Italian coalition government collapses; a "new Mussolini" waits...

Italian governments tend to have very short lives. Since the end of WWII there have been hundreds... literally. They come and go like mushrooms after a spring rain. The latest, a coalition led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, teeters on the brink this evening, with Sig. Draghi saying he wants to resign to make way for a new government, only for Italian President Sergio Mattarella to reject his resignation and ask him to think up some way to hold together a parliamentary majority.

The trambusto ridicolo came about when senators from the once populist but now left-leaning Five Star Movement boycotted a confidence motion linked to a bill that contained a provision for a new garbage  incinerator to serve Rome, which they oppose on environmental grounds. Sig. Draghi had made clear he would interpret a walkout as a vote against his "unity government". 

The FSM walked out anyway, so the PM tendered his resignation, saying that the trust underpinning the government had come undone, and that the conditions for a functional government "no longer exist"... as if they ever did, in the Italian republic.

Theoretically Sig. Draghi could stay on at the head of a new government without the Five Stars. However, having been chosen by the Pesident in February 2021 to lead a unity coalition, the PM has indicated that he wants no part of that scheme. "There is no government without the Five Stars," he said, adding that he wouldn’t lead a coalition with an alternate makeup. 

If Sig. Draghi succeeds in quitting, Italy be forced into yet another election, which European "progressives" and the controlled media already clutching their pearls in fear of a resurgent right. In the spring of 2018,  as Italy prepared for its first general election in five years, the most-feared party was Matteo Salvini's far-right League. See "Italian top court OKs Fascist salute as right-wing coalition heads for election victory", WWW 24/2/18. 

Things didn't quite turn out as Walt predicted (lifetime pct. 978), as the conservative/populist vote was divided among Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, the League and the new kids on the right-hand side of the block, Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy).

Things are different today. Brothers of Italy, the descendant of a party formed in 1946 by the lingering supporters of Benito Mussolini, has steadily moved from the political fringes to being neck-and-neck with the League. Recent opinion polls put the FdI in a statistical tie -- 21% each -- for most popular party, with the centre-left Democratic Party, led by Giuseppe Brandoni. [Ed., please check that.]

Giorgia Meloni, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and former minister in Silvio Berlusconi's fourth cabinet, is said to have a good chance of being Italy's next prime minister. She has fast become a a celebrity, with videos about her on Facebook (click here to see "Giorgia Meloni a 'Cartabianca' 22/2/22"), and YouTube, and a best-selling autobiography out last year. 

Guido Crosetto, a co-founder of FdI, says voters feel they can trust Ms Meloni because she has: "consistency, reliability, thoroughness. She does not speak by slogans or based on polls.... We [the FdI party] do well in the polls because our party remains consistent with its ideas."

Giorgia Meloni was just 15 when she became involved in the youth organisation of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded after World War II by neo-fascists and veterans of Mussolini's Italian Social Republic.

The popularity of Fratelli d'Italia comes amid a broader shift to the right in Italian politics in recent times. See "Told ya! Anti-immigrant backlash pushes Italy sharply right", WWW 5/3/18. 

The League, once the leading party of the right, is now down to 15% in the polls, with FdI picking up a lot of the League's votes, and even making inroads in northeastern Italy, a League bastion since the 1990s. Businesspeople in northern Italy say they like Meloni's anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy style. "There is too much red tape, whether imposed by Rome or Venice [the regional capital]," said a businessman in Vicenza. "Maybe Meloni has realised that."

FdI is unabashedly rightist. Its literature contains slogans such as "Italy and Italians first" and aims to protect Italian identity from Islamization, while calling for the largest family and birth support plan in Italy's history. Convincing moderate voters to switch to a party with radical roots is "not an easy bet", said one analyst, adding,"Meloni is trying, though."

The controlled media in Europe (and now America), cowering in fear, have dubbed Ms Meloni "the new Mussolini". It has been said of the "old" Mussolini that at least he made the trains run on time. If Ms Meloni can make the planes depart and arrive on time, she should be a shoo-in. Walt wishes her buona fortuna!

Told ya! Anti-immigrant backlash pushes Italy sharply right

Bunga bunga! As Walt predicted in "Italian top court OKs Fascist salute as right-wing coalition heads for election victory" (WWW 24/2/18), Italian voters turned sharply to the right in yesterday's parliamentary election. Lifetime pct .991!

