neo-Nazi groups

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares189 Views

    Charges Against Two White Nationalists Are Dismissed as ‘Selective Prosecution’

    by

    A federal judge found that prosecutors were biased in pursuing charges against the two men and not against far-left activists who had also committed acts of violence at the same events.A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed riot charges against two members of a neo-Nazi street gang who had attacked counterprotesters at several pro-Trump rallies in California in 2017, saying that the government had behaved improperly by neglecting to bring charges against left-wing activists who had also acted violently at the same events.The ruling by the judge, Cormac J. Carney, found that prosecutors had unfairly engaged in “a selective prosecution” against the two men — members of the Rise Above Movement, or R.A.M. — and targeted them chiefly because of their vitriolic speech and white supremacist ideology.While Judge Carney acknowledged that he found the ideas that the movement promoted “reprehensible,” he also said it was “constitutionally impermissible” to bring charges against one group, but not the other, based on politics alone.“The government cannot prosecute R.A.M. members such as defendants while ignoring the violence of members of antifa and related far-left groups because R.A.M. engaged in what the government and many believe is more offensive speech,” he wrote.The decision by Judge Carney, who sits in Federal District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., immediately wiped out the case against the two men, Robert Rundo, the founder of R.A.M. and an infamous figure in neo-Nazi circles, and Robert Boman, one of his subordinates. It was also a rare successful use of the selective prosecution tactic and leaned heavily on an appeal to the First Amendment. “It does not matter who you are or what you say,” Judge Carney wrote. “It does not matter whether you are a supporter of All Lives Matter or a supporter of Black Lives Matter. It does not matter whether you are a Zionist professor or part of Students for Justice in Palestine. It does not matter whether you are a member of R.A.M. or antifa. All are the same under the Constitution, and all receive its protections.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis’s Silence on Neo-Nazis in Florida Speaks Volumes to Some

      by

      One of the governor’s closest Jewish allies in the state publicly switched his support to Donald J. Trump, citing past incidents.As Israel’s war against Hamas has become an animating force in the Republican presidential primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has cast himself as a staunch defender of the Jewish state, sending taxpayer-funded charter flights to rescue Americans stranded in Israel, calling for harsh measures against the civilians of Gaza and ordering pro-Palestinian groups on public university campuses in his state to disband.Those efforts, as well as a series of bills he has signed to combat antisemitism in Florida in the past, have won him attention from the news media and praise from some Republican voters.But Mr. DeSantis has earned fewer plaudits for his response to a series of neo-Nazi demonstrations that have taken place in his state over the last two years. The hateful displays have included masked men marching and chanting “Jews get the rope” and banners with swastikas hung from highway overpasses.Unlike other prominent Republican politicians in Florida, the governor stayed silent after each incident, making no public statements. When pressed, he has said that he did not wish to draw attention to people he considered provocateurs, and claimed that those calling on him to denounce the groups were trying to “smear” him by association. But his adamant, ongoing refusal to condemn the public activities of neo-Nazis has angered and confused many American Jews while highlighting what critics say is his tendency toward obstinacy.Now, as he challenges former President Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination, his silence has also become a concern for some Republican donors. Two of them, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive and private discussions, said that they or their allies had reached out to Mr. DeSantis’s advisers after high-profile incidents of antisemitism in Florida, urging him to say more. One of the donors recounted being told that Mr. DeSantis did not want to speak out. There wasn’t an explanation as to why, beyond that the governor believed he had done enough already, the person said.State Representative Randy Fine, a close ally of Mr. DeSantis’s and the only Jewish Republican in the State Legislature, broke with the governor after the attack on Israel.Octavio Jones/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Supreme Court’s Rejection of a Disputed Legal Theory on Elections

      by

      More from our inbox:Race and ClassDemand Tax Relief‘Make Reading Fun Again’The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllThe case will have no practical impact in the dispute that gave rise to it, involving North Carolina’s congressional voting map. The state has waged many battles over redistricting.Gerry Broome/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Court Rules State Control of U.S. Voting Has Limits” (front page, June 28):Several high-profile cases were decided by the Supreme Court this month, but only one, Moore v. Harper, had the potential to affect the very lifeblood of our democracy — voting. This election law case considered, in part, a controversial constitutional theory known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine.At issue was whether or not state legislatures had absolute power with no electoral oversight authority by state courts to regulate federal elections. With unchecked power, state legislators in key swing states could have rejected the voters’ slate of electors and appointed their handpicked substitutes.The Supreme Court has an obligation to protect our democracy. By rejecting the dangerous independent state legislature theory, the court safeguarded state-level judiciaries, shielding the will of the voters in the process.Jim PaladinoTampa, Fla.To the Editor:In the 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in Moore v. Harper, the fact that a supermajority including both Democratic