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      Italy’s Hard-Right Leader Vexes Europe by Playing Nice, Mostly

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      Some still fear an authoritarian turn, but Giorgia Meloni has surprised many by showing a pragmatic streak since coming to power. Now Europe is not sure what to do.ROME — In the weeks before Italy elected the hard-right leader Giorgia Meloni, the left sounded “the alarm for Italian democracy.” The European Union braced for Italy to join ranks with members like Hungary and Poland who have challenged the bloc’s core values. International investors worried about spooked markets.But more than 100 days into her tenure, Ms. Meloni has proved to be less predictable. She has shown flashes of nationalist anger, prompting fears at home and abroad that an authoritarian turn remains just around the corner. But until now, she has also governed in a far less vitriolic and ideological and more practical way.The unexpected ordinariness of her early days has vexed the European establishment and her Italian critics, prompting relief but also raising a quandary as to what extent the toned-down firebrand should be embraced or still cautiously held at arm’s length.Ms. Meloni has made a case for herself. She has calmed international concerns over Italy’s ability to service its debts by passing a measured budget. She has had cordial meetings with European Union leaders and has muted her famously rapid-fire invective against the bloc, migrants and elites. She has followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, Mario Draghi, Mr. Europe himself, seeking to carry through on his blueprint to modernize the country with billions of euros in E.U. pandemic recovery funds.While her coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi went full Putin apologist this weekend — blaming President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for the Russian invasion of his own country — her popularity has effectively minimized the damage from the loose cannons in her right-wing coalition.In the first electoral test for Ms. Meloni since she her coalition’s victory last September, the center-right crushed the left in regional elections on Monday.“Now we have to deal with reality,” she said on social media in a recent weekly video chat called “Giorgia’s Notes,” explaining why she had to delay a populist electoral promise to give tax breaks on fuel at the pump.Ms. Meloni has been “better than we expected” on economic and financial issues, said Enrico Letta, the center-left leader who had warned she would threaten Italian democracy. He said she had abandoned her clearly stated aggression toward the European Union by deciding “to follow the rules” and by avoiding “making any mistakes.”A gas station in January in Rome. Ms. Meloni has delayed a populist electoral promise to give tax breaks on fuel at the pump.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“The reality is she is strong,” said Mr. Letta, who is stepping down from the party leadership after failing to stop Ms. Meloni. “She’s in that full honeymoon, without an alternative within the majority and the opposition divided.”After Ms. Meloni was elected in September, she became the leader of Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini. Her party, the Brothers of Italy, was born from the wreckage of Italy’s failed experiment with Fascism. In the opposition, she made common cause with Europe’s other hard-right leaders who have challenged Europe’s democratic values, like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.More on ItalyA Fast-Shrinking Nation: Italy’s population of elder Italians is soaring as its birthrate plummets, putting the country at the forefront of a global demographic trend that experts call the “silver tsunami.”Looted Art: Five dozen ancient artifacts that had been illegally looted from archaeological sites have been returned to Italy thanks to a collaboration with authorities in the United States.End of the Road: After 30 years on the lam as one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives, the mobster Matteo Messina Denaro was quietly arrested in Palermo.Truffle Wars: Truffles are big business in Italy. Some are trying to take out the competition by poisoning the dogs that accompany truffle hunters.But since coming to power, if Ms. Meloni has proved to be something less than an Orban in charge of the eurozone’s third largest economy, the difference, analysts say, may be that Italy’s deep dependency on Europe for billions of euros in relief funds and flexibility on its enormous debt has induced moderation.Her seeming willingness to play nice has put Europe’s leaders in the bind of having to decide whether to treat her like the migrant-baiting, verbal bomb thrower of the far right that she had been for decades or the more or less responsible prime minister that she has acted like for months.If she is embraced too closely, it risks legitimizing the hard right and illiberal currents in Europe. If she is rejected, it might seem like she is being punished for doing what was asked of her, creating a dangerous disincentive for the leader of a country large enough to destabilize the entire bloc and global economy.Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party emerged from the wreckage of Italy’s failed experiment with Fascism. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesLast week, for example, President Emmanuel Macron of France excluded Ms. Meloni from a dinner in Paris with Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, a clear sign that Italy had been knocked down a notch from when Mr. Draghi was in office. But analysts said Mr. Macron also wanted to avoid indirectly legitimizing France’s own right-wing firebrand, Marine Le Pen.Ms. Meloni fumed, saying Italy sought more than “pats on the back,” and some interpreted her huddling in Brussels last week with leaders of the Czech Republic and Poland as a veiled warning. But on Friday, Ms. Meloni, a skillful politician well versed in the politics of victimization, spent a significant amount of time explaining that she did not care about not being invited to Paris.She seemed to try to speak for much of Europe, arguing that she would have counseled against the meeting even if she had been invited because having two, instead of all 27, European leaders in the room risked eroding the bloc’s unity and public support for Ukraine.“It is not easy for any of us to handle the Ukraine issue with public opinion,” she said, adding that the meeting did not help leaders do the “right thing.” European officials have warned that a combative approach only risks diminishing Italy’s influence. And at home, liberals fear that Ms. Meloni is beginning to show her true, authoritarian face.In recent days, her allies have called for the head of a top official at the country’s public television broadcaster after a pop star appeared on Italy’s widely popular Sanremo song contest and ripped up a photograph of a government official in Ms. Meloni’s party. In the photo he was dressed as a Nazi.Critics like Mr. Letta still say there is also plenty to worry about on issues like migration, justice and gay and abortion rights, though he acknowledged that in those areas, “until now, nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic has been done.”“Nothing of what she is doing makes us think that she is taking a fascist turn,” said Giovanni Orsina, the director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.Joking that the European establishment reacted to her election as if “someone had died,” Andrea De Bertoldi, a member of Parliament with Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said that her government was “only surprising” to those who did not know her, or who had not followed the normalization of the Italian right in the past 30 years.Ms. Meloni has received only limited one-on-one face time with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.Pool photo by Johanna Geron“The fear,” he said, was provoked by political enemies, though he acknowledged that she perhaps sounded a little different during her years venting from the political margins. “To be heard in the opposition,” he said, “you always need to raise the tone.”For now, it seems, she has extinguished fears of burning down Italian democracy with the post-Fascist flame of her party emblem. But the left, searching for traction, has come up with a new critique: that Ms. Meloni might clumsily break the country.