Meloni makes no secret of her heritage. Anti-fascism is a matter of fact

According to the New York Times and Roger Cohen, Meloni has one thing going for her that cannot be faulted. She is not a fanatic. She is not particularly dishonest, beyond the usual political propaganda – a trait common to everyone, with its exaggerations and understatements. She emphasises her political and cultural heritage – in which, incidentally, she is not biographically steeped up to her neck; far from it – and she emphasises being part of that Italian right wing which for a long time lay outside the constitutional spectrum but evidently had something to say beyond its own history and proto-history. Opinions on Giorgio Almirante are divided – as is only natural – due to his open association with the worst aspects of Mussolini’s ‘Repubblichina’, his umpteenth ethical and political disaster, a harbinger of civil war, following the assassination of Matteotti, the ‘fascistissimo’ laws, the racial laws and the treacherous entry into the war alongside Hitler. 

It must be acknowledged, however, that for many decades the members of the Italian Social Movement and their leaders, including Almirante, were part of the parliamentary Republic, with their past—to put it mildly—being somewhat ambiguous, and their present gradually normalising.

It must also be acknowledged, in light of the story of Renzo De Felice and other decisive developments, that not all critics and ideological enemies of fascism – whether ‘eternal’ or not, it matters not – were up to the task they had taken upon themselves. And the experience of this newspaper – anti-fascist yet not blind to reality, capable of accepting, encouraging and incorporating contributions and ideas from the ‘sewer’ right, which has always been excluded from the mainstream media, and strengthened by its deliberate exclusion of the ‘Guareschi-style’ right, genuinely but not obsessively anti-communist, suggests that the process of legitimising that facet of the nation’s and the Republic’s early history had, at the very least, a purpose and a direction that did not compromise with the worst of the fascist past; in certain respects, it took the form of a liberating cultural turning point.

Cohen was absolutely right to subject Meloni to a sceptical, disenchanted, yet not hostile scrutiny. He hit the political nail on the head. The unpalatable right-wingers – both far-right and centre-right – who do not support pro-Ukraine Europeanism, but rather campaign for the autocrat in Moscow, who couldn’t care less about Western unity, stability or public finances, not to mention due process, and who have a long way to go to conform to a culture of governance and mainstream stability policies, point to the reassuring example of the Meloni government for electorates whose republican loyalty is far from certain. Marine Le Pen promises to enshrine her extremist views on immigration in the constitution via a referendum, and seeks in the Italian experience an ethical shield to push through the exact opposite of what she stands for. Meloni presents herself, in practice, as the conservative turning point that does not bow down before the grim and stubborn rebellion against the welfare state and the finest achievements of an open society, without renouncing its best qualities. And the first real – albeit grotesque – example of a resurgent right-wing movement within an anti-establishment sphere is a wedge designed to pierce it, to strike at it, to sully it politically, to manipulate it with slogans and traits of genuine ethical and social unpresentability, the sort of thing that makes one long for the ‘woke’ movement that has been cast aside – shunned with haughtiness and self-indulgence – by the ideological left of few rights and many punishments. A profession of anti-fascism in the form of a forced renunciation, rather than in the normal manner reflected in the numerous public statements and actual conduct of the Meloni government – something a certain ‘assembly-style’ left has been demanding of her with futile and clumsy insistence for years – would be evidence of a process that is insincere, weak and disingenuous. Cohen notes that Meloni lacks vision; he may well be right, or it may be a Weberian advantage (“those who want visions should go to the cinema”, as the professor used to say), in the light of which the girl from Garbatella is not forced to put on a mask and systematically refuses to do so.