The stage is Italy, the reality is Europe. Forty-eight hours after the blow received by the center-right in the ballots of the big cities, the Meloni government finds itself one step away from moving a pawn that could magnificently upset the balance of Italian politics, bringing the right closer to the left, distancing the more extremist right from the right less extremist and turning friends into adversaries and adversaries into allies. The stage is Italy, as we have said, with its Donzelli, with its Lollobrigida, with its Sangiuliano, with its La Russa, with its Ester Mieli, with its young nostalgic fascists, with its ruling class unlikely regularly uncomfortable when there is no Meloni capable of removing the chestnuts from the fire. The reality, however, is Europe where everything that appears bizarre, extravagant, dazed and unpresentable here, can only appear incredibly miraculous in Brussels. You can joke all you want about the gang of runaways that form the unlikely constituency of the Meloni gang. But on the eve of the favorable vote that the leader of Fratelli d’Italia will give to Ursula, a vote that will be hidden, dissimulated, minimized, there is a fact that is difficult to deny. In Europe, the right is broken into a thousand rivulets and cannot, do not want to, cannot dialogue with each other.
The stage is Italy, the reality is Europe. Forty-eight hours after the blow received by the center-right in the ballots of the big cities, the Meloni government finds itself one step away from moving a pawn that could magnificently upset the balance of Italian politics, bringing the right closer to the left, distancing the more extremist right from the right less extremist and turning friends into adversaries and adversaries into allies. The stage is Italy, as we have said, with its Donzelli, with its Lollobrigida, with its Sangiuliano, with its La Russa, with its Ester Mieli, with its young nostalgic fascists, with its ruling class unlikely regularly uncomfortable when there is no Meloni capable of removing the chestnuts from the fire. The reality, however, is Europe where everything that appears bizarre, extravagant, dazed and unpresentable here, can only appear incredibly miraculous in Brussels. You can joke all you want about the gang of runaways that form the unlikely constituency of the Meloni gang. But on the eve of the favorable vote that the leader of the Brothers of Italy will give to Ursula, a vote that will be hidden, disguised, minimized, there is a fact that is difficult to deny. In Europe, the right is divided into a thousand streams and cannot, does not want, cannot dialogue with each other.
In Italy, the right-wing parties that are unable to dialogue in Europe dialogue well in government, and the country that all European observers look to as a model to follow in trying to normalize the European right-wing parties is precisely the one formed by a ruling class that we all habitually define as sloppy, immature, provincial and, indeed, out of touch. Nice mystery, right? The Italian stage, obviously, allows us to illuminate the interminable defects of the governing right, and it is natural to ask what would happen to the Italian conservatives if Meloni’s shield were not there. But also Meloni’s opponents, as well as being indignant at the ill-timed words used by the President of the Senate on the runoffs (there were 364 days to criticize the runoffs, La Russa managed to find the only day on which it would have been better to remain silent) they should start finding the right words to recognize the enormity of what will happen in a few days in Brussels: a pro-Putin party born with the idea of taking Italy out of the euro that has changed its course to the point of becoming an unthinkable barrier against Putinists and anti-Europeans.
It can be said that the Melonian changes in Europe were often dictated by impulses closer to necessity than to conviction. But compared to what will happen between Thursday and Friday when the head of the Italian government will first make available Italy’s favorable vote for the package of European appointments (Von der Leyen, Costa, Kallas) and then in just under a month the vote favor of his party in the European Parliament (always on the nomination package) what will appear before the eyes of the observers will be a different scenario from the one evoked yesterday by Meloni in a video constructed to avert attention from the results of the run-offs (autonomy: c ‘it’s a civil war in Italy fomented by the left, no less). And it will be a scenario within which the Italian right, a right capable thanks to Berlusconi’s intuition of creating populist coalitions in words but often concrete in deeds, will ally itself with the pro-European mainstream to fight European extremists by making a decisive step to give birth to a majority built to fight many “isms”: Putinism, extremism, nationalism, populism, anti-Europeanism. And as strange as it may sound, in Europe there are few countries that like Italy can boast of having a right that is as ramshackle as it is concrete in fighting the fascisms of the present. The film is always the same: the stage is Italy, the reality is Europe.