“The great problem of the center right in power is different, absolute incompetence,” Stefano Feltri, the editor of the leftist newspaper Domani, wrote in an editorial.One of the first things Ms. Meloni did upon coming to power was crack down on illegal rave parties. The initial draft of the measure targeted “gatherings” of 50 people or more, a law written so broadly as to potentially be used against political or union rallies, and even sporting events. She was forced to redo it. She also had to backtrack on a plan to put a 60 euro basement on credit card purchases, which raised fears of tax evasion.More ideologically, Ms. Meloni has sought to force ships run by nongovernmental organizations to rescue migrants to return to an Italian port after each mission, limiting time at sea. In November, her government tried to block a ship from disembarking migrants in Italy, and instead sought to send it to France, causing tensions with Mr. Macron.The Geo Barents migrant rescue ship docked in January at the port of La Spezia, Italy. Ms. Meloni has sought to force ships run by nongovernmental organizations to return to an Italian port after each rescue mission, limiting time at sea.Luca Zennaro/EPA, via ShutterstockLast week’s exclusion from the Paris dinner inflamed those tensions. Whereas last year, Mr. Draghi, an architect of Europe’s policy on Ukraine, accompanied the French and German leaders on a train to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Ms. Meloni received one-on-one face time with Mr. Zelensky only on the margins of a large meeting in Brussels.“It is so clear that we had two pictures,” Mr. Letta said. “One last year on the train to Kyiv. And yesterday at the Élysée and the picture without Italy.”But Mr. Letta, already bested by Ms. Meloni, was wary of what else she had in store for Europe, including a more ambitious plan to move the continent to the right. He said that she had sought to build new alliances with right-wing forces at the European level to become a power center, with Mr. Orban, ahead of European elections next year.“This is not, of course, a Democratic alarm that I’m launching,” Mr. Letta said. “This is a political alarm.”Gaia Pianigiani More

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      Italy’s Hard Right Feels Vindicated by Giorgia Meloni’s Ascent

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      Long marginalized politically and ostracized socially, the new prime minister’s supporters sense a chance to give a final blow to the stigma and shame of their association with Fascism.ROCCA DI PAPA, Italy — As a young card-carrying member of a party formed from the ashes of Italy’s Fascist party after World War II, Gino Del Nero, 73, recalls being insulted, sidelined and silenced by leftists, as well as by some neighbors and co-workers.But now that Giorgia Meloni, a hard-right political leader, has been sworn in as prime minister of Italy, Mr. Del Nero feels vindicated.“That is over,” he said of the decades where he had to keep his head down. “We are freer now.”The ascent of Ms. Meloni, who leads the most hard-right government since Mussolini, was the final blow to a political taboo for Italy. That has worried critics on the left, who fear that she will initiate an atmosphere of intolerance on social issues and that her nationalist impulses will threaten Italy’s influence in Europe.But to her supporters, it has meant a chance to assert their domination over the mainstream of Italian politics and to shed the shame and stigma of their association with a Fascist movement that took power 100 years ago this week, with Mussolini’s march on Rome, which ushered in two decades of dictatorship that used political violence, introduced racial laws against Jews, allied with Hitler, and disastrously lost a world war.Rocca di Papa, a hilltop village outside Rome where the hard-right Brothers of Italy won 38 percent of the vote in September.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesGino del Nero, 73, who was a member of the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, recalls being insulted and admonished by leftists in his youth.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesFor her part, Ms. Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of that failed experiment, has sought to walk a fine line, repeatedly condemning Fascism, while also nodding to the long years of political exclusion and social ostracism of her supporters and offering them solidarity.In her maiden speech to Parliament as prime minister this week, Ms. Meloni again rejected Fascism and said that the racial laws of 1938 were the lowest point in Italian history. But she also denounced Italy’s postwar years of “criminalization and political violence,” in which she said “innocent boys” had been killed “in the name of antifascism.”The remarks were very much in line with the balancing act that Ms. Meloni executed throughout her campaign before the election in September. On the eve of that vote, she said her victory would not only be “payback for so many people who in this nation had to lower their head for decades,” but also “for all the people who saw it differently from the mainstream and the dominant power system.”They were, she said, “treated as the children of a lesser God.”“Giorgia’s victory closes a circle,” said Italo Bocchino, a former member of Parliament and now the editor in chief of Il Secolo d’Italia, a right-wing newspaper that used to be the party’s in-house organ, and whose readership, he said, has grown by 85 percent in the past year. “Let’s say it’s been like a desert crossing that lasted for 75 years.”A polling station in Garbatella, a traditionally leftist district in Rome where Ms. Meloni grew up and started her political career.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMs. Meloni, right, taking a selfie with a supporter last month in Rome. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesBut if her supporters now hope for a long-awaited cultural shift, others are looking on with “critical and concerned awareness,” said Nadia Urbinati, a professor of political theory at Columbia University. Ms. Meloni’s use of the word “nation” instead of “country” or “people” during her maiden speech struck Ms. Urbinati as a possible red flag.Italy’s New Right-Wing GovernmentA Hard-Right Breakthrough: Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, is once again a testing ground for the far right’s advance in Europe after Giorgia Meloni’s election victory in September.New Government Forms: As she takes office, Ms. Meloni faces surging inflation, an energy crisis and increasing pressure to soften Italy’s support for Ukraine.The Coalition’s Linchpin: Ms. Meloni’s turn as prime minister will depend on support from the billionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. So may the health of Italian democracy.Renewed Anxiety: Mr. Berlusconi was caught on tape blaming Ukraine’s president for pushing Russia to invade, raising concerns that Italy could undercut Europe’s unity against Moscow.When the Italian Social Movement was first formed in 1948, its close association with its Fascist forebears repelled many Italians still stinging from the fallout of World War II. Effectively, for nearly a half-century, Italy remained politically split between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, leaving little room for the hard right to maneuver in part because of a tacit agreement to keep the right out of government.Political polarization surged among young people during the 1970s and early ’80s, and schools and streets became violent battlefields where the right was vastly outnumbered. Clothing was a political statement then: Members of the left wore parkas, known as an “Eskimo,” and lace-up shoes, and they wore their hair long; members of the right opted for Ray-Ban glasses, leather bomber jackets and camperos, made-in-Italy cowboy-style boots.Members of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Brothers of Italy, at a rally in September in Rome.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSimone D’Alpa, 32, one of the leaders of the Rome branch of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Brothers of Italy, at its headquarters in Rome.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesIn those days, said Simone D’Alpa, one of leaders of the Rome branch of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Brothers of Italy, you could be targeted, even killed, for wearing camperos boots, or for writing essays seen to be too rightward thinking. Ms. Meloni’s victory vindicated those deaths. “We owe it to them,” he said.The tide first turned in the early ’90s, when the party was reborn as National Alliance and softened its tone. Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister at the time, brought it into the center-right coalition, lifting a longstanding taboo. Critics said that Ms. Meloni’s messaging of “vindication, comeback and victimization” was unjustified because members of her party have already been in office.But to supporters, leading the government is another story.Six of Ms. Meloni’s cabinet ministers started their political careers in the Italian Social Movement, the post-Fascist party. Her close ally Ignazio La Russa was elected president of the Senate, the second top institutional office after the president. The right-wing newspaper Libero called his nomination “the definite legitimization not only of a party, but of an entire world,” that for 30 years had been in a “political ghetto.”Ms. Meloni’s supporters also hoped that this legitimization would trickle down to their everyday lives.Maurizio Manzetti, 61, at his restaurant, The Legend, in Ostia, a seaside neighborhood of Rome. The restaurant was vandalized because its décor included Italian flags and photographs of Ms. Meloni.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesA plaque outside an office of the former Italian Social Movement, now a branch of Brothers of Italy, in Rome. When the Italian Social Movement was first formed, its close ties with its Fascist forebears repulsed many Italians.