain solvent and is contingent on following a brokered economic plan. Financially, Italy has far more debt than the EU is comfortable with but maintains something of a blind eye as long as Italian politicians play ball—with the implicit threat of simultaneous EU funding cuts coupled with demands for crippling domestic budgetary tightening.
No Italian government can break free of this EU administrative cage without effectively detonating the current political system in Italy, but increasingly the Italian population have demanded they do so. It is clear that the labelling of Meloni as a “Fascist” pre election was not an attempt to smear her, but to bolster her in the mind of italian voters hungry to exit the technocratic EU management Italy has been under, in various forms, since the 2011 height of the Southern European sovereign debt crisis.
This debt crisis and the fallout are what made the conditions possible for Golden Dawn, a genuinely insurgent identitarian party, to take third place in the 2015 Greek general election, along with —of course— the lingering migrant crisis in the mediterranean. What happened to Golden Dawn is how truly non-regime right wing political parties are handled: sixty eight members—eighteen of them former MPs— were tried and convicted of belonging to Golden Dawn, which was redefined as a criminal conspiracy. The third largest Greek political party in 2015 was banned by 2020, its entire core membership jailed and all attempts to establish a successor party blocked by the Greek courts. The same process is currently being talked up as a solution to Germany’s AfD, now the country’s second largest political party.
Meloni is the clearest example that the global elite will frame a candidate as an extremist, an outsider—even in this case an out and out fascist—in order to capture and dissipate the political energy of their opponents. She and others like her are framed as antithetical to modern systems of government, as agents of radical change, in response to demand for such figures from native populations. This framing is not only for a domestic audience but an international one, as international right wingers were encouraged to cheer her on via the leftist media ‘meltdown’ ahead of the Italian election. What is also clear is that mass media can and does intentionally bolster certain candidates in the eyes of the public via the correct publications attacking them the correct way. Propaganda from left wing outlets is meant to appeal to a right wing audience as well; the frankly clunky shift in messaging around Meloni by The Atlantic is pretty clear evidence of this. The regime media are able to create and bolster right wing figures simply by attacking them in the left wing press. In this way, figures can easily be injected into the political right—especially with cooperation from captured ‘right wing’ media. It is Kayfabe: one side’s face is another side’s heel.
Selling Meloni as a fascist to garner appeal does, however, come with complications for Italy and the EU: it demonstrates the rise of right wing sentiment within the population and a growing disquiet about a government that is effectively stuck of rails when it comes to the structure of the Italian economy, public spending and the systems of state at large. The EU needs to retain control of its opposition and fight off any genuinely insurgent parties that would be heavily incentivised to reject the current order wholesale. This is because Italian policy within the EU frameworkis so tightly limited as to make meaningful reform impossible. Real change in the Southern European EU states has been made all or nothing—and people are getting increasingly tired of “nothing.”
The simplest way to pacify a population who cries out for old world order is to pretend to give it to them. Governments reneging on promises is what politicians in a democracy do as a matter of course, populations expect to be lied to to a degree. Selling a neoliberal functionary as a fascist radical to head off the popular demand for fascism is merely the logical endpoint of that.
“Democracy is a system in which the elite promise things to the voters which they don't believe in and won't do, in pursuit of office. Then they do what they want.” -Peter Hitchens
The strategies to contain insurgent right wing parties with mass popular support preoccupies the mind of many within the EU and global elite; here in the UK Matthew Goodwin, for example, is pushed as a right wing dissident, but in 2011 authored a report entitled Right Response: Understanding and Countering Populist Extremism in Europe which we have used as an example in our other work. His report, and many like it, advise a mix of strategies to take up the space that popular right wing ideas inhabit, one of which is outright adoption of their message to occupy the political space they inhabit.
Meloni is the outgrowth of these strategies, she is the endpoint of a strategy of adoption by which you have a paid up member of the elite class placed at the head of the supposed insurgent right wing. She could not be a clearer example.
What is the only way to fully guarantee you win a horse race? You buy all the horses, and shoot those which cannot be bought.
This is hegemony manifest. As the fate of Golden Dawn and the possible fate of the AfD demonstrates, if a political party is truly a challenge to the regime, you will not be allowed to vote for it. There is no such thing as a truly dissident political party—or at least not for long. Here in the UK the BNP was hounded out of existence via the leaking of its membership and systematic harassing of individuals even tangentially related to it by the British state, media and state funded activists / NGOs.
The existence of the ‘Neoliberal Nazi’ is another in a long line of demonstrations that ideology is post hoc to power. They can just say anything because they believe in nothing; Meloni is a power pragmatist. She is just another EU technocrat caretaker, but the way she has been framed has defused anger about the governance of Italy from Brussels and spread confusion within the Italian right who thought their moment had finally come. The power of our elite is not in their control of events, of which they have varying degrees, but in their framing of events. They do not need to be all powerful to shape reality because our current reality is largely shaped by mass media propaganda—an area they demonstrably have a high degree of coordinated control over. The methods of government did not change in Italy, only the framing around them did. Meloni is an empty suit, she is a technocrat mannequin with a swastika scrawled on her forehead for style points.
