Two years on: what Italy's far right normalization says about Europe's future

26% of Italians voted for the successor party to Mussolini's Fascists in 2022, handing Giorgia Meloni the premiership. Since then their popularity has grown ever-larger.

I’ve been travelling through Umbria and Le Marche the past days, two lesser-known central Italian regions which were formerly the backbone of the Papal States ruled directly by the pope in Rome. During the Italian Republic both of these regions have been historically aligned with the left, similar to but to a lesser degree than Florence and Emilia-Romana to their north (the four of them were together known as the “red regions”). However in the last election in 2022, like most of Italy, they switched to voting for the far right Fratelli d’Italia (FdI - Brothers of Italy) party. Today, Marche has a president from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy, and Umbria has one from Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega.

The transformation of these two regions, and of Italy as a whole, since that shock election result in 2022 tells us much about the direction Europe is going as formerly untouchable far right parties are being mainstreamed across the continent. Brothers of Italy is the renamed (in 2012) National Alliance, itself the successor (in 1995) to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a Neo-Fascist party established by Benito Mussolini’s inner circle in 1946 after the Fascist leader was executed. FdI still has the same logo as MSI, the tricolor flame. For decades this neo-fascist party was outside the limits of acceptable political discourse, scoring well below 5% in elections. However in the 1990s Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia party brought them into a coalition, and the course for their normalization was set then. Under the charismatic leadership of Giorgia Meloni, one of the shrewdest political operators Italy has seen in modern times, the party has now far eclipsed its center-right coalition partner (Forza Italia is currently a minority partner in the coalition government with far-right Lega and FdI). Polls indicate that if an election were held today, Meloni’s FdI would get over a third of the vote - a rare feat in Italian politics that could conceivably enable them to eventually form a majority government because of the seat bonus given to the first-place party. And because of the current leadership vacuums in France and Germany, Giorgia Meloni has emerged as the most politically powerful leader in the European Union.

As has often been observed, Italy never went through the reckoning with its Fascist past that Germany did. The name Mussolini conjures up positive thoughts for many Italians (Meloni herself has praised Mussolini in the past). The Fascist symbol is still on many public buildings. But even for a country like Italy which has remained deeply conservative while its neighbors Spain and Portugal veered far to the left after the end of their dictatorships in the 1970s, the meteoric rise of a far right party with Fascist roots and a far-right Northern seperatist party that until recently didn’t think Italy should exist has shocked observers. As the rest of Europe is also grappling with a steady rise in support for the far right, it seems Italy has only gotten a head start. What’s happened here over the past decade can teach us much about what to expect in other European countries. And in these dark times, it is also interesting to observe how Italians have adjusted to, and in many cases accepted, the far right’s dominance even if they are horrified by it.