Giorgia Meloni is the head of government of the post-fascist party that governs Italy. She is showing increasingly fewer inhibitions and is taking a crack at democracy, women’s rights and media freedom. She also wants to rewrite the history of the Mussolini era.
Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is in the process of fundamentally remodeling the country. Nothing is left out. This also includes a constitutional reform that should introduce a direct election of the head of government, or better: the “boss”. This term is an affront to Ms. Meloni because she doesn’t like gender-appropriate language. Meloni insists on being called “Il Presidente del Consiglio”, “the” head of government.
The proposed direct election of the head of government is intended to take away many powers from parliament. The directly elected head of government would be virtually impossible to vote out of office due to very complicated rules for no-confidence votes, meaning she would remain in office for the full five years of the legislative period. A hefty bonus of parliamentary seats is also planned for the party with the relatively most votes. Meloni’s pretext is that he wants to give Italy a stable government. To achieve this, all power should be concentrated in the executive branch and the president, as an independent supervisory authority, should be largely disempowered.
This reform has not yet been passed; it requires a referendum. Until then, Meloni, her ministers and their allies will continue to work to free the country from the “ideological hegemony of the left.” That’s what they call it while they try to transform Italy into national sovereignty. They’re only barely successful at this, it’s sometimes embarrassingly amateurish and it’s often a family business.
“Italy first” – all cheese
Meloni’s sister Arianna is part of the Fratelli d’Italia party leadership. Her husband Francesco Lollobrigida, widely related to Gina “nazionale” Lollobrigada, as “Minister for Food Sovereignty” wanted to oblige all restaurants in Italy to offer Italian cheeses on the menu: “Italy first” is the motto for cheese too. The request failed due to objections from the Italian chefs. Lollobrigida then went to war against non-alcoholic wine – and thus antagonized the winegrowers.
Meloni’s government also embarrassed itself in its campaign with a new ministry that was supposed to protect and promote typical Italian products: it was given the English name “Il Ministero del Made in Italy”. Only 375 boys and girls enrolled in the new type of high school that was introduced at the same time and was intended to teach “Made in Italy” products. A flop, the students are smarter than their education minister Giuseppe Valditara.
State television becomes Giorgia Meloni radio
What is much less laughable, however, is the Meloni government’s attempt to gain control of the media. “We notice,” says lawyer and university lecturer Vitalba Azzolini, “that the government is removing all voices of criticism from television. The talk shows now only have soft-spoken guests who are allowed to object, but if they argue with facts, they won’t invited again. We are seeing a gradual synchronization of the media.”
Italy’s state television, Radiotelevisione Italiana RAI, is directly controlled by the political majority in parliament and has a market share of over a third. Here the political intervention is immediate. The presidents of Italy’s two houses of parliament appoint the directors and a parliamentary commission controls every decision. In Italy, politicians supervise journalists, not the other way around.
Traditionally, the three state broadcasters RAI 1, 2, 3 were divided proportionally. RAI 1, with the largest share of viewers, is handed over to the government majority, RAI 2, mixed, and only RAI 3, the smallest station, is allowed to follow the left-wing opposition. But even this relatively limited freedom of expression seems to be going too far for the Meloni government. The government is making full use of all instruments to have a deep influence on the work of the broadcasters – and to provide representatives with lucrative positions at the broadcasters.
Almost a quarter of the Italian TV market, calculated based on audience shares, is already indirectly under the control of the smallest of the three government parties: Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is not only the founder of the Forza Italia party, his heirs also own the Mediaset media group. Favorite topic of Mediaset channels and newspapers is: Forza Italia.
Reinterpretation of the problems
Where this equalization leads can be seen, for example, in women’s policy and the way in which the country’s history is dealt with. In the most important TV talk on state television RAI on “Bruno Vespa” there is a discussion about abortion with seven men all alone. These then also justify that groups of ultra-Catholic abortion opponents now have access to the advice centers for women. These activists are notorious for the brutal methods they use to prevent women from terminating their pregnancies.
“The Italian right wants to control women, and they will use any means to achieve this,” says the writer Dacia Maraini about Italy’s first government led by a woman. More and more women are raising their voices against the Meloni government because the right is increasingly vehemently demanding the abolition of abortion paragraph 194. As if Italy’s extremely low birth rate was the fault of women and not of the conditions that are hostile to women and families: hardly any childcare places for small children, almost no financial support for mothers.
Instead of working on these realities, the Meloni government prefers to work on their interpretation through the media. The problems are manifold in other ways too: economic growth is meager and national debt is enormous. The employment rate of almost 64 percent is at the lower end of the EU spectrum. Many well-educated young people leave Italy, as do many industrial companies. At the same time, the population of the aging country is declining year after year to the size of a large city
“We shouldn’t talk about all of these pressing problems; instead, the capillary control of the media should anchor the Meloni narrative: Everything is good, we are better than the previous governments, there are no problems,” says lecturer Azzolini. And anyone who doesn’t move will be shown the stick. The Meloni majority recently introduced a bill that would allow journalists to be sentenced to prison if convicted of “defamation.” After violent protests, the Meloni party initially withdrew the proposal, but the direction is clear.
The ghost of fascism continues to haunt
The treatment of the writer Antonio Scurati, author of a bestseller about Benito Mussolini, caused a scandal. He was forbidden to give a monologue on the occasion of the day of liberation from Nazi fascism on April 25th. Quoting from the effectively censored text is illuminating. Scurati draws a parallel from the murder of the last politician who dared to speak publicly against Mussolini in 1924, Giacomo Matteotti, and who was murdered by Mussolini’s henchmen in the same year, to the massacres carried out by German troops in 1944 were carried out by the Italian fascists. The significant shared responsibility of Italian fascists for the murder of around 20,000 civilians is extremely well documentedbut is hushed up on Italian television.
Scurati: “These two simultaneous sad anniversaries – spring ’24, spring ’44 – proclaim that throughout its entire historical existence – not just at the end or occasionally – fascism was an indelible phenomenon of systematic murderous and massacring political violence. Become the heirs of this History finally acknowledge this? Unfortunately, everything indicates that this will not be the case. The post-fascist government group that won the elections in October 2022 had two options in front of it: deny its neo-fascist past or try to ignore history to rewrite. She has undoubtedly chosen the second path.”
Fratelli d’Italia success
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In fact, the Meloni government is lying about the story. On the occasion of the memorial days, the persecution of Jews and the victims of the Nazi German occupation are remembered. However, the Italian fascists’ contribution to these massacres remains unmentioned. No wonder, since Giorgia Meloni was a youth official in the political successor organization to the Italian fascists, the “Movimento Sociale Italiano”. The MSI is the direct political successor to Mussolini’s partial republic of German grace, the “Repubblica Sociale Italiano”.
Scurati: “The word that the Prime Minister refused to utter will still ring on the grateful lips of all sincere democrats, whether they belong to the left, the center or the right. As long as that word – anti-fascism – is used by those who govern us “If not spoken, the specter of fascism will continue to haunt the house of Italian democracy.” Words that are no longer allowed to be spoken on Italian state television. The crimes of the (own) fascist dictatorship have left a blood trail of massacres, from Libya to Ethiopia, the Balkans through all of Italy. All of this should never have happened. This is Meloni Italy: eating Italian cheese and letting bygones be bygones. And woe to anyone who rebels against it.
This article first appeared at ntv.de