The unexpected ascendance of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, led by the one-time neo-fascist activist Giorgia Meloni who now stands to be Italy’s next prime minister, has some historians convinced that fascism has returned to the nation once ruled by Benito Mussolini.
While the coalition led by Ms. Meloni will be Italy’s most right-wing government since 1945, both she and her party may be best described as populist and illiberal, rather than fascist and revolutionary. In fact, Brothers of Italy espouses many of the same anti-establishment, anti-European Union, and anti-liberal ideas that are embraced by other far-right parties across Europe.
In this episode of History As It Happens, one of the world’s foremost experts on the history and ideological underpinnings of fascism, Roger Griffin of Oxford Brookes University, says students of Italian politics were expecting Ms. Meloni’s rise because populist politics have been gaining for years now.
“It’s been a long, slow buildup and people in Italy – the commentators and leftist democratic press – have been spotting this evolution for a long time,” Mr. Griffin said. “They’ve seen the middle collapse and the populist, floating voter – a fact of European politics is a lot of people are not anchored anywhere – is moving from a sort of leftist populism… but when that coalition collapsed it was in the cards that there would be a right-wing coalition.”
Although Brothers of Italy has a historical connection to post-war Italian fascists and admirers of Mussolini, Mr. Griffin said the party is not seeking to overthrow the existing democratic order. Should Ms. Meloni establish a stable coalition – never a given in Italian politics – she will be constrained by operating within a pluralistic system as well as within the European Union.
SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: Is Putin a fascist?
For more on who Giorgia Meloni is, and why Italian politics have taken a hard turn to the right, listen to this episode of History As It Happens.
