American Liberal Media See Italy’s Meloni, Think ‘Fascist’

Newly elected Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will be the first woman to lead Italy, a fact that is producing far less than the usual “girl power” cheers. That relative quiet is undoubtedly due to the fact that Italy now joins Great Britain (Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Liz Truss) and Germany (Angela Merkel) in having chosen female heads of the elected government only from parties of the center-Right or Right. Meloni is undeniably a figure of the social Right.

Is she a conservative? Is she a fascist or fascist-adjacent? It is always tricky to try to put the European Right on the American political spectrum, because the free-market Right in Europe — to the extent it exists, which in some countries it barely does — tends to be socially moderate or liberal, and the social-issue Right in Europe is often socialist-leaning on economic issues, or at least much more big-government, pro-welfare-state, and anti-business than the American Right. A Buckley/Reagan-style fusionism is thin on the ground in Europe, especially on the Continent. American conservatives may rationally note that, say, Viktor Orbán is closer to our way of seeing the world than are his domestic political opponents, but that does not mean that Orbán is one of us or a model for American politicians to emulate. My initial impression of Meloni is tempered by the same cautions: Conservatives can greet her as an ally on some things without blindly embracing everything that comes with the notoriously dysfunctional heritage of Italian politics. Italy is, after all, not just the country where fascism was invented in the 1920s; it was also the European democracy with the largest home-grown Marxist terror group in the post-war era, the Red Brigades of the 1960s and 1970s. There are reasons why Italy has for so long been proverbial for the instability of its governments, many of them quarrelsome and ideologically incoherent coalitions. And it is an uncomfortable truth of political coalitions everywhere that successful leaders do not expend a lot of their political capital denouncing the past sins of their own side of the political spectrum within their own country.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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Newly elected Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will be the first woman to lead Italy, a fact that is producing far less than the usual “girl power” cheers. That relative quiet is undoubtedly due to the fact that Italy now joins Great Britain (Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Liz Truss) and Germany (Angela Merkel) in having chosen female heads of the elected government only from parties of the center-Right or Right. Meloni is undeniably a figure of the social Right.

Is she a conservative? Is she a fascist or fascist-adjacent? It is always tricky to try to put the European Right on the American political spectrum, because the free-market Right in Europe — to the extent it exists, which in some countries it barely does — tends to be socially moderate or liberal, and the social-issue Right in Europe is often socialist-leaning on economic issues, or at least much more big-government, pro-welfare-state, and anti-business than the American Right. A Buckley/Reagan-style fusionism is thin on the ground in Europe, especially on the Continent. American conservatives may rationally note that, say, Viktor Orbán is closer to our way of seeing the world than are his domestic political opponents, but that does not mean that Orbán is one of us or a model for American politicians to emulate. My initial impression of Meloni is tempered by the same cautions: Conservatives can greet her as an ally on some things without blindly embracing everything that comes with the notoriously dysfunctional heritage of Italian politics. Italy is, after all, not just the country where fascism was invented in the 1920s; it was also the European democracy with the largest home-grown Marxist terror group in the post-war era, the Red Brigades of the 1960s and 1970s. There are reasons why Italy has for so long been proverbial for the instability of its governments, many of them quarrelsome and ideologically incoherent coalitions. And it is an uncomfortable truth of political coalitions everywhere that successful leaders do not expend a lot of their political capital denouncing the past sins of their own side of the political spectrum within their own country.