and Republican appointees reaffirmed the American constitutional order is the latest example that the Republican-appointed justices are not in the hip pocket of Donald Trump and the extreme right of the Republican Party.This should provide comfort for those who believe in the separation of powers as prescribed in our Constitution.John A. ViterittiLaurel, N.Y.To the Editor:Adam Liptak writes about the Supreme Court’s ruling that soundly dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory.The article quotes Richard L. Hasen, a U.C.L.A. law professor and leading election law scholar, who said the ruling giving the Supreme Court the ultimate say in federal election disputes was “a bad, but not awful, result.”It seems globally accepted that legal disputes, including election disputes, should be decided by courts, and that in federal democracies, the highest national courts are best suited to have the last word in federal election cases.While it is common for politicians and lawyers worldwide to dismiss international best practices based on the uniqueness of their legal systems, in the U.S., too, only the Supreme Court can ensure consistency across all states and thus protect the integrity of federal elections.Jurij ToplakNew YorkThe writer is a visiting professor at Fordham University School of Law.To the Editor:In your article the Supreme Court justices whose opinions pose a threat to voting rights and democracy are referred to as “conservative.” The justices’ positions are not “conservative,” if conservative refers to those who are committed to preserve traditional institutions, practices and values.I would ask that The Times consider a better word to describe these justices, whose positions on legal issues are heavily influenced by considerations of preserving Republican rule, class structures and Christian ideological dominance.Cindy WeinbaumAtlantaRace and Class Pablo DelcanTo the Editor:Re “Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning,” by John McWhorter (Opinion, June 26):Providing support for those who have been hurt by past discrimination is an important step in alleviating the harm caused by America’s long history of racism.However, including all who are economically disadvantaged in any initiatives, as Professor McWhorter suggests, will broaden support for affirmative action programs while assisting more people who need a hand up.Ignoring this slice of the populace is what has led to simmering resentment in many communities and to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.Rather than pitting groups against one another, we should strive to lift up the fallen, regardless of the origin of people’s suffering.Edwin AndrewsMalden, Mass.Demand Tax ReliefHomeowners 65 or older with income of less than $500,000 could qualify for a property tax cut of as much as $6,500 a year.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Property Taxes Could Be Cut in Half for Older New Jersey Homeowners” (news article, June 22):As a suburban homeowner in Nassau County in New York, I find it reassuring to see neighboring New Jersey working hard to address the problem of high property taxes. It just approved a property tax reduction program for homeowners 65-plus called StayNJ, designed to offset some of the highest property taxes in the country.The people of New York State must demand that their elected officials pass similar relief for their constituents, who also live in a state with high property taxes. We are still suffering from a $10,000 state and local taxes deduction cap on our federal income tax that was passed under former President Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats promised to repeal this as one of their legislative priorities and have failed to keep their promise so far. So it is up to us to demand action from the New York State Legislature.Philip A. Paoli Jr.Seaford, N.Y.‘Make Reading Fun Again’To the Editor:Re “13-Year-Olds in U.S. Record Lowest Test Scores in Decades” (news article, June 22):The latest data is out on reading scores for 13-year-olds in the U.S., and it’s not good. Children’s reading levels are at their lowest in decades.In your article, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics states, “This is a huge-scale challenge that faces the nation.”Indeed, we see this challenge every day in the faces of children in our homes, schools and communities. We are responding by bolstering instruction, tutoring and summer learning, all of which offer reason to hope.But what stood out to me most in this story was that fewer kids report reading for fun, with 31 percent saying they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared with 22 percent in 2012.Could reigniting a love for reading and the joy of books be an answer we’re missing to this problem? Imagine every child with an abundant home library, cuddled up with a parent or under the covers reading a book, starting from birth.At a time when our education system is struggling, and life is hard for so many children, let’s make reading fun again!Mary MathewDurham, N.C.The writer is director of advocacy for Book Harvest, which provides books and literacy support to children and families.The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllAn AfD demonstration on energy security and inflation, outside of the Reichstag in Berlin in October.Christoph Soeder/DPA, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “As German Worries About Future Rise, Far-Right Party Surges” (news article, June 21):The expanding and emboldened far-right element in Germany is not solely a concern for Germans; it is also troubling for the international community in general and Jews in particular.Extremism fueled by xenophobia and a deep sense of nationalism in a country that carried out the systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is foreboding and a grave threat to democracy.With global antisemitism increasing at an alarming rate and Nazism experiencing an unsettling resurgence, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the political gains that it has made are a proverbial red flag.When extremism becomes normalized and gains a foothold in the mainstream political arena and people flagrantly fan the flames of fanaticism, we have a societal and moral obligation to sound the alarm.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      La extrema derecha vuelve a la carga en Alemania