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesTwo years ago, vandals targeted Maurizio Manzetti, a cook in the seaside Roman neighborhood of Ostia, whose restaurant décor includes Italian flags and photographs of Ms. Meloni. They spray-painted “Friend of Giorgia, Fascist” on a wall in front of the eatery and left a bottle that looked like firebomb in front of his door.“As soon as you talked about patriotism, sovreignism and borders they called you a Fascist,” Mr. Manzetti said. “Now the word patriot is not going to be canceled anymore.”Some nationalists said that having a prime minister might also give them a better foothold in public sectors of cultural life that they complain has systematically excluded them.“There’s now a great opportunity on a cultural level,” said Federico Gennaccari, the editor of a Rome-based conservative publishing house. His wish list, for example, would include a new take on the massacre of Italian soldiers and civilians by Yugoslav Communist partisans from 1943 to 1947 in northeastern Italy. For decades, members of the hard right, in a clear example of “whataboutism,” cited that massacre when asked about Fascist complicity in the Holocaust.One series about that massacre that Mr. Gennaccari saw aired by the state broadcaster RAI “didn’t say the word Communist once,” he said.Federico Gennaccari, the editor of a conservative publishing house in Rome.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesA rally commemorating the mass killings of Fascists by Yugoslav Communist partisans during World War II.Matteo Corner/EPA, via ShutterstockOthers, like Gennaro Malgieri, a conservative author and former lawmaker, spoke of a “hegemony of the left” in postwar Italy that had “occupied centers of learning and culture,” keeping the right from making inroads in “publishing, means of mass communication, universities, festivals and positions in cultural institutions.”While Italy is far less sensitive to political correctness than other Western democracies are, Mr. Malgieri said the victory would afford the right more — and vaster — channels from which to critique those positions and affirm a nationalist “way of being Italian” that derived from the country’s Roman, Greek and Judeo-Christian roots.Some Italian historians question the extent to which the right had been truly banished, and whether it was instead simply engaging in politically useful victimization.“The names of people who were discriminated against or exiled because they were right wing don’t come to mind,” said Alberto Mario Banti, a modern history professor at the University of Pisa.The Square Colosseum, an example of Fascist architecture, in Rome’s EUR district.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesOutside a cafe in Rocca di Papa.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesStill, supporters said, Ms. Meloni’s victory was a turning point for them.Mr. Del Nero, from Rocca di Papa, said he hoped that now he could read a right-wing newspaper or book on the subway without eliciting scornful looks.His loyalty to the right had come at a cost, he said, years of being excluded from workers’ union meetings at the hospital where he worked. Colleagues silenced him in discussions. People often dismissed him as a “Fascist.”“It’s a mark we carry inside,” he said. “Now I feel vindicated.”A bus stop and magazine stand in Rocca di Papa. Mr. Del Nero said he hoped that he could now read a right-wing newspaper without eliciting scornful looks.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times More

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      Italia articula su próximo gobierno en torno a un rostro conocido: Silvio Berlusconi

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      El apoyo del magnate de los medios de comunicación definirá la posición de Giorgia Meloni como posible primera ministra del país. La salud de la democracia italiana también está en juego.ROMA — Durante el último mitin de campaña de la coalición de derecha italiana antes de su victoria en las elecciones del mes pasado, el magnate multimillonario Silvio Berlusconi, con una sonrisa congelada en su rostro de cera, estaba en el centro del escenario, apuntalado, literalmente, por sus aliados de la ultraderecha, Giorgia Meloni y Matteo Salvini, que agitaron la mano de Berlusconi por encima de su cabeza.El cuadro pudo haber evocado una versión italiana de Weekend at Bernie’s más que un triunvirato moderno. Pero los tres formarán ahora el gobierno italiano más derechista desde Mussolini. Berlusconi, con 86 años y cada vez menos popularidad, es su frágil eje.Hace casi 30 años, Berlusconi fue quien incorporó a los partidos de sus aliados, antes pequeños y marginales, a uno de sus gobiernos y a la política italiana establecida. Pero ahora es Meloni, líder de los Hermanos de Italia, un partido que desciende de los restos del experimento italiano con el fascismo del siglo pasado, quien casi con seguridad será la próxima primera ministra cuando se forme un gobierno, quizás esta misma semana.La cuestión ahora, sin embargo, es si el envejecido líder de centroderecha puede cumplir su promesa de fungir como una fuerza moderadora y proeuropea en el próximo gobierno de Italia, o si ha perdido el control de la política que puso en marcha y que ha convertido a Italia, la cuna del fascismo, otra vez en un campo de pruebas para el avance de la extrema derecha en Europa. El lunes, Suecia instaló su propio gobierno de derecha, respaldado por un partido de raíces neonazis.“Europa espera mucho de nosotros”, escribió la semana pasada en Twitter Berlusconi, que declinó una solicitud de entrevista. “Y nos consideramos el garante del próximo gobierno”.Incluso antes de que se forme el gobierno, las tensiones ya son evidentes. La semana pasada, cuando Berlusconi ocupaba su nuevo escaño en el Senado, un órgano que hace casi una década lo vetó temporalmente tras una condena por fraude fiscal, los fotógrafos hicieron un acercamiento sobre sus apuntes, quizá colocados a propósito para que fueran visibles, en los que describía a Meloni como “prepotente, arrogante, ofensiva”. Cuando los periodistas le preguntaron al respecto, Meloni espetó que había olvidado algo: “No chantajeable”.Los dos parecieron hacer las paces durante un encuentro el lunes por la noche en Roma; publicaron una foto sonriendo juntos, y Berlusconi los llamó “unidos”.La idea de Berlusconi como protector de la democracia italiana es para muchos algo profundamente preocupante.Simpatizantes del partido de extrema derecha Hermanos de Italia el mes pasado en Cagliari, Cerdeña. Es casi seguro que Meloni, la líder del partido, será la próxima primera ministra cuando se forme un gobierno.Gianni Cipriano para The New York TimesSus numerosos críticos recuerdan los abusos del poder gubernamental para proteger sus intereses empresariales, sus escapadas libertinas con mujeres jóvenes y las llamadas fiestas Bunga Bunga realizadas cuando ocupaba el cargo, su humillación a las mujeres y la cultura italianas con su humor, y sus canales de televisión, a menudo burdos, que, junto con sus periódicos y revistas, aprovechó para realizar propaganda política.Para ellos, es el villano que degradó la democracia italiana, cuyos conflictos de intereses, asociaciones dudosas y aparente ilegalidad desencadenaron un movimiento de oposición de furiosos populistas antisistema y llevaron a la izquierda a una crisis nerviosa de la que aún no se ha recuperado.En la escena internacional, es un viejo amigo del presidente ruso Vladimir Putin, al que defendió el mes pasado, lo que supuso un dolor de cabeza para Meloni, que apoya firmemente a Ucrania en la guerra con Rusia.Berlusconi también provocó un motín entre los centristas de su propio partido en julio, cuando hundió al gobierno del primer ministro Mario Draghi, al que admiraba públicamente, en su afán por volver a probar el poder.“Es muy importante entender inmediatamente que Berlusconi no es amigo de la democracia”, dijo antes de morir Paul Ginsborg, biógrafo de Berlusconi, en una conversación reciente.Pero dada la composición del nuevo gobierno, algunos analistas creen que Berlusconi puede ser el mejor amigo que tienen los defensores de una Italia proeuropea, centrista y democrática.“La parte responsable de la centroderecha la encarna el líder que durante mucho tiempo ha sido considerado el más irresponsable del mundo”, dijo Claudio Cerasa, autor de un nuevo libro, Le catene della destra (Las cadenas de la derecha), sobre la aceptación de las teorías de conspiración por parte de nacionalistas y populistas.