Relax, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers aren’t fascist

Relax, Italy’s next PM Giorgia Meloni isn’t fascist. By Greg Sheridan.

The apparent election to government of Giorgia Meloni at the head of Brothers of Italy is an earthquake in European politics but probably a minor earthquake. First, this label of far right. It’s increasingly meaningless.

As a young person, Meloni was a member of the Italian Social Movement, which was set up by people who had been fascists in World War II. It then gave birth to the National Alliance. Meloni, as part of that, was a capable minister in a Berlusconi government a decade ago. In 2012 she founded the Brothers of Italy, a name she took from the Italian anthem.

Ever since the second world war, Italy’s so-called post-fascists have behaved democratically and according to all the rules. The party Meloni now heads has been through several evolutions. She and her colleagues say the Italian centre right has “handed fascism over to history”. She condemns absolutely anti-Semitism and any breach of democratic rights.

That the most powerful European and American media continue to label parties such as Meloni’s as far right indicates double standards and an intensely illiberal desire to eliminate from public debate all the issues Meloni and her colleagues raise. The German Social Democrats emerged out of more extreme Marxists. Half the parties on the French left have communist roots but they are never labelled far left. Sinn Fein is the biggest party in Northern Ireland and will furnish the province’s chief minister. Only a few short decades ago it was directly supporting terrorism. …

Meloni’s program is a perfectly legitimate centre-right amalgam. She wants more police, less crime, cost-of-living relief, control over illegal immigration, lower taxes, reassertion of traditional Italian identity, support for moderate conservative social values and more independence from the dictates of the EU. She wants to address the energy crisis in part by increasing the supply of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. …

In a famous 2019 speech she declared: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m Christian, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, they won’t take that away from me.”

That sounds, and is, a declaration of independence from woke ideology. …

On another occasion Meloni described the EU as “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance”.

Sometimes the words international finance can be code for anti-Semitic hang-ups. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

She has endorsed the idea of the “Great Replacement”. This holds that Europe is being intentionally flooded with immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East to change its demographic and cultural identity forever. …

The EU has indeed been extremely foolish in attempting at times to force European countries to take immigrants they don’t want. European voters hate this. It has been an abject failure of European politics, in which the EU bears a huge portion of blame, that many European nations have been unable to control immigration from North Africa and the Middle East. …

Britain’s whole Brexit project was driven in part by a desire among British voters for their government to control the nation’s borders. European courts and bureaucracies, which under Brexit ought to have no influence on British law, are still interfering with Britain’s efforts to do this. …

Rich countries ought to be generous to refugees and host a sizeable refugee intake. But it is unrealistic, and at the level of the real world actually in my view immoral, to suggest that the whole of the population of Africa and the Middle East which would rather live in Europe is free to do so, provided they can physically get there. That is the practical outcome of an open-borders approach.

The ABC News last night mentioned several times that Meloni was “far-right” and associated her with Mussolini (every Republican candidate for president is Hitler, and every Italian conservative is Mussolini). But they didn’t once mention that she was going to be Italy’s first female leader. Can you imagine them omitting the “first female” tag on just about any other accomplishment?

Democracy is working in Italy. This is what you get when the globalist ruling class flagrantly ignores the people’s desires and interests on big issues like immigration.

However, the lesson from Sweden and Italy seems to be that it takes large numbers of non-working immigrants hanging around making life dangerous before the electorate will vote decisively against the ruling class.

hat-tip Stephen Neil