These figures exist in much of Europe: Geert Wilders is a populist firebrand currently rowing back on his harder-edged rhetoric in attempts to form a coalition government that is going nowhere. Previously he was portrayed as a fringe figure who would be too dangerous to be allowed near the levers of power, and his victory in the 2023 Dutch election was once again portrayed as a massive victory for the European right—and yet he has so far been unable to form any kind of government. These are some of the same mechanisms we discussed when we spoke about why it is impossible to “Take over The Tory Party” as an insurgent force: you do not subsume the regime, they subsume you.
There is an air of performative failure around the compromises Meloni has made. She is meant to be an exercise in discrediting popular right wing ideas as unfeasible in reality, or as the smug Politico piece puts it: “fiery rhetoric yields to the cold practicalities of governing.” The “cold practicalities of governing” are always portrayed as the same thing: consensus neoliberal democracy led by supranational organisations. The official line goes that this is indeed the ultimate form of government and all politicians who try to mess with this perfected formula are defeated by reality, just ignore the ever louder cries of those subjected to this form of government—the very dissatisfaction that led to a supposed fascist being electable in the first place.
The ruling political elite in a democracy are highly incentivised to adopt the rhetoric of popular political outsiders, even if it is antithetical to them, in order to retain power. As they are the ones in power, they can go back to the populace and say that they have tried to implement these popular ideas but they simply do not work in practice. Meloni, Wilders and Sunak with his deliberately ill fated Stop The Boats push are examples of this. Our political elite act like a child picking and smashing another child’s toy, only to sneer and declare it was always broken. The current toy they are smashing is immigration control.
Adoption also allows you to tweak unpalatable aspects of popular messaging in order to defuse it. Even during the most fiery moments of her campaign, The Great Replacement theory Meloni espoused is a limited version of the original framing: Meloni is hardly ever described as Anti-Semitic not only because of her vocal support for Israel, but because of the stripping out—in her version—of the ethno-religious aspect to the original telling of who is doing The Replacing. Meloni was able to adopt, tone down and gain political capital from what was previously seen as the most extremist right wing rhetoric out there. In government, she was able to claim she still held these same ideas, but that the compromises needed for practical governance make them impossible.
The Great Replacement is now just another background talking point in Italian politics, it has been defanged. How can immigration control advocates claim they are being excluded from the machinery of government if that machinery claims to agree with them? The same thing is happening to a degree to the previously fringe ideas of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, and why concepts like The Cathedral and Managerialism can end up on Tucker Carlson, in the pages of Jewish news and culture magazine Tablet and be parroted by the likes of Vivek Ramseyway. Neoreactionary thought was previously the preserve of figures like Nick Land and the Yarvin inspired fever dream that is his book The Dark Enlightenment—but NRX has now put on a sweater and gone on TV. This is why Elon Musk can repost what were previously considered fringe hardcore white nationalist figures and why Richard Spencer can end up as a CNN pundit: what is said and what is done are entirely different things.
In Meloni World, media hyped racist and former EDL front man Tommy Robinson waves an Israeli flag and tells you to allow yourself to be arrested. In Meloni World, Nigel Farage is the last hope for the British right, despite having boasted about destroying the parts of it to the right of him. In Meloni World, people funded by The Tory Party are the most visible right wing critics of it. In Meloni World, you will be presented with a photocopy of your favourite online dissident stapled over a managerial apparatchik and told that you have attained victory.
They will say anything to remain in power, they will especially tell you what you want to hear, because words mean nothing. If you can be placated by mere words then you are doomed to live in Meloni World forever, voting for the fourth term of the Ultra Mega Nazi Party and still getting 1.4 million migrants a year. The permanent bureaucracy, the nuts and bolts macherary of state, is where power is held. The framing around that machine does not matter; the machine can be painted any colour the ruling elite class want and be called anything they want because it is the function of the machine—and their oversight of it—that matters. That is their power, not the window-dressing of electoral politics or the abstract fart-in-the-breeze that is The Political Discourse™ or The Overton Window™. No regime has ever been overturned using The Overton Window™ because it is fugazi, as Meloni rightly demonstrates. If pushed, the regime will give you abstract victories to extract concrete compromises.
That is the essence of Meloni World: the current ruling elite understand what real power is and, crucially, what it is not. That is why they are in power and how they remain in power. Until dissident forces can differentiate victory from containment, co-option and appeasement, victory is impossible.
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I did Have similar toughts way before in the later years of Trump presidency. We hear all the time that the media is losing legitimacy, but the reality is that media haters just read different from media supporters, and the media knows this and plays this to their advantage.
"it demonstrates how the most extreme political rhetoric can be captured, neutered and worn like a skin-suit to create a veneer of radical change over the continuation of the status quo." Brilliant!!
They (Politicians) are all skin-suits, a parasitical bureaucracy, whose goal is to suck the life from the plebs, enriching themselves and their masters as they do so!