Giorgia Meloni, 45, has won the Italian general election by drive and sheer personality, but her victory was a huge step backwards for the country. Meloni’s politics has direct lineage to those of another leader of Italy, Benito Mussolini , Il Duce, the Fascist who ruled from 1921 to 1943.
On the face of it, Meloni, who says she will govern for all Italians, may have little in common with the other dominant personality of the week, or even the year’s news – Vladimir Putin.
Both have their own brand of personality which embraces a false vision of their nation’s destiny and greatness. In charting where their nations have gone wrong, and now can be put right, both leaders appeal to a particular view of history , in which myth and fact make odd bedfellows.
Putin is a digital age dictator, but with a thirst for the old trappings of Imperial glory – invoking the conquests of Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.
Meloni’s appeal is more subtle – the vision of ‘il bel paese’ – the beautiful country, based on good Catholic family values, and an Italy for Italians , which means immigrants from Africa must be stopped by a naval blockade across the Gulf of Sirte and the coast of Libya.
Nostalgia for the rule of Mussolini has been growing lately. The leader is cast in a glow of beneficence , a man who cared for his people as in his newsreels showing him joining farmers and harvest workers in ‘the war for grain’ and draining the Pontine marshes to rid them of malaria. The downside of the story, the mistakes, the thuggish police, the racial laws, following Hitler unprepared into war, were caused by inept and corrupt advisers and henchmen.
Italy’s new electoral rules, the reduction of parliament from nearly 950 seats to 600 overall , plus the strange mixture of first past the post and the lottery of party lists, have given Meloni a lucky break. They have delivered a coherent bloc of her own Brothers of Italy, the League of Salvini, and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, with a working majority in both houses of the Rome parliament. She is set fair to stay as prime minister for a full five year term – a rarity since Italy first became a republic in 1948.
The challenge is enormous. Meloni won because she offered a simple message of comfort – family values and security – against a continuing crisis of debt and despair, from Covid lockdowns to the gas and energy privations from the Ukraine war. Mario Draghi, the outgoing prime minister brought in to face down fiscal meltdown from Covid, has tried to get Italians to face harsh reality, which in the end his quarrelsome allies in government, rejected.
Meloni will also have to contend with the shadow of the man and whose party, or a version of it, first brought her into politics, Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a pioneer media dictator – the Nazis learned from his use of film and radio to project his myth. But it was myth more than fact, and as Professor Paul Corner shows in his brilliant new book “Mussolini in Myth and Memory,” it was a pretty nasty one at that. Corner depicts a regime “that was corrupt, inefficient, and, at times, brutal, but which at times presented a very positive face to the outside world. Fascism created its own ‘phantom utopia.’
Vladimir Putin now seems on his way to creating from his own Russian dystopia , which is inly too brutally real. Like Mussolini he has a narcissistic vision of the nation. Like Il Duce, he feigns to follow the rules while at the same time being bent on crude power. This has led him to a position where now he must gamble or lose; twist or bust. This weekend he is set to announced the results of the plebiscites in four Ukrainian oblasts.
Following the pattern of his annexation of Crimea in 2014, he is likely to claim, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are now Russia, to be defended against the West at all costs.
Unintentionally he seems to invoke an even more potent and ancient myth, than those invented by himself or Mussolini – the parable of pride and woe of Hubris and Nemesis.