“Europa espera mucho de nosotros”, escribió Berlusconi la semana pasada en Twitter. “Y nos consideramos el garante del próximo gobierno”.Gianni Cipriano para The New York TimesCerasa, que también es director de Il Foglio, un periódico fundado por la familia de Berlusconi pero que ahora es independiente, señaló que solo Berlusconi en la derecha italiana había rechazado el trumpismo, el populismo antielitista y el nacionalismo euroescéptico. También sirvió de contrapeso a la desconfianza que Meloni y Salvini expresaron ante las vacunas, y gobernó en coaliciones con la centroizquierda.Muchos en la clase política creen que Berlusconi evitará que Meloni ponga en peligro la unidad europea al gravitar de nuevo hacia sus viejos aliados, entre ellos el primer ministro euroescéptico y de extrema derecha Viktor Orbán de Hungría y Marine Le Pen en Francia. “Él es como una brújula”, dijo Cerasa.No está claro que Meloni lo siga. Este mes, ella participó en un mitin del partido español de extrema derecha Vox, junto con el expresidente Donald Trump y Orbán. “No somos monstruos”, dijo en un mensaje de video. “El pueblo lo entiende”.Meloni, consciente de las preocupaciones que genera su pasado ideológico, desea calmar a los mercados internacionales al nombrar a tecnócratas reconocidos para los ministerios económicos clave. Pero estos siguen rechazándola.Algunos sostienen que el legado más duradero de Berlusconi en la política italiana —más que el debate que forzó sobre los impuestos onerosos o la extralimitación judicial— puede ser su creación de una coalición europea moderna de derecha, formada por partidos antes marginados cuyas versiones actuales lideran Meloni y Salvini.De este modo, Berlusconi eliminó la noción, según John Foot, un historiador del fascismo, de que “un fascista no debería hablar, no debería existir, no debería tener un lugar en la sociedad italiana”.En 2019 Berlusconi dijo durante un mitin político que, en lo que respecta al partido de la Liga de Salvini y a los “fascistas”, “los dejamos entrar en el 94 y los legitimamos”. Insistió, sin embargo, en que “somos el cerebro, el corazón, la columna vertebral”.“Sin nosotros”, dijo, “la centroderecha no existiría ni existirá nunca”.Meloni el mes pasado en Roma. Algunos sostienen que el legado más duradero de Berlusconi en la política italiana puede ser su creación de una moderna coalición de derecha europea.Gianni Cipriano para The New York TimesAlgunos de los antiguos partidarios de Berlusconi consideran que esa alianza fue un golpe maestro democrático, por obligar a la franja a normalizarse y comprometerse con la realidad transaccional de la capital.“Transformó estos dos movimientos que eran, digamos, balas perdidas, o variables fuera de control, y los llevó al puerto constitucional”, dijo Renato Brunetta, que ayudó a fundar el partido Forza Italia de Berlusconi. “Esto fue un elemento estabilizador”.Pero después de que Forza Italia ayudó a desencadenar nuevas elecciones, Brunetta, que fue ministro en el gobierno de Draghi, abandonó el partido y dijo que Meloni era “realmente regresiva en lo que respecta a la cultura de la derecha en Italia”.Meloni, por su parte, agradeció la obra de Berlusconi. En una reciente entrevista, reconoció que “hizo algo inesperado” cuando en 1993 apoyó la candidatura a la alcaldía del entonces líder de su partido Alianza Nacional, que luego fue Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de Berlusconi.“Eso seguramente hizo que muchos que quizás no tenían el valor de decirlo, y lo creían de corazón, salieran a la luz”, dijo Meloni. “En este sentido, es el tema de la legitimación”.Pero, añadió Meloni, “creo que el momento de la derecha había llegado”.Ahora claramente llegó. El partido de Meloni obtuvo el 26 por ciento de los votos, más que ningún otro. Insistió en que no se limitaba a andar con Berlusconi porque necesitara el pequeño porcentaje de su partido para gobernar, como él necesitó en su día al partido de ella.“No necesitamos llevarlo con nosotros”, dijo Meloni. Y añadió: “Puede que sea la persona que más se ha impuesto en la historia italiana, en la historia republicana italiana, más que cualquier otro en los últimos 20 años”.De hecho, a pesar de su paso cansino y de los jóvenes con banderas que lo protegen de la vista del público al salir del escenario, las cosas parecen ir a favor de Berlusconi.La semana pasada, con el pelo lacado, fue el centro de atención en la sesión de apertura del Senado recién elegido.Berlusconi, en el centro, el jueves en la primera sesión del recién elegido Senado en Roma.Antonio Masiello/Getty ImagesTodas las contradicciones de la historia y la política actual de Italia estaban a la vista. También las tensiones entre los aliados de la derecha.La sesión la abrió un sobreviviente del Holocausto y senador vitalicio que recordó que el fascismo de Mussolini tomó el poder hace 100 años. Los senadores eligieron como presidente a Ignazio La Russa, líder del partido de Meloni, que lleva el segundo nombre de Benito y guarda en su casa recuerdos de Mussolini.Berlusconi, que recibió apretones de manos y peticiones de selfis por parte de los senadores, tiró el bolígrafo y maldijo furiosamente a La Russa, cuya presidencia intentó bloquear como represalia por la negativa de Meloni a nombrar ministra a su propia lugarteniente, Licia Ronzulli, una antigua enfermera que se sienta a su lado y solía ayudar a organizar sus veladas nocturnas con mujeres jóvenes.La novia de Berlusconi, Marta Fascina, de 32 años, obtuvo un escaño en el Parlamento en representación de una ciudad siciliana en la que nunca hizo campaña. El 29 de septiembre, el día del cumpleaños de Berlusconi, hizo que un globo aerostático soltara miles de globos con forma de corazones rojos sobre el jardín de su villa.Al día siguiente, Berlusconi publicó un video de su cena de cumpleaños en el que meseros con guantes blancos sacaban un pastel de varios pisos: uno por su equipo de fútbol, otro por su partido político y otro por su imperio mediático.Encima de todo estaba la imagen de un Berlusconi mucho más joven y con su traje característico, sonriendo junto a una tierra comestible.Jason Horowitz es el jefe del buró en Roma; cubre Italia, Grecia y otros sitios del sur de Europa. Cubrió la campaña presidencial de 2016 en Estados Unidos, el gobierno de Obama y al congreso con un énfasis en perfiles políticos y especiales. @jasondhorowitz More

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      Italy’s Next Government Hinges on a Familiar Face: Silvio Berlusconi

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      Giorgia Meloni’s likely turn as prime minister will depend on support from the billionaire media mogul. So may the health of Italian democracy.ROME — During the final campaign rally for Italy’s right-wing coalition before it emerged victorious in Italy’s elections last month, the billionaire mogul Silvio Berlusconi, a smile frozen on his waxen face, stood center stage, propped up, quite literally, by his hard-right partners, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, who waved Mr. Berlusconi’s hand above his head.The tableau may have evoked an Italian remake of “Weekend at Bernie’s” more than a modern-day triumvirate. But the three will now make up the most right-wing Italian government since Mussolini, with Mr. Berlusconi, 86 and decreasingly popular, as its fragile linchpin.It was nearly 30 years ago that Mr. Berlusconi brought his partners’ once small, marginalized parties into one of his governments and Italy’s political mainstream. But today it is Ms. Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the wreckage of Italy’s experiment with Fascism last century, who is almost certain to be the next prime minister when a government is formed, perhaps as soon as this week.The question now, though, is whether the aging center-right leader can fulfill his promise to act as a moderating, pro-European force on Italy’s next government, or whether he has lost control of the politics he set in motion that have made Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, once again a testing ground for the far right’s advance in Europe. On Monday, Sweden installed its own right-wing government, backed by a party with neo-Nazi roots.“Europe expects much from us,” Mr. Berlusconi, who declined a request for an interview, wrote last week on Twitter. “And we consider ourselves the guarantor of the next government.”Even before the government begins, the tensions are already evident. Last week, as Mr. Berlusconi took his new seat in the Senate, a body that almost a decade ago temporarily barred him after a conviction for tax fraud, photographers zoomed in on his notes, perhaps purposefully left visible, describing Ms. Meloni as “overbearing, arrogant, offensive.” Asked about it by reporters, Ms. Meloni snapped that he forgot something: “Not blackmailable.”The two seemed to make peace during a meeting on Monday evening in Rome; they released a photo of themselves smiling together, and Mr. Berlusconi called them “united.”The notion of Mr. Berlusconi as a protector of Italian democracy is for many a deeply troubling one.Supporters of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party last month in Cagliari, Sardinia. Ms. Meloni, the party leader, is almost certain to be the next prime minister when a government is formed.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesHis legions of critics recall his abuses of government power to protect his business interests, his libertine escapades with young women and so-called Bunga Bunga parties while in office, his degrading of Italian women and culture with his humor, and his often crude television channels, which, along with his newspapers and magazines, he exploited for political propaganda.For them, he is the villain who debased Italian democracy, whose conflicts of interest, questionable associations and apparent illegality set off an opposition movement of angry anti-establishment populists and drove the left into a nervous breakdown from which it has still not recovered.On the international stage, he is a longtime friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom he defended as recently as last month, causing a headache for Ms. Meloni, who is a strong supporter of Ukraine in the war with Russia.Mr. Berlusconi also prompted a mutiny of centrists in his own party in July when he sank the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, whom he publicly admired, as he reached for another taste of power.