Written By: Raja Waqas Raza
The victory of right-wing politician Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party in Italian general election on Sunday, September 25, 2022.Giorgia Meloni claimed victory early Monday morning and is projected to win a battle to become Italy’s first female prime minister, leading her conservative party Brothers of Italy in the country’s national elections.The turnout in yesterday’s election was the lowest in the history of the Italian Republic.
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy, wins voting in that country. A bit of knowledge about Meloni and an additional article in the comments.
The European far right used to have a very strong streak of anti-Americanism. In a study on the ideology of far right parties in the European Parliament between 1989 and 1994, Fennema and Pollmann (1998) found anti-Americanism to be ubiquitous.
This has changed substantially over the past two decades. Geert Wilders was an important figure here–one of the first far right politicians to build a significant network in the United States.Meloni represents a cadre of leaders whose views are fully interoperable with the American far right (and British, and Israeli…etc). She’s a polyglot, fluent in English (quite rare among Italian politicians).Meloni gave a pretty powerful speech at the flagship CPAC conference in February 2022. In the speech, she expresses support for Ukraine and attributes Russian aggression to Biden’s weak foreign policy (withdrawal from Afghanistan).The support for Ukraine is significant, as it would have been easy for FdI to exploit the issue as one more point to hammer the Draghi government on, but the Italian far right is now supporting a pretty status quo transatlantic take on foreign affairs.Going back to the speech, we should also note how skillfully Meloni drew parallels between the IT and US situations “it’s the same all over the world…” She even mentioned “RINOs” and threats to the “education of our children.”
And we know, that our adversaries operating globally applying the same tactics and the same ideology to destroy our identities and what makes us who we really are.”This is one of the most common justifications of the need for an internationally integrated far right.
Perhaps more importantly, Meloni cast FdI as the peer of “the British Tories, the US Republicans, and the Israeli Likud.” The move is to use transnational affiliations as a resource for an image of normality.
Meloni is a clear example of a new kind of far right, one that is not anti-American, that is deeply connected internationally, and able to attribute similarities between diverse national situations with ease.
International ties used to be a threat to far right leaders/parties reputations as they were routinely hurt by guilt by association tactics. Now international solidarity is a resource they can draw upon. Meloni and FdI clearly illustrate this”.
The Victory of Right-Wing Politician Giorgia Meloni
