By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday,
September 26, 2022
You are
going to hear the F word a lot this week. I mean “fascism,” of course.
The New York Times dropped it 28
times this past Saturday in one
short article on the likely new prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni. You
see, the latest crisis for democracy is upon us. The government of the technocrat
Mario Draghi, which Italians had never voted for but which was beloved by the
EU, fell. And a government led by the Brothers of Italy, the only party to
oppose the Draghi government, appears to have been elected in its place.
The
Brothers of Italy is a Euroskeptic party, of a sort. It wants to renegotiate
aspects of the Italy’s involvement in the EU, and champion the primacy of
Italian law. It is populist and nationalist in orientation, allied at the
European level with Poland’s Law and Justice party. Although at one time it had
argued for better relations with Russia, since the invasion of Ukraine, it has
supported sending arms to Ukraine. Even though it was itself formed as the
result of a split in Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party, it has many
factions. These include market-oriented “liberal conservatives” and social
conservatives, led by an anti-abortion politician who converted from Islam to
Catholicism. Meloni’s slogan was “God, family, country.”
Overall,
as of this writing the party looks likely to have taken about 25–30 percent of
the vote. It will likely be joined in a coalition government by Berlusconi’s
more traditionally center-right Forza Italia party, We Moderates, and the other
right-wing-populist party, the Lega. Matteo Salvini, the Lega’s leader, is
expected to return to his old job as interior minister, where he will take an
overwhelmingly hard line on immigration.
It is
true that some members of Brothers of Italy trace their political heritage to a
variety of far-right groupings in Italian politics. And it is true that
scattered descendants of Mussolini have tried to run for office under the
Brothers of Italy banner — most of them unsuccessfully, though one now sits on
Rome’s city council.
But the
F word is a distraction. Youth unemployment and underemployment in Italy are so
chronic that they are driving an emigration
crisis. This exacerbates other baleful
trends in a nation that has a well-below-replacement-level fertility rate, and
that has become the chief landing zone for mass migration from across the
Mediterranean.
Christopher
Caldwell looked at the
numbers at the beginning of the Covid
era:
Almost a quarter of women born in 1978 are ending their childbearing
years childless, double the level in 1950. Every year 440,000 Italians are
born, and about twice as many die. But those numbers radically understate how
quickly the population is declining. Native Italians have been emigrating at
record rates for more than a decade—160,000 in 2018 alone. Municipalities
across the country are giving away — or selling for the nominal price of €1 —
abandoned houses, many of them quite beautiful, to anyone willing to invest in
refurbishing them.
These
are problems too big to leave festering for another generation. Italy’s
political class — and Europe’s behind it — have been unable to address this
interlocking social, economic, and political calamity for decades. In fact, the
shibboleths of the establishment — ever-closer-union in the EU is better, the
Euro is a boon to everyone — make even raising the most obvious questions about
it impossible.
Undoubtedly,
the new Italian government will be lumped in by the usual suspects as another
“crisis for democracy,” joining the popularly and fairly elected governments of
Poland and Hungary. But the truth is that the center-left-consensus politics of
the 1990s are breaking down. Wherever democratic challenge is allowed, it
comes. Italy was just the next on the list. It won’t be the last.
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