Italian PM Giorgia Meloni (Image: Pasquale Gargano/Pacific Press/Sipa USA)

A century after the March on Rome launched fascism on the world, Italy cycles back to where it was as the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) leads the country’s right-wing coalition to a comfortable majority in both houses of Parliament, making its leader, Giorgia Meloni, the first fascist prime minister since Mussolini was deposed in 1943.

Meloni seems to have a mandate. But for what? Is it what she’s said before? Or what she says now?

When campaigning, Meloni talked down her past anti-Europe (and pro-Putin) rhetoric. She walked away from ideas that, in Italy at least, were thought too radical, like a navy blockade to stop African migration by boat. She fought the election on her party’s traditional rhetoric — “Dio, patria e famiglia” (“God, country and family”) — in an assertion of Italian identity and the predictable “war on woke”. It suggests a government that will be more culture wars than economic reform, with the usual targets: immigrants and the LGBTIQA+.

It’s less a vote for change than it’s a victory for the country’s politics of opposition appealing to the self-identifying left-behinds. The Fratelli was the only significant party to stay outside the technocratic Mario Draghi’s government of national unity, leaving it well placed to leverage unhappiness at COVID disruption and continuing economic stagnation where unemployment is about 7.9% — and about 24% among the young.

The voting surge — from 4.4% in 2018 to a provisional 26.2% this week — came off a halving of the votes of Meloni’s two right-wing partners (Forza Italia and Lega Nord) and of the anti-elite populist 5 Star Movement, the three parties that dominated the 2018 elections.

Italian parties are fluid. No surprise, then, if Meloni entrenches power by repeating the ploy of her current partner, Forza Italia’s Silvio Berlusconi, and seeks to absorb all or part of her partners. 

It’s two of the big global political trends up in lights: conservative voters are becoming more conservative — a lot more — while the post-2008 anti-politics populists are offering a bridge from the centre left to the right. Although the leading party on the left, the Democrats, largely held on to their vote, they suffered a repeat of the breakdown of British Labour’s 2019 northern England “red wall” (and US Democrats’ 2016 Midwest wall) in parts of their historic “zona rossa” in Emila-Romagna and Tuscany.

The centrist commentariat is taking comfort that the (post-)fascists will be constrained by the country’s institutions, particularly the presidency (currently held by the rigorously centrist Sergio Mattarella, eight months into his second seven-year term) and the constitutional court. The right fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority to push through changes to the constitution — at least, not without the support of the politically eccentric 5 Star populists. 

The major constraint remains the European Union. Italy sits at its core, part of both the Schengen visa-free zone and the common currency eurozone. Meloni talks the hard-right rhetoric of a “Europe of sovereign nations” and in the past she has talked about dropping the euro.

For the time being at least, economic stability will mean continuing the post-COVID “recovery and resilience plan” agreed last year with the European Commission. This includes European money for the “green transition” to build energy efficiency and renewable energy. (Apart from current renewables in hydro and solar, Italy is an energy importer.) The Italian right talks the same loose chatter as Australia’s conservatives of dumping renewables for nuclear, but it’s unlikely to be able to fund development.

Meloni has been supportive of Ukraine — lately, at least. Her radical right-wing ally, the anti-Russian Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, was one of the first to congratulate her on her win. Her coalition partners have been less reliable. Berlusconi broke ranks last week to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticise Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Europe is expected to constrain the new government, too, on immigration. Expect instead the high theatre of cruelty that makes examples of individual migrants. Australia may provide a model: Meloni has promised to deport foreign citizens convicted of crimes.

Meloni has criticised the “LGBT lobby” and “gender ideology”. She opposes adoption by same-sex couples. The election is likely to leave Italy as the only western European country to bar same-sex marriage, although, bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, the new government is expected to maintain civil unions legalised in 2016.

Italy’s dependence on the European institutions means the risk is less a break with Europe than it is that Meloni’s election will change the continent’s politics. Together with the recent success of the Swedish Democrats, it means the far right has overtaken the traditional centre right as the main conservative voice on the continent.

As it drags the old conservatives along behind it, the post-fascist right threatens to undermine the democratic Europe the global order depends on.