      by

      Mientras los alemanes se enfrentan a una era de turbulencias políticas y económicas, el partido Alternativa para Alemania resurge. Los políticos tradicionales se esfuerzan por reaccionar.Las mesas estaban abarrotadas en el Waldhaus, un restaurante en las afueras boscosas de una ciudad del este de Alemania, mientras los habituales —trabajadores estrechando manos callosas, jubiladas agarrando carteras en su regazo— se acomodaban para una reunión de bar de la ultraderechista Alternativa para Alemania.Pero los incondicionales preocupan menos a los dirigentes políticos alemanes que personas como Ina Radzheit. Ella, agente de seguros con una blusa floreada, se coló entre bandejas de schnitzel y cervezas espumosas en su primera visita a la AfD, las iniciales alemanas con las que se conoce al partido.“¿Qué pasa?”, dijo. “¿Por dónde empiezo?”. Se siente insegura con el aumento de la inmigración. Le incomoda que Alemania suministre armas a Ucrania. Está exasperada por las disputas del gobierno sobre planes climáticos que teme que costarán a ciudadanos como ella su modesto pero cómodo modo de vida.“No puedo decir ahora si alguna vez votaré por la AfD”, dijo. “Pero estoy escuchando”.A medida que la preocupación por el futuro de Alemania crece, parece que también lo hace la AfD.La AfD ha alcanzado su punto más alto en las encuestas en los antiguos estados comunistas del este de Alemania, donde ahora es el partido líder, atrayendo a alrededor de un tercio de los votantes. En el oeste, más rico, está subiendo. A nivel nacional, está codo a codo con los socialdemócratas del canciller Olaf Scholz.Si la tendencia se mantiene, la AfD podría representar su amenaza más seria para la política alemana tradicional desde 2017, cuando se convirtió en el primer partido de extrema derecha en entrar en el Parlamento desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial.El giro es sorprendente para un partido cuyos obituarios políticos llenaban los medios alemanes hace un año, tras haberse hundido en las elecciones nacionales. Y refleja el malestar de un país en una encrucijada.Residentes locales llegan a una reunión de la AfD en el restaurante Waldhaus en Gera, Alemania.Lena Mucha para The New York TimesTras décadas de prosperidad de posguerra, Alemania lucha por transformar su modelo industrial exportador del siglo XX en una economía digitalizada capaz de resistir el cambio climático y la competencia de potencias como China.“Vivimos en un mundo de agitación global”, dijo Rene Springer, legislador nacional de AfD, en su intervención en el Waldhaus de Gera. “Nuestra responsabilidad para con nuestros hijos es dejarles algún día una situación mejor que la nuestra. Eso ya no es de esperar”.Cuando fue elegida en 2021, la coalición de tres partidos de Scholz prometió conducir a Alemania a través de una transformación dolorosa pero necesaria. En cambio, el país se sumió en una incertidumbre más profunda por la invasión rusa de Ucrania.Al principio, la coalición parecía vencer a los pronósticos: los aliados elogiaban su promesa de sustituir el pacifismo de posguerra por una revitalización militar. Encontró alternativas al gas ruso barato —casi el 50 por ciento de su suministro— con una rapidez inesperada.Pero entonces el país entró en recesión. Las cifras de migración alcanzaron máximos históricos, impulsadas sobre todo por los refugiados ucranianos. Y la coalición empezó a luchar entre sí sobre cómo retomar el rumbo marcado para Alemania antes de la guerra.La AfD, un partido que atrajo apoyos sobre todo al criticar la migración, encontró un nuevo atractivo como defensor de la clase económicamente precaria de Alemania.“Con la migración, la AfD ofreció una narrativa cultural y una identidad a quienes estaban ansiosos por su futuro”, dijo Johannes Hillje, un politólogo alemán que estudia la AfD. “Ahora, la amenaza cultural no viene solo de fuera, sino de dentro, es decir, de la política de transformación del gobierno”.Una manifestación de la AfD sobre seguridad energética e inflación, en las afueras del edificio del Reichstag en Berlín, en octubre.Christoph Soeder/DPA, vía Associated PressLa AfD ha resurgido a pesar de que los servicios de inteligencia nacionales la clasifican como organización “sospechosa” de extrema derecha, lo que permite ponerla bajo vigilancia. Su rama en Turingia, donde se celebró la reunión de Waldhaus, está clasificada como extremista “confirmada”.Un mes antes, su rama juvenil nacional también fue clasificada como extremista confirmada, aunque esa etiqueta fue retirada hace poco mientras se resuelve en la corte un caso sobre su estatus.En el informe anual de la agencia nacional de inteligencia en abril, el líder de la agencia, Thomas Haldenwang, indicó que se cree que de los 28.500 integrantes de la AfD, alrededor de 10.000 son extremistas.Sin embargo, un tercio de los alemanes la consideran un “partido democrático normal”, según Hillje. “La paradoja es que, al mismo tiempo, cada vez está más claro que se trata realmente de un partido radical, si no extremista”.En años anteriores, el partido parecía dispuesto a dejar de lado a las figuras extremas. Ahora ya no. Este mes de abril, la colíder Alice Wiedel habló junto a Björn Höcke, líder del partido en Turingia y uno de los políticos considerado entre los más radicales de la AfD.Höcke fue acusado recientemente por la fiscalía estatal por utilizar la frase “todo para Alemania” en un mitin, un eslogan de las tropas de asalto nazis.Nada de eso empañó el entusiasmo en el Waldhaus de Gera, una ciudad de unos 93.000 habitantes en el este de Turingia, donde la AfD es el partido más popular.Anke Wettengel, maestra de escuela, dijo que esas etiquetas equivalen a centrarse en los hinchas de un equipo de fútbol, y no reflejan a los seguidores normales, como ella.Tampoco veía ningún problema en lo dicho por Höcke.