Democracy Faced Populism in Recent Italian Election

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The recent Italian election saw another European country veer to the right. It was another blow to liberal democracy.

In his recently published book The Shortest History of Democracy, John Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney in Australia, argues that democracy represents the fairest method for governance of power in an uncertain world.

But, he warns, economic inequality can corrupt democratic political means. The latest threat from this front arises from globalism. The trans-national scale of power and wealth, through entities reporting on everything from climate change to human rights, has come to modify the sovereignty of the nation-state, tying its democratic processes to supranational commitments.

Democracy has been disfigured by the triumphant power of business, banking and conservative neo-liberal policy, asserts German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas. Governments “lack courage and are thrashing around helplessly in the dilemma between the imperatives of the major banks and the rating agencies, on the one side, and their fear of losing legitimacy among their own frustrated populations, on the other,” he argued in a 2012 article in the European Journal of International Law.

The result is a weakened and ineffective political system and an increasingly unequal and polarized society. Western leaders laud democracy over authoritarianism while simultaneously diminishing the power of their voters and strengthening the authority of foreign institutions such as the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization, among many others.

All this has led to a crisis of political legitimacy. As the role of money in politics has soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, populists who rail against this say they want to return power to “the people.”

The answer from entrenched political elites is to vilify these people, calling them fascists, even Nazis. These issues have come to the fore in Italy, where the Sept. 25 election result will see Giorgia Meloni become the country’s prime minister. 

Her Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party won around 26 per cent of the vote, as part of a right-wing alliance which also included Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega (League) and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia (Forward Italy). They will take control of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, with 44 per cent of the vote. An opposing centre-left coalition won just 26 per cent.

Meloni ran as an outsider to the outgoing “national unity” government led by Italy’s centre-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) under Prime Minister Mario Draghi, an Italian economist whose work at Goldman Sachs and the Bank of Italy had led him to the presidency of the European Central Bank.

Draghi’s government, note analysts at Italy’s Forum on Inequality and Diversity, had done essentially nothing to confront the nation’s swelling maldistribution of income and wealth. The rise of the right is a function of the failure of the centre-left, and mainstream political parties more generally. In Italy, established democratic parties have spent years leaving inequality unaddressed. Now they’re facing the consequences.

Four years ago, Meloni’s party won little more than four per cent of the vote but this time it benefited from staying out of the Draghi government that collapsed in July. “Fratelli d’Italia is now the dominant party,” said Gianfranco Pasquino, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Bologna.

Meloni says she wants what’s best for the Italian people, not what serves the agenda of the Western economic class. So European Union officials were reportedly anxious about the aftermath of the results.

“Giorgia Meloni will be a minister-president whose political examples will be Viktor Orban and Donald Trump,” Katharina Barley, the vice-president of the European Parliament, declared.

European Affairs Minister Laurence Boone of France told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that Paris will “pay close attention to the respect for values and the rule of law” once the new cabinet is sworn in.

But Meloni says Italy belongs in Europe. She promises to maintain Italy’s Atlantic alliances and says the country won’t take an authoritarian turn. Meloni insists her party will “govern for everyone” and would not betray people’s trust.

Meloni joined the youth wing of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano-Destra Nazionale (Italian Social Movement-National Right) when she was 15 to oppose the far-left terror that plagued Italy during the 1970s.

But she now allays concerns about fascism by condemning Benito Mussolini, whom she once admired as “a complex personality,” and Italy’s fascist past. Yet headlines spoke darkly about the threat of fascism. And she does have the backing of two of Mussolini’s granddaughters, Alessandra and Rachele, and one great-grandson, Caio Giulio Cesare.

But there has been some pushback, with former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi criticizing such scaremongering. “Personally, I was against Giorgia Meloni. I’m not her best friend. We are rivals, but she is not a danger to democracy. The idea there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news.”

As Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, wrote the day after the election, “The populists are not the source of the problems Europe confronts but a symptom. Britain is collapsing economically. Germany faces a recession and high inflation. So does France. With Italy already mired in economic woes, Meloni isn’t going to be able to convert it into a fascist state.”