As Fascist takeovers go, it’s been a bit of a fizzer: no Marches on Rome, no Blackshirts running riot in the street (except for Antifa), no clenched-fist salutes. How the trains are going, I have no idea, although the Italian economy appears to have made some significant gains.
That’s not what the legacy media told us would happen, though. In a stunning twist, yet another legacy media screech-fest has turned out to be just so much bloviating bullshit. Shocking, I know.
I’m talking, of course, about the government of Italy’s first woman prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
We were hysterically warned that Meloni’s election victory was the beginning of a “far-right” takeover. “The most dangerous woman in Europe”, we were shrieked at, would imminently “transform Italy into an authoritarian state”.
After 100 days in office, the media screeching has gone quieter than a young person mysteriously dropping dead for no reason whatsoever.
Ask her accusers for evidence to support their claims that she is far right, ergo fascist, and the best they can do is to say things like: she wants to stop abortion. But she does not even want to do that. She may well be against abortion, like many people, especially Catholics, but she respects the right of a woman to choose. Ah, they say, but she wants to restrict access to the RU486 abortion pill. Are they sure? Yes, they insist, look at Le Marche, where Brothers of Italy is in charge of the regional government. There, the abortion pill can be prescribed only in hospitals, not GP surgeries.
Leaving aside the obvious nonsense of arguing that opposing abortion is “fascist”, how is making an abortion pill available in hospitals “banning abortion”? The only real obstacle to abortion in Italy is that most gynaecologists (65%) refuse to do it. And still Italy’s fertility is the lowest in Europe.
But that has got nothing to do with Meloni. So it is as dishonest as it is ridiculous to claim that Meloni’s government is the most right-wing since Mussolini.
How about Meloni’s “aggressive nationalism”? Italexit will be next!
As I wrote just after her election victory, Italy’s new prime minister would avoid confrontation with Brussels for a very simple reason.
The EU has earmarked almost 200 billion euros (£180 billion) in grants and loans to Italy from its 800 billion euro Covid recovery fund – far more than for any other member state – to be activated in stages until 2026 but conditional on a large number of structural reforms.
This EU cash injection is of existential importance to Italy whose economy has hardly grown in real terms since the introduction of the euro in 1999.
At the same time, Meloni is undertaking concrete steps to break its energy dependency on Russian gas. She recently oversaw the signing of an $8 billion off-shore gas production between the Italian energy giant Eni and Libya’s National Oil Corporation. As a result of this and a previous deal struck with Algeria by Meloni’s predecessor Mario Draghi, Italy has reduced its reliance on Russian energy by 75%.
We were also told, of course, that Meloni and her party are racists who are – among other things – dead keen to deploy the Italian navy to blockade Libya to stop refugees reaching Italy. Nothing of the sort has happened […]
But as Meloni told me: the only real solution is for the EU at long last to take responsibility for its southern border and set up hot spots in Libya to process asylum claims. Such hot spots would demonstrate not just that the vast majority of claimants – usually single men of fighting age – are not refugees but also solve the problem that it is virtually impossible to deport bogus asylum claimants once they are in Europe.
While the legacy media in the US and NZ were tearing their hair and screaming at the sky that Meloni was “far-right”, Italian media, no less left-wing-biased than anywhere else in the West, said no such thing. To the Italians, who after all know a thing or two about real fascism, Meloni is centre-right.
And they appear pretty happy with that.
Meanwhile, Meloni’s popularity rises. At the election, Brothers of Italy got 26 per cent of the vote which enabled the right-wing coalition Meloni leads to win a large majority of seats in Parliament. It is now polling around 30 per cent.
All this, plus the continued state of disarray of the opposition mean that unlike most Italian governments Meloni’s looks well set to complete its five-year mandate.
And – would you believe it? – a couple of weeks ago, Italian police arrested the capo di tutti i capi (the boss of all the bosses) of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, who had been on the run for 30 years.
Spectator Australia
Were the legacy media completely wrong and utterly unhinged, with their ludicrous hysteria about so-called “fascists”?
Surely not.