“Fue una frase muy normal”, dijo. “Hoy se nos debería permitir estar orgullosos de nuestro país sin ser acusados inmediatamente de extremistas”.Desde el escenario, Springer arremetió no solo contra las reformas laborales para los inmigrantes, calificándolas de “sistema traidor contra los ciudadanos nativos”, sino que también criticó las nuevas medidas climáticas.La audiencia golpeó sus mesas en señal de aprobación.Una sesión de preguntas y respuestas para simpatizantes de la AfD y residentes locales en el Waldhaus, en Gera. La ciudad ubicada en el este de Turingia es una de las muchas que están experimentando un incremento en el apoyo al partido en todo el país.Lena Mucha para The New York TimesStefan Brandner, representante de la AfD en Gera, compartió estadísticas que, según él, vinculaban de manera abrumadora a los extranjeros con asesinatos y entregas de alimentos, lo que provocó exclamaciones en la multitud.Muchos invitados afirmaron que son estos “hechos reales” los que los atrajeron a los eventos de la AfD. (El gobierno federal escribió en un documento que proporcionaba estadísticas a la AfD, que los datos no eran lo suficientemente sustanciales como para sacar tales conclusiones).Los analistas políticos afirman que los principales partidos de Alemania comparten la culpa por el ascenso de la AfD. La coalición de Scholz no logró comunicar de manera convincente sus planes de transformación y, en cambio, pareció enfrascarse en batallas internas sobre cómo llevarlos a cabo.Sus tradicionales opositores conservadores, entre ellos la Unión Demócrata Cristiana de la excanciller Angela Merkel, se están acercando a las posturas de la AfD con la esperanza de recuperar votantes.Están adoptando la estrategia de la AfD de antagonizar el lenguaje neutro de género, así como posturas más duras sobre la migración. Algunos líderes demócratas cristianos incluso están pidiendo eliminar los derechos de asilo de la constitución de Alemania.Los partidarios de la AfD han notado que sus puntos de vista se han ido normalizando incluso cuando los rivales han intentado marginar al partido, y eso hace que sea más difícil para los partidos tradicionales recuperar su confianza.“Se están radicalizando”, aseveró Julia Reuschenbach, politóloga de la Universidad Libre de Berlín. “Ningún grupo de votantes principales es tan inaccesible como los de la AfD”.Björn Höcke, uno de los líderes del partido en Turingia y considerado uno de los políticos más radicales de la AfD, marchando en un mitin en Turingia el mes pasado.Martin Schutt/Picture Alliance, vía Getty ImagesLa semana pasada, el Instituto Alemán por los Derechos Humanos, una organización financiada por el Estado, publicó un estudio que argumenta que el lenguaje y las tácticas utilizadas por la AfD “para lograr sus objetivos racistas y extremistas de derecha” podrían reunir las condiciones para inhabilitar el partido por ser un “peligro para el orden democrático libre”.Sin embargo, estas propuestas le generan otro dilema a la sociedad democrática: las herramientas que tiene Alemania para luchar contra el partido que ve como una amenaza son las mismas que refuerzan los sentimientos entre los partidarios de la AfD de que su país no es realmente democrático.“¿Cómo es posible que una organización financiada por el Estado se pronuncie e intente estigmatizar a una parte significativa de sus votantes?” preguntó Springer en una entrevista.Es una pregunta a la que aquellos en la multitud, como Wettengel, han encontrado respuestas inquietantes.“La política tradicional está en contra de la gente”, aseguró. “No a favor de la gente”.La verdadera prueba del apoyo a la AfD no llegará sino hasta el próximo año, cuando varios estados del este de Alemania celebren elecciones y tenga una posibilidad de llevarse la mayor parte de los votos.Mientras tanto, todas las semanas, los políticos de la AfD se despliegan por todo el país, organizan mesas de información, noches de encuentros en pub y conversaciones con ciudadanos, como si ya estuvieran en campaña electoral.Fuera de la estación de tren de Hennigsdorf, un suburbio de Berlín, el legislador estatal de la AfD, Andreas Galau, repartía folletos a los visitantes con una sonrisa inquebrantable. Algunos transeúntes le gritaban insultos. Otros tenían curiosidad.“Muchos vienen aquí solo para desahogar sus frustraciones”, dijo, con una sonrisa. “Vienen y nos dicen lo que sienten. Somos una especie de grupo de terapia”.Cada vez más personas, aseguró, ya no se avergüenzan de mostrar interés en la AfD. La sensación de que la política tradicional no está escuchando al ciudadano común es lo que podría estar ayudando a llenar las filas de la AfD.En Gera, el discurso que Springer pronunció frente a la multitud parecía un ejercicio de catarsis y validación.“Ellos creen que somos estúpidos”, dijo. “Se lo pensarán de nuevo cuando lleguen las próximas elecciones”. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Germany’s Far Right AfD Party Stages a Comeback

