Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia) said that without him Giorgia Meloni (Brothers of Italy) would never have existed. He didn’t say it so abruptly, sure. He explained that “if today for the first time in the government of the country, by decision of the voters, there is an exponent who comes from the history of the Italian right, this is possible because 28 years ago a plural coalition was born in which the right and the center together have been able to express a democratic government project for our country ”. But, in short, everyone understood what he meant.
The opportunity to reclaim its weight in the history of the right, and therefore also in today’s things, came with the speech given in the senate on October 26, shortly before the classroom voted for confidence in the government led by Meloni. The day before, even the deputies had voted for the trust. The new government was thus able to begin work, even if there are still undersecretaries and deputy ministers to be appointed. It will probably be a matter of a few days, but it is another step that will put a strain on the compactness of a majority that has so far appeared far from solid. And Berlusconi himself in the previous week had been at the origin of many tensions, rather irritated by the outcome of the negotiations for the distribution of ministries.
Some of his very heavy judgments on Meloni had made a great impression. And a great bewilderment, in this case also abroad, had provoked certain words of her, later denied, about her close relations with Vladimir Putin, while Meloni was committed to demonstrating that the new government she led would guarantee the Atlanticist position of Italy.
But it is not only the distribution of a few sub-government seats that agitates relations between the two. Nor, as it seemed to many, the frictions can all be traced back to Berlusconi’s intolerance towards a younger woman, whom he considers his own creature and who, however, is now in a position of strength. Beyond all this, there is in fact a broader question concerning the possible closure of a historical phase of which the leader of Forza Italia was a central figure. Berlusconi knows that this government is preparing to consign to history not so much his person as what he has represented for thirty years. In short, he knows that the political and cultural horizon that he had imposed a few decades ago – centered on a pop liberalism steeped in populism and ruthlessness, libertarian in theory but conservative in practice – is about to be filed away by a right that Meloni intends to re-establish in a much more radical and ideological key.
She said it herself, addressing the parliamentarians: “In my speech I chose to design the Italy we want to build”. And it was a strong, identifying, sometimes biased speech, in the chamber as well as in the senate. The vision Meloni spoke of has a strong reactionary characterization. There is a lot of certain old slogans, such as the “god, country and family” that she claimed even in the electoral campaign. And there is a tendency to consider social issues primarily as matters of public order. Examples are the answer given to the questions raised by migration, or the idea of justice that seems to run out of punishment or the construction of new prisons.
The scaffolding that supports this vision is provided, among other things, by a twentieth-century ideological baggage, which was already evident before, and which became even more so during the debate on trust in recent days. What clearly emerged, however, was also the error of those who, like the center-left, had imagined being able to nail Meloni to a past, that of historical fascism that in reality Meloni does not claim, at least not in a manifest way. The reference is instead to something else, for example, to the “innocent boys” who “in the name of militant anti-fascism […] they were killed with wrenches, ”as he said in parliament. The same reminder was present in the speech he gave on September 26, immediately after the electoral victory that Meloni dedicated “to all the people who are no longer there and who deserved to see this night”.
Something similar Meloni also wrote in his political manifesto, I am Giorgia (Rizzoli 2021): “I know every name and every story of the young people sacrificed in the seventies on the altar of anti-fascism”. And the evocation of these events also served to liquidate her relationship with fascism. In fact, you explained that, if the violence of the seventies nourished your “rebellion against political anti-fascism”, this also ends up with her relationship with fascism. She then repeated something similar, speaking in the chamber on Tuesday 25 September, when she stated that she “never felt sympathy or closeness towards undemocratic regimes. For no regime, including fascism ”. But she didn’t seem entirely convincing.
In fact, there are many points to be clarified in his relationship with the fascist regime and ideology. In his speech to the chamber, for example, he never spoke of resistance, preferring a reference to the Risorgimento. And this is where much of the criticism that the prime minister has received from politicians and observers has focused. However, if it is true that the ambiguities remain standing, the point is however that the cultural and political horizon that you intend to affirm finds its roots above all in the history of the Missina right from 1945 onwards, not in that of Mussolini’s twenty years. And her goal seems more to undermine and defuse anti-fascism, to send it to the archives, than to celebrate fascism.
In reality there is a common trait between Berlusconi and Meloni, and it is populism. That trait, to be more precise, lies in the recovery in a nationalist and reactionary key by the prime minister of that form of populism that Berlusconi himself inaugurated in 1994. There is a passage from Meloni’s speech to the chamber in which this is particularly noticeable. In asking for trust, in fact, the leader of FdI affirmed that democracy “wants in the people, and only in the people, the holder of sovereignty”. Actually, things are not quite like that, at least according to what can be read in the constitution. In fact, Article 1 establishes that “sovereignty belongs to the people”, but also states that the people “exercise it in the forms and within the limits of the constitution”. And the limits and forms are those of a parliamentary democracy, and therefore of a democracy in which it is the parliament that confers confidence in the government, not the people directly.
It is not the first time that Giorgia Meloni tries to rewrite the constitution in her own way. Berlusconi had done the same in the past several times. In 1994, shortly before resigning as prime minister due to tensions in the center-right majority, he gave a speech in the chamber to say that “only one majority is legitimized by the voters”, and that “if this majority falls apart, it is definitely necessary and calmly return to seek the opinion of the voters ”. It was a decisive step in the history of the second republic, since it was precisely in establishing a direct relationship between leader and people, and in the exclusion of parliament from that relationship, that populism opened the way to power.
But the similarities between Meloni and Berlusconi end there. Compared to Berlusconi, Meloni looks elsewhere. The model seems to be that of the so-called illiberal or authoritarian democracies, experienced by politicians such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán. One of the tools that could be useful for affirming such a model is precisely that represented by the presidentialist revision of Italian parliamentary democracy. Fratelli d’Italia has always asked for it and Meloni reiterated it in his speech in parliament, speaking of “a reform that would allow us to pass from an interloquent democracy to a decisive democracy”. And if this is the goal, to get closer, a rewriting of history such as the one proposed in the Senate by Meloni who, without clearly referring to historical fascism, still archives anti-fascism, undermining its relationship with the republic through the replacement of the resistance with the Risorgimento among the founding values of the national community.
It is obviously a very different right from the one embodied for thirty years by Silvio Berlusconi. It is so in terms of content, structure and objectives. Berlusconi knows this. He knows that his world is in danger of being consigned to history. And it is above all for this reason that he tried to put his seal on the coalition that is preparing to govern, indicating it as an evolution of the one he built in 1994, after having cleared the right led by Gianfranco Fini the year before.
Meloni listened to him, but then he went straight on. He believes that his strength lies in political ideas and in the legitimacy received by the popular vote, not in the possible guarantee that others could offer to make it presentable, as instead happened to the right of Fini. In short, he shows that he feels strong. We will see if it will be enough to really put Berlusconi’s thirty years on file.