“It’s very important to understand immediately that Berlusconi is no friend to democracy,” Paul Ginsborg, the biographer of Mr. Berlusconi, said in a conversation recently, before his death.But given the composition of the new government, some analysts believe that Mr. Berlusconi may be the best friend proponents of a pro-Europe, centrist and democratic Italy have.“The responsible part of the center-right is embodied by the leader considered for a long time the most irresponsible in the world,” said Claudio Cerasa, the author of a new book, “The Chains of the Right,” about the embrace of conspiracy theories by nationalists and populists.“Europe expects much from us,” Mr. Berlusconi wrote last week on Twitter. “And we consider ourselves the guarantor of the next government.”Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMr. Cerasa, who is also the editor of Il Foglio, a newspaper founded by Mr. Berlusconi’s family but is now independent, noted that Mr. Berlusconi alone on the Italian right had rejected Trumpism, anti-elite populism and Euroskeptic nationalism. He also served as a counterweight to vaccine skepticism exercised by Ms. Meloni and Mr. Salvini, and he governed in coalitions with the center left.Many in the political establishment believe that Mr. Berlusconi will prevent Ms. Meloni from endangering European unity by gravitating back toward her old allies, including the Euroskeptic and hard-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France. “He’s like a compass,” Mr. Cerasa said.It is not clear that Ms. Meloni is following him. This month, she, along with former President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Orban, took part in a rally of the far-right Spanish party Vox. “We are not monsters,” she said in a video message. “The people understand that.”Ms. Meloni, aware of concerns about her ideological past, is eager to assuage international markets by appointing mainstream technocrats to key economic ministries. But they keep turning her down.Some argue that Mr. Berlusconi’s most lasting legacy on Italian politics — more than the debate he forced about burdensome taxation or judicial overreach — may be his creation of a modern European right-wing coalition, made from previously untouchable parties, which are now led in their current iterations by Ms. Meloni and Mr. Salvini.In doing so, Mr. Berlusconi eliminated the notion, John Foot, a historian of Fascism, said, that “a Fascist should not speak, should not exist, should not have a place in Italian society.”Mr. Berlusconi said in 2019 at a political rally that, when it came to Mr. Salvini’s League party and the “Fascists,” “we let them in in ’94 and we legitimized them.” He insisted, though, that “we are the brain, the heart, the backbone.”“Without us,” he said, “the center right would never exist and will never exist.”Ms. Meloni last month in Rome. Some argue that Mr. Berlusconi’s most lasting legacy on Italian politics may be his creation of a modern European right-wing coalition.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSome of Mr. Berlusconi’s longtime supporters cast that alliance as a democratic masterstroke, for forcing the fringe to normalize and compromise in the transactional reality of the capital.“He transformed these two movements which were, let’s say, loose cannons, or who were out-of-control variables, and brought them into the constitutional harbor,” said Renato Brunetta, who helped found Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “This was an element of stabilization.”But after Forza Italia helped trigger new elections, Mr. Brunetta, who was a minister in Mr. Draghi’s government, quit the party and said Ms. Meloni was “actually regressive when it comes to right-wing culture in Italy.”Ms. Meloni, for her part, appreciated what Mr. Berlusconi had done. In a recent interview, she acknowledged that he “did something unexpected” when in 1993 he supported the mayoral candidacy of the leader at the time of her National Alliance party, who later served as Mr. Berlusconi’s foreign minister.“That surely brought many who maybe did not have the courage to say it, and thought it in their hearts, to come out,” Ms. Meloni said. “In this sense, it is the theme of legitimization.”But, Ms. Meloni added, “I believe the time of the right had arrived.”It now clearly has. Ms. Meloni’s party received 26 percent of the vote, larger than any other. She insisted she was not merely carrying Mr. Berlusconi along because she needed his party’s small percentage to govern, as he once needed her party.“We don’t need to carry him with us,” Ms. Meloni said. She added, “He may be the person who has imposed himself in the Italian history, in the Italian Republican history, more than any other in the last 20 years.”Indeed, despite his shuffling gait and the flag-bearing youths who shield him from view as he exits the stage, things seem to be going Mr. Berlusconi’s way.Last week, his hair looking lacquered, he held court during the first seating of the newly elected Senate.Mr. Berlusconi, center, on Thursday at the first seating of the newly elected Senate in Rome.Antonio Masiello/Getty ImagesAll of the contradictions of Italy’s history and current politics were on display. As were the tensions between the right-wing partners.The session was opened by a Holocaust survivor and senator for life who noted that Mussolini’s Fascism took power 100 years ago. Senators elected as their president Ignazio La Russa, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, who carries the middle name Benito and keeps Mussolini memorabilia in his house.Mr. Berlusconi, who received handshakes and selfie requests from senators, threw down his pen and angrily cursed Mr. La Russa, whose presidency he tried to block as a reprisal for Ms. Meloni’s refusal to make a minister out of his own lieutenant, Licia Ronzulli, a former nurse who sat beside him and used to help organize his after-hours soirées with young women.Mr. Berlusconi’s girlfriend, Marta Fascina, 32, won a seat in the Parliament representing a Sicilian town she never campaigned in. On Sept. 29, his birthday, she arranged for a hot-air balloon to release thousands of red balloon hearts over his villa’s garden.The next day, Mr. Berlusconi posted a video of his birthday dinner where waiters in white gloves brought out a multitiered cake — one for his soccer team, one for his political party, one for his media empire.Atop it all sat a likeness of a Mr. Berlusconi, much younger and in his trademark suit, grinning next to an edible earth. More

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      Seven Years of Trump Has the Right Wing Taking the Long View

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      Could there soon be an American counterpart to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, a right-wing populist who in 2018 declared, “We must demonstrate that there is an alternative to liberal democracy: It is called Christian democracy. And we must show that the liberal elite can be replaced with a Christian democratic elite”?Liberal democracy, Orban continued,is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues — say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.Or could there soon be an American counterpart to Giorgia Meloni, another right-wing populist and admirer of Orban, now on course to become the next prime minister of Italy?Meloni’s platform?Yes to natural families, no to the L.G.B.T. lobby. Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology. Yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death. No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders. No to mass immigration, yes to work for our people.Donald Trump’s entrenched refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and his deepening embrace of conspiracy theory, particularly its QAnon strain; the widespread belief among Republican voters that the election was stolen; and, as The Times reported on Sept. 18, the fact that “six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results, with another six Republicans ignoring or declining to answer a question about embracing the November outcome” — all suggest, to say the least, that all is not well with democracy in America.There are many other signals pointing to the vulnerability of the liberal state.A 2020 study, “Global Satisfaction With Democracy” by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, found that dissatisfaction with democracy has grown rapidly in developed nations since the recession of 2008, and that one of the sharpest increases in discontent has been in the United States:Now, for the first time on record, polls show a majority of Americans dissatisfied with their system of government — a system of which they were once famously proud. Such levels of democratic dissatisfaction would not be unusual elsewhere. But for the United States, it marks an “end of exceptionalism” — a profound shift in America’s view of itself, and therefore, of its place in the world.It is a reflection of just how remarkable this shift in sentiment has been that a presidential candidate — Donald J. Trump — could arrive at the White House after a presidential campaign that denounced American political institutions as corrupt, and promised to step back from promoting democracy abroad in favor of putting “America First,” treating all countries transactionally based on a spirit of realism, regardless of their adherence to or deviation from democratic norms.Along similar lines, Joshua Tait — a contributor to the volume “Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy” — argued in a Q. and A. posted at George Washington University’s Illiberalism Studies Program that “we face potentially massive disruptions over the coming decades as we feel the impacts of climate change, aging populations, and automation.”Tait went on:The right, both in the United States and elsewhere, has the sort of rhetorical and intellectual tools to craft a compelling argument to certain segments of the population in the face of insecurity and transformation. The combination of disruption, transformation and pain creates the conditions where right-wing, often illiberal discourses of heroism, golden age and the threatening Other creates real meaning for some, even as it draws boundaries around communities.In an email response to my follow-up inquiry, Tait wrote:The 2016 election, Trumpism in the United States, Orban, Law & Justice in Poland, and to a lesser extent Brexit in the United Kingdom have validated the intellectual right in the America that long held some or all illiberal positions. Moreover, Trump in particular obliterated right-wing respectability politics and revealed the conservative and Republican establishments had no capacity to discipline views that had previously been beyond the pale — the result of changes in the way the right-wing media ecosystem worked, and the nature of party primaries.The end of the Cold War, Tait contended, prompted the right to shift from an international focus to domestic issues:Without an external ideological foe in global communism, the right faced up to its domestic and in many ways real enemy, progressive liberalism. The right imported its existential and apocalyptic view domestically. The Culture Wars, antipathy toward multiculturalism and so on are part of this, and the great demographic sort (the coming minority status of white Americans) has intensified it dramatically.Many leaders of the social and cultural right in this country are treating Trump’s presidency and his continuing hold on a majority of Republican voters as an opportunity to further mobilize conservatives.The National Conservatism project, created in 2019 by the Edmund Burke Foundation, has taken up this challenge, joining together an array of scholars and writers associated with such institutions, magazines and think tanks as the Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, the Hoover Institution, the Federalist, First Things, the Manhattan Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and National Review.On June 22, 75 supporters of the National Conservatism project issued a 10-part statement of principles. The signatories include Rod Dreher, senior editor of The American Conservative; Jim DeMint, a former senator from South Carolina and a former president of the Heritage Foundation; Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Trump; Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.The principles include a strong commitment to the infusion of religion into the operation of government: “No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition.” Thus the “Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and nonbelievers alike.”Perhaps most strikingly, the principles declare that:Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.The principles argue for a restoration of traditional family values combined with a rejection of the sexual revolution and of feminist calls for self-actualization in defiance of family obligation:We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization.Their authors warn thatThe disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the well-being and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.I asked Yoram Hazony, the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, to expand on this phrase in the statement in the principles: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision.”Hazony replied by email that the statement is intendedto permit a public life rooted in Christianity and its moral vision in those parts of the United States in which a majority of voters support such a public culture. This is in keeping with our endorsement of the federalist principle in Clause 3. There are many states in the United States where no such majority exists, and the Statement of Principles does not envision using the national government to impose such a public life on those states. The point is to return “church and state” issues to the states to be resolved through the democratic process.In her March 2022 paper, “Illiberalism: a conceptual introduction,” Marlene Laruelle, a professor of international affairs and the director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, provides a four-part definition of the term:Illiberalism is a new ideological universe that, even if doctrinally fluid and context-based, is to some degree coherent; it represents a backlash against today’s liberalism in all its varied scripts — political, economic, cultural, geopolitical, civilizational — often in the name of democratic principles; it proposes solutions that are majoritarian, nation-centric or sovereigntist, favoring traditional hierarchies and cultural homogeneity; and it calls for a shift from politics to culture and is post-post-modern in its claims of rootedness in an age of globalization.Laruelle argues that there are significant differences between illiberalism and conservatism as it has been traditionally understood:The key element that dissociates illiberalism from conservatism is its relationship to political liberalism. Classical conservatives — such as the Christian Democrats in Europe or the Republican Party in the U.S. before Donald Trump — are/were fervent supporters of political rights and constitutionalism, while illiberalism challenges them. For classical conservatives, the political order is a reflection of the natural and family order, and therefore commands some submission to it. For illiberals, today’s political order is the enemy of the natural order and should be fought against.In a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Why America Needs National Conservatism,” Christopher DeMuth, president from 1986 through 2008 of the mainstream Republican American Enterprise Institute and now chairman of the National Conservative Conference, reinforces Laruelle’s point: “When the American left was liberal and reformist, conservatives played our customary role as moderators of change. We too breathed the air of liberalism, and there are always things that could stand a little reforming.” But, DeMuth continued, “today’s woke progressivism isn’t reformist. It seeks not to build on the past but to promote instability, to turn the world upside-down.”The doctrines of progressivism have resulted, DeMuth argues, inmayhem and misery at an open national border. Riot and murder in lawless city neighborhoods. Political indoctrination of schoolchildren. Government by executive ukase. Shortages throughout the world’s richest economy. Suppression of religion and private association. Regulation of everyday language — complete with contrived redefinitions of familiar words and ritual recantations for offenders.How deep is the reservoir of support that national conservatism can tap into? The striking pattern in polling data shows that over the years from 2017 to the present, Trump, despite all his liabilities, has retained a consistent favorability rating, ranging from 41 to 46 percent of the electorate, a base that appears virtually immovable.Arlie Hochschild, a professor of sociology at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” has been interviewing voters in Eastern Kentucky’s Appalachia since 2018, exploring the reasons behind this unwavering loyalty.I asked her about the prospects of illiberalism in this country and she replied by email: “We should keep a close eye on the sense of grievance stored up almost as a springboard within the word ‘stolen.’ ” The background to this, Hochschild argued,is that blue-collar, rural/small town — especially white and male — have since the l970s been the “losers” of globalization, and the two parties now represent two economies. To this demographic, economic loss is compounded with a loss of fallback sources of honor — gender, sexuality, race — for white heterosexual males these, too, seem under attack. This is the “deep story” of “Stop the Steal,” and they see reality through that story.The story does not end there. Hochschild continued:The right believes that it is the left, not the right, that is moving toward fascism. Inside the right wing mind today freedom is threatened “by the left.” Political correctness a form of “thought control.” The left controls the media. The F.B.I. is scanning Facebook to hunt down patriots in Washington. So, ironically, they see themselves as brave upholders of freedom, democracy, civil liberties. They aren’t saying we want strong totalitarian control so we get to impose our values on others. They see themselves as the victims of this control and Trump as their liberator from that control.Still, national conservatism faces significant hurdles. For example, Hochschild pointed out, this country recently saw a dramatic change in the Kansas electorate: “In the days after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision leaked, Kansans turned out in record numbers in the primary and delivered a victory for abortion rights, a win fueled by Democrats out registering Republicans by 9 points since the Dobbs decision was announced, with a staggering 70 percent of all new registrants being women.”How dangerous, then, is America’s current right populist movement?Tait, the historian of conservatism, is cautious in addressing this question, noting that national conservatism seems to “represent something new in that it seems to explicitly depart from liberalism instead of reproducing it in a compromised, conservative way.” He described the Edmund Burke Foundation’s Statement of Principles asan effort at a mature, sanitized post-Trumpism. But a great many of the guardrails of constitutional liberalism and fusionist conservatism have been undermined and we may see a politics less constrained by liberal constitutional norms and rules. Likewise, the actors prominent in this space are less constrained by right-wing respectability politics, including Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley.Damon Linker, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, sees a strong parallel between trends in the United States and the illiberal developments in Europe. Referring to the recent election in Italy, Linker posted “What just happened in Italy?” on his Sept. 26 substack, Eyes on the Right, arguing thatWe’re left with a picture of a country in which the center-left is supported mainly by the educated, secular, and professional classes, while the right appeals to a cross-section of the rest of the country — the working class as well as the middle and upper-middle classes, along with the religiously pious and the large numbers of Italians who treat religion as a symbol or identity-marker without actually believing in or practicing it.If that sounds familiar, Linker continued,that’s because similar things have been happening in many places over the past decade. The precise political results of these shifts have varied from country to country as they’ve interacted with different electoral systems, but the underlying trends in public opinion can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in France, Great Britain, the United States, and other countries. In each case, the center-left has gone into decline with the center-right and anti-liberal populist right rising to take its place. Until the center-left figures out a way to win back the working- and middle-class, as well as the nominally religious, it will continue to lose precious political ground to the populist and nationalist right.William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, points out in an essay, “What Is National Conservatism? The movement could be the future of the American right,” that “Two of illiberalism’s most important intellectuals, political theorists Yoram Hazony and Patrick Deneen, have mounted a frontal attack on the entire individualist, rights-based liberal political tradition that they trace back to John Locke.” In Eastern Europe, this critique resonates, Galston continued, but “it does create a problem for the United States where, historians inspired by Louis Hartz have argued, political liberalism is our tradition.”National conservatives, Galston argued,do not distinguish between the liberal political tradition and the excesses of today’s liberal culture. They see the focus on individual rights — and on the conceptions of equality and liberty that flow from them — as corroding traditional beliefs and practices. They are convinced that they must sacrifice the liberal baby to get rid of the progressive bathwater, and they are all too eager to do so. Embracing unfettered majoritarianism in the pursuit of virtue is no virtue. It is hard to overstate the danger to pluralism and liberty that lies at the end of this road.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Italy’s Hard-Right Lurch Raises New Concerns in Washington

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      The Biden administration pledged to work with the country’s new leaders despite worries. Several Republicans hailed the Italian election results.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration publicly reacted with calm on Monday to Italy’s election of a far-right governing coalition, pledging to work with the country’s incoming leaders despite concern about their party’s fascist roots.But the latest rightward lurch of a European country — two weeks after a far-right party performed startlingly well in Sweden’s elections — is raising concerns in Washington about the continent’s combustible populism and what it could mean for some of President Biden’s foreign policy goals, including confronting Russia and defending democracy against authoritarianism.It has also underscored divisions within the United States, as members of the Trump wing of the Republican Party embraced the rise of a nationalist whose party has roots in Mussolini-era fascism.In the near term, the political success of Giorgia Meloni and her nationalist Brothers of Italy party, which leaves her poised to become the country’s next prime minister, is unlikely to rupture relations between Washington and Rome. Nor should it hobble the U.S.-led effort to unify Europe in defense of Ukraine against Russian conquest. Although Ms. Meloni has espoused radical nationalist views, and key members of her coalition openly oppose the European Union and call for friendlier relations with Moscow, as a candidate she expressed support for NATO and the defense of Ukraine.Writing on Twitter on Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken set a tone of comity, saying that the Biden administration was “eager to work with Italy’s government on our shared goals: supporting a free and independent Ukraine, respecting human rights, and building a sustainable economic future.”“Italy is a vital ally, strong democracy, and valued partner,” he added.Mr. Blinken’s comments appeared to reflect an initial belief that officials in the Biden administration can do strategic business with Ms. Meloni, even if many of her core values, including skepticism of gay rights and “gender ideology,” clash with their own.The Biden administration also understands that even an anti-establishment firebrand like Ms. Meloni will need financial support from the European Union to survive in office — a tall order if she wages political fights with Washington and Brussels. And with Italian public opinion slanted against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, Ms. Meloni would be hard-pressed to soften Italy’s line toward Moscow or seek to block the E.U.’s consensus-based support for Kyiv, analysts said.“From a foreign policy perspective, I do not expect a U-turn,” said Giovanna De Maio, a visiting fellow at George Washington University who studies trans-Atlantic relations. “It will be a moderate approach, at least for now,” she added.In an unsettling sign for the administration and centrist European leaders alike, however, several prominent Republicans hailed Ms. Meloni’s showing — a reminder of the growing kinship between European nationalists and the Trump wing of the Republican Party, who share a general philosophy of traditional social values, support for restricted immigration and deep skepticism of multilateral institutions.“This month, Sweden voted for a right-wing government,” Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, wrote on Twitter. “Now, Italy voted for a strong right-wing government. The entire world is beginning to understand that the Woke Left does nothing but destroy. Nov 8 is coming soon & the USA will fix our House and Senate! Let freedom reign!”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mike Pompeo, President Donald J. Trump’s secretary of state, who is of Italian heritage, also tweeted his congratulations. “Italy deserves and needs strong conservative leadership,” he wrote. “Buona Fortuna!”After Mr. Trump derided the European Union and clashed with longtime U.S. allies like Germany and France over foreign policy, Mr. Biden has worked to restore relations between America and Europe. That effort was accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Europe.But the shock wave from Italy is a reminder of Europe’s volatile politics and the threat they pose to the established, U.S.