Few Italians were surprised at who won Italy’s general election on Sunday. The right-wing coalition led by the Brothers of Italy (FdI), a political party descended from neo-fascists, took 44 percent of the vote and will almost certainly be asked to form a government by President Sergio Mattarella, once the new Parliament meets on Oct. 13. After an elaborate series of consultations, Prime Minister Mario Draghi will hand over power to the FdI’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, and her team. That should happen sometime around Oct. 27.
Meloni will be Italy’s first female prime minister. By coincidence, she will probably take office on the centenary of the March on Rome, the coup that brought Benito Mussolini to power in October 1922. So what does it mean that an ex-fascist woman will be in charge of one of Europe’s biggest countries?
Meloni argues that she isn’t a fascist anymore
Meloni argues that her party has turned away from fascism, as she has. However, many Europeans fear that the right’s victory will lead to the “Orbanization” of Italy and its transformation into an illiberal democracy, much like Hungary’s recent path.
Their fears may be exaggerated. Meloni’s popularity may not hold — and she doesn’t have much freedom to change policy.
Over the past two decades, the Italian electorate has been fickle. Parties surge to win 30 to 40 percent of the vote, then fail in government and slump in the next election. Only a couple years ago, people feared that Matteo Salvini, the populist leader of the anti-immigrant Lega party, would transform Italian politics. In Sunday’s voting, the Lega got under 9 percent, half of what it achieved in 2018 and a quarter of its vote in the 2019 European elections.
Meloni now has to govern, not just complain from the opposition bench. She has relatively little experience of government (she was a junior minister in the 2008-2011 Berlusconi administration), and her party has few people of ministerial caliber.
Meloni’s coalition partners, the Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, can provide experienced ministers, but both parties remain discredited by their previous failures. Meloni will probably fall back on suitably conservative technocrats to fill cabinet positions.
Italy is stagnating
Meloni faces the same problem as her predecessors: Italy’s 30-year stagnation. Public debt is above 150 percent of GDP. Italy is an aging society with big pensions bills. It has many people living at or near the poverty line. Tax rates penalize the middle class, but health-care provision, schools and universities are of mixed quality. In foreign affairs, relations with the European Union are tense — Salvini and Berlusconi are regarded as being too close to Russia. These are difficult policy challenges for any government.
Meloni will have a harder time addressing these hurdles than her predecessor, Mario Draghi, who was trusted by the E.U. But if she fails to deliver quickly, her party’s popularity may evaporate. One of the few hard promises that the right-wing coalition made was to abolish the “Citizenship Wage,” a welfare payment guaranteeing a financial safety net for the unemployed. The wage has been susceptible to fraud, and many Italians believe it leaves young people with less incentive to look for work. It is, however, popular in Italy’s economically deprived south. The Five Star Movement (M5S), which introduced the wage, outpolled the right in Naples and some other parts of southern Italy.
Meloni won’t find it easy to pass policy
Italian voters are transactional, like everybody else. They want to know what the government is going to do for them. But a Meloni government will have little political or economic room to maneuver.
Britain is undergoing its own crisis for just the opposite reason. There was little to prevent Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss from proposing radical tax changes, which quickly led to a big drop in the value of the U.K. pound. Meloni, in contrast, has to confront multiple checks and balances that make it harder for her government to do what it likes, similar to the constraints on U.S. presidential power.
Meloni can’t even appoint her own cabinet. Italy’s president has that role. The current president can and will turn unsuitable ministers down. And Meloni will also have to deal with her coalition partners, who are likely to be fractious. Salvini will be unhappy about the collapse in his party’s support, for instance.
Passing laws in Italy is no small feat — Meloni will have to push legislation through two equal chambers of Parliament, using procedures that offer endless opportunities for obstruction. Meloni’s coalition will have a 35-seat majority in the lower house of Italy’s Parliament and an even smaller one in the Senate.
Meloni would like to amend Italy’s constitution to introduce a directly elected president, but any such move would require a referendum, or a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Parliament. The constitution is popular with voters, and its core values are a legacy of the resistance to fascism. Italy’s E.U. membership and E.U. laws will also constrain the legislative independence of a Meloni government, but leaving the E.U. would be a disaster for Italy and is not in the cards.
Meloni can still frustrate change
Meloni’s victory will not be a new March on Rome. But LGBTQ+ rights and other social issues are not going to rank among Meloni’s priorities. In June, Meloni brought a rally of Vox, the Spanish neofascist party, to its feet with an impassioned speech in which she called for protecting the traditional family from liberals and stopping migration from Africa.
It will be hard for her to act on her beliefs — but Meloni will be able to block her opponents from making progress on theirs. It’s possible that she may move further away from her party’s fascist roots, by turning the Brothers of Italy into a conservative party like Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, the CSU. If she doesn’t, her administration may lose its way in never-ending fights over social issues and immigration and keep international commentators speculating that she is still a fascist.
Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History at SAIS Europe, the Bologna campus of Johns Hopkins University.