      by

      With Germans facing an era of political and economic turbulence, the Alternative for Germany is resurgent. Mainstream politicians are struggling to respond.The tables were packed at the Waldhaus, a restaurant on the wooded outskirts of an east German town, as the regulars — workers shaking calloused hands, retirees clutching purses in their lap — settled in for a pub gathering of the far-right Alternative for Germany.But the die-hards worry Germany’s political leadership less than people like Ina Radzheit. An insurance agent in a flowered blouse, she squeezed in among platters of schnitzel and frothy beers for her first visit to the AfD, the German initials by which the party is known.“What’s wrong?” she said. “Where do I start?” She feels unsafe with migration rising. She is uncomfortable with Germany providing weapons to Ukraine. She is exasperated by government squabbling over climate plans she fears will cost citizens like her their modest but comfortable way of life.“I can’t say now if I would ever vote for the AfD,” she said. “But I am listening.”As anxieties over Germany’s future rise, so too, it seems, does the AfD.The AfD has reached a polling high in Germany’s formerly Communist eastern states, where it is now the leading party, drawing around a third of voters. It is edging up in the wealthier west. Nationally, it is polling neck and neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.If the trend lasts, the AfD could present its most serious threat to Germany’s political establishment since 2017, when it became the first far-right party to enter Parliament since World War II.The turnabout is surprising for a party whose political obituaries filled the German media a year ago, after it had sunk in national elections. And it reflects the unease of a country at a crossroads.Locals arriving for an AfD meeting at the Waldhaus restaurant in Gera, Germany.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesAfter decades of postwar prosperity, Germany is struggling to transform its 20th-century industrial exporting model into a digitized economy that can withstand climate change and competition from powers like China.“We are living in a world of global upheaval,” said Rene Springer, the national AfD lawmaker speaking at the Waldhaus in Gera. “Our responsibility to our children is to one day leave them better off than we are. That’s no longer to be expected.”When it was elected in 2021, Mr. Scholz’s three-party coalition vowed to lead Germany through a painful but necessary transformation. Instead, the country was plunged into deeper uncertainty by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.At first, the coalition seemed to beat the odds: Allies praised its pledge to overwrite postwar pacifism with military revitalization. It found alternatives to cheap Russian gas — nearly 50 percent of its supply — with unexpected speed.But then the country dipped into recession. Migration numbers reached all-time highs, mostly driven by Ukrainian refugees. And the coalition began fighting among itself over how to return to the course it set for Germany before the war.The AfD, a party that mostly drew support by criticizing migration, found new appeal as defender of Germany’s economically precarious class.“With migration, the AfD offered a cultural narrative and identity to those anxious about their future,” said Johannes Hillje, a German political scientist who studies the AfD. “Now, the cultural threat is coming not just from the outside, but within — that is, the transformation policy of the government.”An AfD demonstration on energy security and inflation, outside of the Reichstag in Berlin in October.Christoph Soeder/DPA, via Associated PressThe AfD has resurged despite domestic intelligence classifying it a “suspected” right-wing extremist organization, allowing it to be put under surveillance. Its branch in Thuringia, where the Waldhaus gathering was held, is classified as “confirmed” extremist.A month earlier, its national youth wing was also classified confirmed extremist, though that label was recently lifted as a case regarding its status is settled in the courts.In April, the domestic intelligence agency head, Thomas Haldenwang, said in the agency’s yearly report that of 28,500 AfD members, around 10,000 are believed to be extremists.Yet a full third of Germans now view it as a “normal democratic party,” Mr. Hillje said. “The paradox is that, at the same time, it has become more and more clear that this is really a radical party, if not an extremist party.”In previous years, the party seemed ready to sideline extreme figures. No longer. This April, co-leader Alice Weidel spoke alongside Björn Höcke, party leader in Thuringia and seen as one of the AfD’s most radical politicians.Mr. Höcke was recently charged by state prosecutors for using the phrase “everything for Germany” at a rally — a Nazi Storm Trooper slogan.None of that dampened the enthusiasm at the Waldhaus in Gera, a town of about 93,000 in eastern Thuringia, where the AfD is the most popular party.Anke Wettengel, a schoolteacher, called such labels the equivalent of focusing on hooligan fans of a soccer team — not a reflection of normal supporters, like her.Nor did she see a problem with Mr. Höcke’s language.“That was a very normal sentence,” she said. “We should be allowed to be proud of our country today without immediately being accused of being extremists.”From the stage, Mr. Springer railed against not only immigrant labor reforms, calling them a “traitorous system against native citizens,” but also criticized new climate measures.The audience thumped their tables in approval.A question-and-answer session for AfD supporters and locals at the Waldhaus in Gera. The town in eastern Thuringia is one of many seeing a rise in support of the party across the country.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesStefan Brandner, Gera’s AfD representative, shared statistics that he said overwhelmingly linked foreigners to murders and food handouts, eliciting gasps from the crowd.Many guests said it is such “real facts” that drew them to AfD events. (The federal government wrote in a document providing statistics to the AfD that the data was not substantial enough for such conclusions.)Political analysts say Germany’s main parties share the blame for the AfD’s rise. Mr. Scholz’s coalition failed to convincingly communicate its transformation plans — and instead appeared locked in internal battles over how to carry them out.Their mainstream conservative opponents, including the Christian Democrats of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, are edging closer to AfD positions, hoping to regain voters themselves.They are adopting the AfD’s antagonism to gender-neutral language, as well as tougher stances on migration. Some Christian Democratic leaders are even calling to remove asylum rights in Germany’s constitution.AfD supporters have noticed their views becoming normalized even as rivals try to marginalize the party — and that makes it more difficult for mainstream parties to regain their trust.“They are getting hardened,” said Julia Reuschenbach, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin. “No group of core voters is as unreachable as those of the AfD.”Björn Höcke, a party leader in Thuringia and one of the AfD’s most radical politicians, marching at a rally in Thuringia last month. Martin Schutt/Picture Alliance, via Getty ImagesLast week, the German Institute for Human Rights, a state-funded organization, released a study arguing that the language and tactics used by the AfD “to achieve its racist and right-wing extremist goals” could meet conditions for banning the party as a “danger to the free democratic order.”Yet such proposals create another dilemma for democratic society: The tools Germany has for fighting the party it sees as a threat are the same that reinforce sentiments among AfD supporters that their country is not actually democratic.“How can it be that an organization funded by the state can stand up and try to stigmatize a significant part of its voters?” Mr. Springer asked in an interview.It is a question to which those in the crowd, like Ms. Wettengel, have found unsettling answers.“Mainstream politics are against the people,” she said. “Not for the people.”The real test of AfD support won’t come until next year, when several east German states hold elections and it has a chance at taking the largest share of the vote.In the meantime, every week, AfD politicians fan out across the country, hosting information booths, pub nights and citizen dialogues, as if it already were campaign season.Outside the train station of Hennigsdorf, a Berlin suburb, the state AfD lawmaker Andreas Galau handed out pamphlets to visitors with an unwavering smile. Some passers-by shouted insults. Others were curious.“Many come here just to get their frustrations off their chest,” he said with a chuckle. “They come and tell us what is on their minds — we’re a bit of a therapy group.”More and more people, he said, no longer feel ashamed to show interest in the AfD. It is this sense that the political establishment is not listening to ordinary people that may be helping fill out the AfD’s ranks.In Gera, Mr. Springer’s address to the crowd seemed an exercise in catharsis and validation.“They think we are stupid,” he said. “They’ll think again when the next elections come.” More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Giorgia Meloni Leads Voting in Italy, in Breakthrough for Europe’s Hard Right