-backed order.The ascent of Ms. Meloni’s coalition also deals a blow to a central theme of Mr. Biden’s presidency: the effort to defend democracy and reject authoritarianism abroad. Europe’s right-wing parties have shown authoritarian tendencies in power, with conservatives in nations like Poland and Hungary cracking down on press freedom, an independent judiciary and other checks on central power.Europe’s far right may see greater opportunity in the months ahead, analysts said, as the continent stumbles toward winter amid soaring energy prices and other forms of inflation that many economists predict will produce a recession. Mr. Blinken and other administration officials have warned that winter will test Europe’s resolve on Ukraine, as analysts worry that economic pain could shift public anger away from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and toward the continent’s establishment leaders.“In the coming months, our unity and sovereignty will be tested with pressure on energy supplies and the soaring cost of living, caused by Russia’s war,” Mr. Blinken warned during a stop in Brussels this month.Daniel Baer, the director of the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that if economic conditions grew much worse, they could “drive populist strains on established democracies the way the 2008 financial crisis did.”Mr. Biden has worked with a set of strongly pro-American, internationalist leaders in Europe’s major capitals. France and Germany, along with Britain, have largely been in sync with Mr. Biden’s agenda. Italy was governed for nearly all of the Biden presidency by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, an economist who prioritized Italy’s international integration. Mr. Draghi’s resignation this summer triggered Sunday’s election.Mr. Baer noted that hard-right candidates had fizzled in two major elections over the past year. In April, the centrist French president, Emmanuel Macron, defeated his nationalist challenger, Marine Le Pen, and the moderate Olaf Scholz emerged from Germany’s elections last fall.Since then, the far-right Sweden Democrats won the second-largest share of the country’s vote, Ms. Meloni is poised to lead Italy once a government is formed there and Spain’s Vox party continues to gather momentum.“The sighs of relief that a lot of people breathed when Scholz was elected and Le Pen lost — was that premature?” Mr. Baer asked. More

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      in Elections

      Italy’s Giorgia Meloni Is Extreme, but She’s no Tyrant

      by

      ROME — It happened here, again. Nearly 100 years since the March on Rome, Italy on Sunday voted in a right-wing coalition headed by a party directly descended from Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.This is, to put it mildly, concerning. Yet the most pervasive worry is not that Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party will reinstitute fascism in Italy — whatever that would mean. It’s that a government led by her will transform Italy into an “electoral autocracy,” along the lines of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. During the campaign, the center-left Democratic Party — Brothers of Italy’s main opponent — obsessively invoked Hungary as Italy’s destiny under Ms. Meloni’s rule. The contest, they repeated, was one between democracy and authoritarianism.In the end, the Democrats’ anguished “alarm for democracy” failed to persuade voters: At an early reckoning, the party took 19 percent against the Brothers of Italy’s 26 percent. There are many reasons for that. One surely is that the picture they drew of Ms. Meloni, as a would-be tyrant taking an ax to Italian democracy and ushering in an era of illiberalism, was unconvincing. For all the rhetorical radicalism and historic extremism of her party, the fact remains that it will not be operating in circumstances of its choosing. Tethered to the European Union and constrained by Italy’s political system, Ms. Meloni won’t have much room to maneuver. She couldn’t turn Rome into Budapest even if she wanted to.The major bulwark against autocracy in Italy can be summed up in one word: Europe. Our fragile economy — set to grow, in a best-case scenario sketched out by the International Monetary Fund, only 0.7 percent in 2023 — is heavily dependent on European institutions. Beyond the usual web of economic ties, the country is the biggest beneficiary of a European Commission-led recovery fund set to disperse in the next four years over 200 billion euros, or $195 billion, in grants and loans. Crucially, this economy-saving aid, without which the country may well spiral into recession, is conditional on respecting democratic norms. Any step down an Orban-like path would imperil Italy’s entire economy, surely a no-go for the new government.Playing by European rules wouldn’t be as big a concession as it might seem. After all, Brothers of Italy over the years has progressively tempered its euroskeptic instincts. In 2014, Ms. Meloni announced that “the time has come to tell Europe that Italy must leave the eurozone.” The party, she pledged, would pursue “a unilateral withdrawal” from the monetary union, and in 2018 she sponsored a bill to remove references to the bloc from the Italian Constitution. Yet as the prospect of power came closer, those goals dropped off the party’s agenda. “I don’t think Italy needs to leave the eurozone and I believe the euro will stay,” Ms. Meloni conceded last year.Giorgia Meloni is likely to be Italy’s next prime minister.Antonio Masiello/Getty ImagesOn foreign policy, too, Ms. Meloni is aligned with the dominant view on the continent. Formerly friendly with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — she asked the Italian government to withdraw its support of sanctions in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and congratulated Mr. Putin on his no-doubt fraudulent re-election in 2018 — she has, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, reinvented herself as a torchbearer of Atlanticism and a staunch supporter of NATO. She is now a major proponent of a Europe-wide price cap on gas, the continent’s most potent economic weapon against Mr. Putin (and a measure, incidentally, so far opposed by Hungary). Whether opportunistic or sincere, such moves signal how ready Ms. Meloni is to occupy a conventional, Europe-friendly position, placating international partners and investors alike.Then there’s the country itself. For a start, the right-wing coalition — which also includes the League party and Forza Italia — fell short of the two-thirds majority in Parliament that would have allowed it to modify the Constitution without recourse to a popular vote. Ms. Meloni’s dream of turning Italy’s parliamentary democracy into a presidential system, which critics saw as the first step toward a perilous extension of executive power, is already ruled out.Managing the fractious government coalition won’t be easy, either. On one side, there’s Matteo Salvini, the ebullient leader of the League. Resentful of Ms. Meloni’s rise — which has come at his expense — and adamantly pro-Putin, he could cause endless trouble. On the other, there’s Silvio Berlusconi, who has already warned his partners that Forza Italia “will break with the government if it takes an anti-E.U. line.” In this quarrelsome setting, it will be extremely hard for Ms. Meloni to push through any truly disruptive policies. If she does, the already audible calls to reinstate Mario Draghi, who led the national unity government that fell in July, will grow louder.Italy’s notoriously volatile political environment is also balanced by democratic institutions designed to foster stability and prevent authoritarian backsliding. The decentralized system is made of 20 semiautonomous regions and nearly 8,000 municipalities, firewalls to rein in centralized power. The Constitutional Court, whose general legitimacy has never been in question, is fairly independent from political influence, and the justice system recently went through a comprehensive, E.U.-driven reform. Any attempt by Ms. Meloni to arrogate powers to herself would be stoutly opposed.To be sure, there are genuine reasons for concern. Ms. Meloni is the first post-fascist leader to win a national election in Italy after World War II, and her party is the heir of the Italian Social Movement, the reincarnation of the long-dissolved and constitutionally banned Fascist Party. The process of “de-demonization” that Brothers of Italy went through, including openly repudiating the fascist tradition, hasn’t quashed the deeply rooted connections with neo-fascist circles. Party officials have often been caught mingling and doing business with the sketchiest far-right groups around.What’s more, Ms. Meloni’s sympathies, if not her present political orientation, lie with Europe’s illiberals. As recently as Sept. 15, she led her party to vote against a European resolution censoring Mr. Orban, and she is a close ally of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, which is embroiled in a fierce rule-of-law dispute with the European Commission over government control of the judiciary. Her platform — militantly anti-migrant, socially reactionary and steeped in a culture of clientelism and tribalism — is unmistakably nativist and radical.All this, of course, is problematic. But not all problems lead to autocracy.Mattia Ferraresi (@mattiaferraresi) is the managing editor of the Italian newspaper Domani.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More