Latest results show the anti-establishment Five Star Movement as the biggest party. With strong support in the south of the country, they garnered 32.3% of the vote. But former Prime Minister Silvio Berluscone's coalition of centre-right and far-right parties is set to win most seats in the lower house of the Italian parliament.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the League (formerly the Northern League), declared that, with 17.6% of the vote, his party had the "right and duty" to govern at the head of a right-wing coalition. Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia got 14%, and the far right Brothers of Italy received a smaller share.

Italy is now in for another coalition government, but this time it will be coalition of the centre right, not the centre left. But who will lead? The joker in the deck is the Five Star Movement, which did not join Mr Berlusconi's coalition in the election campaign. If they are going to be part of the coalition government, it would seem logical for their leader, Luigi Di Maio, to get a high position. But at only 31 years of age, the political neophyte is seen to lack the experience and gravitas for the role of prime minister.

Silvio Berlusconi cannot hold public office until next year because of a tax fraud conviction. Besides, he's 81 -- yesterday's man, no longer capable of bunga bunga! Walt predicts the next Prime Minister of Italy will be the League's Matteo Salvini, pictured above. (Lifetime pct .991.)

The Clinton News Network never says "the League". They always call the party "the xenophobic League". During the campaign, Mr Salvini spoke about the danger of Islam, and promised to deport hundreds of thousands of "refugees" and other migrants. And that's why Italians voted for his part and the other putative members of the new coalition. Italians are xenophobic. And they don't like foreigners very much, either. Who can blame them?!

Italian top court OKs Fascist salute as right-wing coalition heads for election victory

As Italy gets ready for its first general election in five years, the New York Times has its hair on fire over the growing popularity of "right-wing" political parties. You already know, don't you, what epithet they're hurling at groups like the Brothers of Italy. That's right. They're using the F-word -- Fascists! In "Anti-Fascist Protesters Rally in Italy as Mussolini’s Heirs Gain Ground" (24/2/48) one terrified scribe writes, "The re-emergence of extremist violence, harassment and xenophobia has gripped Italy and forced the country to reckon with the hard-right and fascist ideologies fueled by a lingering financial crisis and migration."

"Fueled by migration"... Imagine that! As if Italians would be different from the Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans and other Europeans who reject the "suicide by diversity" of the Christian West espoused by such misguided "leaders" as Angela Merkel, who is, until next month at least, still the Chancellor Germany. Italians are just as fed up as the rest with having to welcome, feed, clothe and house the masses of mainly Muslim migrants being fished out of the Mediterranean every week.

Those are the same "refugees" who bite the hands that feed them, going on orgies of robbery, rape and general mayhem. It is only natural that there should be an awakening of the xenophobia which is part of human nature. And it is only natural that those feelings should find expression in what the Times calls "extremist violence, harassment and xenophobia".

As the elections approach, politically inspired violence has become an almost daily occurrence. Earlier this month, in the city of Macerata, a "fascist extremist" (the Times again) carrying a candle with an image of Mussolini opened fire on African migrants, wounding at least six people before he was arrested. Interior Minister Marco Minniti described the shootings as an "evident display of racial hatred."

Earlier this week, Italy's supreme Court of Cassation ruled that giving a Fascist salute is OK. Provided it's "commemorative" and non-violent, the straight-arm salute popularized by Mussolini is considered a free expression of thought, the court said, acquitting two Brothers of Italy (FdI) supporters who gave the salute in Milan in 2014. They had been charged under a law including such salutes as "complicity in Fascist demonstrations", which are prohibited by a postwar law banning the "apology of Fascism".

Forza Nuova, an Italian party which marches with that salute, has repeatedly clashed with the police and masked and violent antifa protesters. Members of CasaPound, a political party that proudly claims to admire Mussolini, recently invaded the emergency area of a hospital in Bolzano to protest against homeless "refugees" taking refuge there overnight.

As anti-immigrant backlash intensifies and the antifa-fomented violence worsens, the "progressives" are pointing the finger of blame at Matteo Salvini, the secretary of the League party, and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, the modern heirs of the party that rose from the ashes of Mussolini’s Fascists. For the coming elections, Mr Salvini and Ms Meloni have joined forces with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. As of this writing, their coalition is leading in the polls. Stay tuned!