      by

      ROME — Italy appeared to turn a page of European history on Sunday by electing a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, whose long record of bashing the European Union, international bankers and migrants has sown concern about the nation’s reliability in the Western alliance. Early projections based on a narrow sampling of precincts, as well as exit polls, on Sunday night suggested that Ms. Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of fascism, had led a right-wing coalition to a majority in Parliament, defeating a fractured left and a resurgent anti-establishment movement. The final results would not be clear until Monday, and it will still be weeks before the new Italian parliament is seated and a new government is formed, leaving plenty of time for political machinations. But Ms. Meloni’s strong showing, with about 25 percent of the vote, the highest of any single party, makes her the prohibitive favorite to become the country’s first female prime minister. While she is a strong supporter of Ukraine, her coalition partners deeply admire Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have criticized sanctions against Russia.“From the Italians has arrived a clear indication,” Ms. Meloni, known for her crescendoing rhetoric and cult of personality, said in a measured victory speech at nearly 3 a.m., “for the center-right to guide Italy.”After saying she had suffered through a “violent electoral campaign” filled with unfair attacks, Ms. Meloni spoke about “reciprocal respect” and recreating “trust in the institutions.” She posed flashing a victory sign. “We are at the starting point,” she said, adding, “Italy chose us, and we will never betray it.”The victory, in an election with lower turnout than usual, comes as formerly taboo and marginalized parties with Nazi or fascist heritages are entering the mainstream — and winning elections — across Europe. This month, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. In France this year, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of presidential elections. In Spain, the hard-right Vox, a party closely aligned with Ms. Meloni, is surging.But it is Italy, the birthplace of fascism and a founding member of the European Union, that has sent the strongest shock wave across the continent after a period of European-centric stability led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who directed hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds to modernize Italy and helped lead Europe’s strong response to Russia. Giorgia Meloni preparing to cast her vote at a polling station in Rome on Sunday.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times“This is a sad day for the country,” Debora Serracchiani, a leader of the Democratic Party, which will now lead the opposition, said in a statement early Monday morning.Ms. Meloni’s victory showed that the allure of nationalism — of which she is a strong advocate — remained undimmed, despite the breakthroughs by E.U. nations in coming together to pool sovereignty and resources in recent years, first to combat the coronavirus pandemic and then Mr. Putin’s initiation of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.How, and how deeply, a right-wing coalition in Italy led by Ms. Meloni could threaten that cohesion is now the foremost concern of the European establishment.Ms. Meloni has staunchly, and consistently, supported Ukraine and its right to defend itself against Russian aggression. But her coalition partners — Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the League, and the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — have clearly aligned themselves with Mr. Putin, questioning sanctions and echoing his propaganda. That fracture, and the bitter competition between the right-wing leaders, could prove fatal for the coalition, leading to a short-lived government. But some political analysts say Ms. Meloni, having attained power, may be tempted to soften her support for sanctions, which are unpopular in much of Italy. If she does, there is concern that Italy could be the weak link that breaks the European Union’s strong united position against Russia.Ms. Meloni had spent the campaign seeking to reassure an international audience that her support of Ukraine was unwavering. She sought to allay concerns by condemning Mussolini, whom she once admired, and Italy’s Fascist past. She also made more supportive noises about Italy’s place in the European Union and distanced herself from Ms. Le Pen and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, whom she had previously emulated. But that pivoting was more for international markets than Italian voters, who didn’t much care about her past, or even her affinity for illiberal democracies. The Italian electorate had not moved to the right, political scientists said, but instead again resorted to a perennial desire for a new leader who could possibly, and providentially, solve all its ills. Ms. Meloni found herself in the right place at the right time. Hers was virtually the only major party to remain outside Mr. Draghi’s national unity government, allowing her to soak up an increasing share of the opposition. Her support surged from 4 percent to nearly about 25 percent.After a revolt by a party in Mr. Draghi’s broad unity government in July, the right-wing parties, eager to go to elections they were favored to win, sensed opportunity and bolted, with Ms. Meloni in the pole position.There is little concern in the Italian establishment that she will undermine Italian democracy — she has been a consistent advocate for elections during unelected technocratic governments and has long served in Parliament. There is also a widespread belief that Italy’s dependence on hundreds of billions of euros in relief funds from the European Union will force Ms. Meloni and her government to follow the spending plans, reforms and overall blueprint established by Mr. Draghi. The money comes in tranches and the plans have to meet strict criteria. If she reverses course, Italy could lose out on billions of essentially free euros as rising energy prices and inflation — much of it stemming from the sanctions against Russia — are expected to worsen in coming months.Giorgia Meloni, addressing supporters during a rally in Piazza Duomo in Milan earlier this month.Piero Cruciatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut there is concern about Ms. Meloni’s lack of experience and her party’s lack of technical expertise, especially in running the eurozone’s third-largest economy, and Mr. Draghi has kept in close touch with her, both to ensure her support for Ukraine and, insiders say, to help find someone who can provide economic continuity.Nevertheless, Ms. Meloni represents a historic break at the top of Italian government. She came of political age in a post-Fascist, hard right that sought to redefine itself by seizing on new symbols and texts, especially “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien, to distance itself from the taboos of Fascism. She grew up with a single mother in a working-class area of Rome, and being a woman, and mother, has been central to her political identity. She once ran for mayor while pregnant because she said powerful men had told her she couldn’t. Her most famous speech includes the refrain “I am a woman. I am a mother.” Being a woman has also distinguished her, and marked a major shift, from her coalition partners, especially Mr. Berlusconi, the subject of endless sex scandals.But Ms. Meloni, Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Salvini share a hard-right vision for the country. Ms. Meloni has called for a naval blockade against migrants and spread fears about a “great replacement” of native Italians. The three share populist proposals for deep tax cuts that economists fear would inflate Italy’s already enormous debt, and a traditionalist view of the family that liberals worry will at least freeze in place gay rights and which could, in practice, roll back abortion rights.Despite the constraints of an Italian Constitution that is explicitly anti-Fascist and designed to stymie the rise of another Mussolini, many liberals are now worried that the right-wing coalition will erode the country’s norms. There was concern that if the coalition were to win two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, it would have the ability to change the Constitution to increase government powers. From left to right, Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi, and Giorgia Meloni attending the final rally of the center-right coalition in Rome on Thursday.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated PressOn Thursday, during one of Ms. Meloni’s final rallies before the election, she exclaimed that “if the Italians give us the numbers to do it, we will.”But the coalition appeared not to hit that mark. The main party of the left, the Democratic Party, all but guaranteed its defeat by failing to heal its differences with other liberal and centrist parties, including a new group of moderates. The moderates, backed by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and attracting some former leaders of Mr. Berlusconi’s party, who were disillusioned with his following of the hard right, did better than expected, but still seemed to remain in the single digits.What really held the right back from a landslide were their former governing partners, the Five Star Movement, the once anti-establishment movement that triggered the collapse of Mr. Draghi’s government when it revolted in July.In 2018, the party’s burn-down-the-elite rhetoric led it to become the country’s most popular party and largest force in Parliament. Years of governing — first with the hard-right Mr. Salvini, and then with the Democratic Party, and then under Mr. Draghi — exposed its incompetence and infighting and it imploded. It seemed on the brink of extinction. But during the campaign, led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the party surged in the country’s underserved south.That development was mainly because Five Star passed a broad unemployment benefit known as the “citizen’s income,” which though roundly criticized by moderates and the right as a handout to the lazy and a disincentive to work, has become a cherished benefit.As a result, Five Star appeared to be becoming the party of the south.“This is what is emerging,” said Angelo Tofalo, himself a southerner and a leader in the party, as he cheered Mr. Conte, at a rally in Rome on Friday. He said the party had laid down deep roots in the south, but acknowledged, “the citizen’s income is a factor.”That unexpected strength ate into Ms. Meloni’s support, while she devoured the backing of the League party of Mr. Salvini. Only years ago he was the country’s most popular populist. Now he appeared to sink to single digits. Mr. Berlusconi, once the hinge upon which the coalition turned, and who legitimized the marginalized post-Fascists and secessionist League in the 1990s, also registered a modest result.But together they had enough to govern and Ms. Meloni had the clearest claim on the office of prime minister during negotiations and consultations with Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, which will take place over the next month. The new government is likely to be seated in late October or early November.But the message of the end of a period of European taboos, and of new change, has already been sent.Ms. Meloni said in one of her last interviews before the election that her victory would be “a redemption” for all the people who “for decades had to keep their heads down” and who had an “alternative vision from the mainstream of the system of power.”Elisabetta Povoledo More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Italy May Get a Leader With Post-Fascist Roots

      by

      With the hard-right candidate Giorgia Meloni ahead before Sunday’s election, Italy could get its first leader whose party traces its roots to the wreckage of Fascism.ROME — Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-right leader, resents having to talk about Fascism. She has publicly, and in multiple languages, said that the Italian right has “handed Fascism over to history for decades now.” She argued that “the problem with Fascism in Italy always begins with the electoral campaign,” when the Italian left, she said, wheels out “the black wave” to smear its opponents.But none of that matters now, she insisted in an interview this month, because Italians do not care. “Italians don’t believe anymore in this garbage,” she said with a shrug.Ms. Meloni may be proved right on Sunday, when she is expected to be the top vote-getter in Italian elections, a breakthrough far-right parties in Europe have anticipated for decades.More than 70 years after Nazis and Fascists nearly destroyed Europe, formerly taboo parties with Nazi or Fascist heritages that were long marginalized have elbowed their way into the mainstream. Some are even winning. A page of European history seems to be turning.Last week, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. The far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of French presidential elections this year.But it is Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, that looks likely to be led not only by its first female prime minister in Ms. Meloni but the first Italian leader whose party can trace its roots back to the wreckage of Italian Fascism.“People have become used to them,” said John Foot, a historian of Fascism and the author of a new book, “Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism.” “The taboo is long gone.”A supporter of the Brothers of Italy party, which Ms. Meloni leads, this month in Cagliari, Sardinia.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe indifference of Italian voters to the past, however, may have less to do with Ms. Meloni’s own personal appeal or policies than with Italy’s perennial hunger for change. But there is another force at work: Italy’s long postwar process — even policy — of deliberate amnesia to unify the nation that began essentially as soon as World War II ended.Today that process has culminated in Ms. Meloni’s arrival on the precipice of power, after several decades in which hard-right elements were gradually brought into the political fold, legitimized and made familiar to Italian voters.“The country has not moved to the right at all,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, who said that voters had little sense or interest in Ms. Meloni’s history and simply saw her as the new face of the center right. “They don’t see her as a threat.”But in having long preferred to forget their past are Italians setting themselves up to repeat it? The concern is not academic at a moment when war again rages in Europe and democracy appears embattled in many nations around the globe.Unlike Germany, which was clearly on the wrong side of history and made facing and remembering its Nazi past a national project woven inextricably into the postwar fabric of its institutions and society, Italy had one foot on each side, and so had a claim to victimization by Fascism, having switched allegiances during the war.After Rome fell to the Allies, a civil war raged between the resistance and a Nazi puppet state of Mussolini loyalists in the north. When the war ended, Italy adopted an explicitly antifascist Constitution, but the political emphasis was on ensuring national cohesion in a country that had succeeded in unifying only a century earlier.There was a belief, the Italian writer Umberto Eco wrote in his classic 1995 essay “Ur Fascism,” or “Eternal Fascism,” that the “memory of those terrible years should be repressed.” But repression “causes neurosis,” he argued, and even if real reconciliation took place, “to forgive does not mean to forget.”Italian civilians lined the streets as Allied soldiers entered Rome in June 1944. In the years that followed, Italy adopted an antifascist Constitution.FPG/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesItaly had ignored much of that advice during its postwar amnesty program that soughtto incorporate post-Fascist elements. But it also kept the party established by the former Fascists, the Italian Social Movement — which pushed for a strong state, tough on crime and opposed to abortion and divorce — away from power in the following decades.Meanwhile, Italy’s left, dominated by the largest Communist Party in Western Europe, had the advantage of being anti-Fascist, which allowed its leaders to have institutional roles, political influence and cultural dominance, which they used to wield the “Fascist” label against any range of political enemies until the term was drained of much of its meaning.That wobbly status quo came crashing down after a sprawling bribery scandal in the early 1990s toppled Italy’s power structure — and with it the barriers that had kept the post-Fascists out of power.It was around that time that Ms. Meloni entered politics, becoming active in the Youth Front of the Italian Social Movement, the heirs to Italy’s post-Fascist legacy.She sought new symbols and heroes to distance the party from its unapologetically Fascist forbearers, but also to correct what she considered politicized history.Memory was a political priority.In her memoir, Ms. Meloni proudly tells of going into bookstores and stamping pages of books that she considered “biased” with left-wing propaganda: “Fake. Do not buy.” She helped persuade the party’s members of Parliament to buy out of circulation all of the books they had stamped, but insisted that they never “burned those books.”“I could never stand those who use history for political purposes,” Ms. Meloni wrote in her memoir. But it was not until 1994, when the conservative media mogul Silvio Berlusconi entered politics, that Ms. Meloni and her fellows in the post-Fascist milieu got their real breakthrough.Silvio Berlusconi voting in Italy’s general elections in 1994. He would go on to be the country’s prime minister for four governments. Massimo Sambucetti/Associated PressAn early innovator of the now-common practice of center-right parties forming politically convenient alliances with the far right, Mr. Berlusconi turned to the support of the marginalized parties.He formed a governing coalition with the secessionist Northern League, now led by the populist firebrand Matteo Salvini, and the National Alliance, which eventually made Ms. Meloni the vice president of the Lower House of Parliament and then the country’s youngest government minister. The party eventually collapsed and was reborn in 2012 as the Brothers of Italy, with Ms. Meloni as its leader.“We let them in,” Mr. Berlusconi explained during a political rally in 2019. “We legitimized them.”Nearly 30 years later, Ms. Meloni is poised to take charge.Her proposals, characterized by protectionism, tough-on-crime measures and protecting the traditional family, have a continuity with the post-Fascist parties, though updated to excoriate L.G.B.T. “lobbies” and migrants.Many liberals are now worried that she will erode the country’s norms, and that if she and her coalition partners win with a sufficient enough of landslide, they would have the ability to change the Constitution to increase government powers. On Sunday, during one of Ms. Meloni’s final rallies before the election, she exclaimed that “if the Italians give us the numbers to do it, we will.”“The Constitution was born of resistance and anti-Fascism,” the leader of the left, Enrico Letta, responded, saying that Ms. Meloni had revealed her true face, and that the Constitution “must not be touched.”The left sees in her crescendoing rhetoric, cult of personality style and hard-right positions many of the hallmarks of an ideology that Eco famously sought to pin down despite Fascism’s “fuzziness.”She evinces what Eco called an “obsession with a plot, possibly an international one” against Italians, which she expresses in fears of international bankers using mass migration to replace native Italians and weaken Italian workers.She is bathed in the current of traditionalism that traces at least back to Catholic revulsion of the French Revolution. And her use of social media fulfilled Eco’s prediction of an “internet populism” to replace Mussolini’s speeches from the balcony of Piazza Venezia in Rome.Ms. Meloni appeared at a rally on Thursday in Rome with her right-wing coalition partners Matteo Salvini, left, Mr. Berlusconi and Maurizio Lupi.Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse, via Associated PressJust this week, one of the party’s top leaders was caught giving a fascist salute and one of its candidates was suspended for flatteringly comparing Ms. Meloni with Hitler. In the past, members have held a dinner celebrating the March on Rome that brought Mussolini to power 100 years ago.Ms. Meloni has tried to distance herself from what she calls those “nostalgic” elements of her party, and chalks the fears up to the usual electoral scaremongering. “I’ve sworn on the Constitution,” she said, and she has consistently called for elections, saying technocrats had hijacked Italian democracy.Ms. Meloni has also apparently shed a deep suspicion of the United States, rampant in post-Fascism, and staunchly aligned herself with the West against Russia in support of Ukraine.Whereas she used to admire Vladimir V. Putin’s defense of Christian values, she now calls Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, an anti-Western aggressor and, in contrast with her coalition allies, who are Putin apologists, said she would “totally” continue as prime minister to send offensive arms to Ukraine.To reassure Europe that she was no extremist, she has also distanced herself from her previous fawning over Viktor Orban of Hungary, Ms. Le Pen of France and the illiberal democracies in Eastern Europe.The Italian establishment is in fact more worried about her party’s lack of competence than an authoritarian takeover.They are confident that a system built with numerous checks to stop another Mussolini — even at the cost of paralysis — will constrain Ms. Meloni, as will the realities of governing, especially when backsliding could cost Italy hundreds of billions of euros in pandemic recovery funds from the European Union.Ms. Meloni’s biggest imprint may be in a less concrete battlefield, what Mr. Foot, the historian, called Italy’s “long-term memory war.”She has refused to remove as her party symbol the tricolor flame that many historians say evokes the torch over the tomb of Mussolini, and historians wonder if she, as prime minister, would condemn the anniversary of the March on Rome on Oct. 28, or if she would on April 25 celebrate Liberation Day, which commemorates the victory of the resistance against the Nazis and its Italian Social Republic puppet state. Italian democracy might be safe, but what about the past?“A historical judgment,” of Mussolini and Fascism, Ms. Meloni said in an interview last month, could be done only by “putting everything on the table — and then you decide.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Inspires Italy’s Giorgia Meloni

      by

      Giorgia Meloni, the nationalist politician who is the front-runner to become prime minister, sees “The Lord of the Rings” as not just a series of novels, but also a sacred text.ROME — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to be the next prime minister of Italy, used to dress up as a hobbit.As a youth activist in the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, she and her fellowship of militants, with nicknames like Frodo and Hobbit, revered “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. They visited schools in character. They gathered at the “sounding of the horn of Boromir” for cultural chats. She attended “Hobbit Camp” and sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.All of that might seem some youthful infatuation with a work usually associated with fantasy-fiction and big-budget epics rather than political militancy. But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.Tolkien’s agrarian universe, full of virtuous good guys defending their idyllic, wooded kingdoms from hordes of dark and violent orcs, has for decades prompted scholarly, and convention center, debate over the author’s racial and ideological biases, his view of modernity and globalization. More recently, his works have also provided a fertile shire for nationalists who see themselves in his heroic archetypes.But in Italy, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the maps of Mordor have informed generations of post-Fascist youths, including Ms. Meloni, who, the latest polls strongly suggest, will emerge from the election on Sunday as Italy’s first female prime minister — and the first descended from post-Fascist roots.Ms. Meloni, who leads the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, and who has called for a naval blockade against illegal migrants and warns her supporters about the dark, conspiratorial forces of internationalist bankers, first read Tolkien, a conservative who once called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus,” at age 11. She became a fantasy fanatic.In her early 20s, she surfaced in chat rooms under the nickname Khy-ri, calling herself the “little dragon of the Italian undernet.” More recently, she named her political conference Atreju, an Italian rendering of the name of the hero of “The NeverEnding Story,” best known as a 1980s cult film featuring a flying animatronic character that appeared to be half dragon, half Labrador retriever.As a government minister in 2008, Ms. Meloni posed for a magazine profile next to a statue of the wizard Gandalf. In 2019, she honored a manga character, Captain Harlock, the “space pirate,” as a “symbol of a generation that challenged the apathy and indifference of people.” Last month, she lamented that her busy campaign schedule had kept her from mainlining Amazon’s new “Rings of Power” series.But Ms. Meloni’s otherworldly interests have as much to do with politics as personal taste.“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”A supporter of Ms. Meloni wearing a hobbit T-shirt at one of her rallies this month in Cagliari. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe modern world did not work out so well for the die-hard Fascists who stayed loyal to Hitler and Mussolini after the official Italian government switched sides to join the Allies during World War II.After the war, many of those Fascists flocked to the Italian Social Movement, but the party’s efforts to reintegrate into Italy’s institutions eventually hit a wall. Its younger members, feeling excluded from civil society, seized on an Italian edition of “The Lord of the Rings,” prefaced by Elémire Zolla, a philosopher who was a point of reference on the hard right and who argued that Tolkien was “talking about everything we confront every day.”That resonated with a small group of the party’s Youth Front, already bristling at the cultural dominance of the left. They saw themselves, as one of their leaders, Generoso Simeone, put it, as “inhabitants of the mythical Middle-earth, also struggling with dragons, orcs, and other creatures.” Seeking a more palatable alternative to quoting Mussolini’s speeches and spray-painting Swastikas, which, Mr. Croppi pointed out, “was easy to reproduce on walls,” in 1977, they created the first Camp Hobbit festival.“The idea to call it Camp Hobbit came from a real strategy,” said Mr. Croppi, one of the founders. The thinking was to move beyond the old symbols and to capitalize on the party’s isolation, smallness and victimization by violent leftist enemies to make their hero “not the warrior Aragorn, but the little hobbit — we wanted to get out of this militarist, heroic idea.”The party’s old guard was perplexed. But, with the support of hard-liners, Camp Hobbit festivals emerged as formative touchstones for the young activists. Celtic cross flags that meshed perfectly with the Tolkien aesthetic waved. The band Fellowship of the Ring played songs about European identity, including what became the anthem of the party’s Youth Front, “Tomorrow Belongs to Us.”The song echoed a ballad “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” sung by a member of the Hitler Youth in a chilling scene in the movie “Cabaret.” Mr. Croppi acknowledged that the camps had their fair share of Fascist salutes, but argued they were “ironic.”When Ms. Meloni entered the picture as a teenage activist in the Youth Front in Rome in the 1990s, the far right — especially in the capital — was still in a trenchlike mentality, struggling to break with the previous generation.Francesco Lollobrigida, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy (as well as her brother-in-law), said that he and others had a desire starting in the 1980s “to break with the patterns of a party that still had inside of it people who had been in the Social Republic, who had done fascism.”Ms. Meloni, seated across from him, agreed.“There was a desire to get out of that,” she said.Ms. Meloni attended a new iteration of Camp Hobbit in 1993, which she called a “political laboratory” and where she sang along with Fellowship of the Ring and discussed culture and books.“We read everything,” Ms. Meloni said.The bookstore of choice for the hard right in Rome was Europa, just outside the Vatican walls. On a recent visit, it displayed titles like “Mussolini Boys” and “The Occult Origins of Nazism.” A picture of Hitler stood watch above the register next to a cup of pens.Europa has a section dedicated to Julius Evola, an esoteric, deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher who became a favorite of Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists and bourgeoisie-loathing nostalgists. Evola argued that progress and equality were poisonous illusions.“A bit boring,” Mr. Lollobrigida said of Evola’s work.Ms. Meloni said that instead a more influential writer at the time was the more mainstream Ernst Jünger, a German former soldier, who sought to make sense of war but also glorified combat.But for Ms. Meloni, all of those took a back shelf to “The Lord of the Rings.” She said she had learned from dwarves and elves and hobbits the “value of specificity” with “each indispensable for the fact of being particular.” She extrapolated that as a lesson about protecting Europe’s sovereign nations and unique identities.In the 1990s, after becoming the leader of the youth wing of the National Alliance, the party that succeeded the Italian Social Movement, Ms. Meloni started her own political festival, which she called “similar” to Camp Hobbit. But this time, she named it Atreju. “It was the symbol of a boy in battle against nihilism, against the Nothing that advances,” she said.She joked that Italians could hardly pronounce Atreju, but she said that the annual conventions, including the first one, in 1998, which was about the dangers of globalization, had reach.“We wanted to say that globalization, you have to govern it,” she said. “If you look around, we weren’t wrong, were we?” she added.At the Atreju convention in 2018, the guest of honor, Stephen K. Bannon, walked by patriotic posters of “Italy’s heroes” and desks selling Evola-themed T-shirts and works by Evola. Ms. Meloni’s supporters have interpreted her calls to defend Italy from mass migration — and the replacement of native Italians by invaders — as a battle cry to protect Middle-earth. This month, at a rally in Sardinia, Davide Anedda, 21, the leader of the local youth wing of the Brothers of Italy, wore a T-shirt reading “Hobbit.”“If you’re not from our world, it’s very hard to understand,” Mr. Anedda said, explaining that Hobbit was a post-Fascist far-right rock band and that Tolkien had written “a fundamental part of our history.”And for Italy, maybe a part of its future.Ms. Meloni, who seems poised to grab her own brass ring after decades in the political trenches, said that her understanding of power and its ability to corrupt and isolate a person was “closely tied to Tolkien’s reading.”“I consider power very dangerous,” she said. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.” More