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Meloni’s election and the EU's future
Now that the election is over, the incoming premier would do well to shift gears and strike a more moderate tone before her voters realize they'd been duped by the power-hungry right.
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Italy’s 'sister’: Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Italy’s far-right party Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), delivers a speech on Oct. 1, 2022 during the three-day Villagio Coldiretti event in Milan, organized by the Italian Farmers' Association. (AFP/Piero Cruciatti )
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t the end of the day, Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party won the highest number of votes in Italy’s recent elections. With the new parliament holding its first session this week, all focus is now on forming a government.
The fury and fear that characterized Meloni’s rise to power are apparently a thing of the past, as the prime minister-in-waiting is trying to project a sense of moderation that she was never interested in embracing up until the recent past.
We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is the blueprint of many leaders on the right wing of the political spectrum: fanning the flames with an incendiary and populist narrative that plays with people’s emotions in a way that profoundly hardens their stance on complex issues like migration, crime and family.
This is not only happening in Italy, France and the United States, but also in Canada, where the new conservative leader, for example, embraced a hard-right stance in order to gain the majority vote within the party. It is a process of simplification that magnifies a problem and offers solutions, often those that hardly have a chance of succeeding on the ground.
For example, will the new Italian government be able to impose a naval block in the Mediterranean Sea to stem the flow of immigrants, or will it try to negotiate a common solution at the European level? Or what about the idea of creating “hot spots”, places akin to the processing centers in Australia where illegal migrants, many of who are refugees, are “dumped”?
This idea was already proposed by the president of the European Commission in 2014-2019, Jean-Claude Juncker, and was rejected immediately.
Yet Meloni’s campaign did not mention the New Pact on Migration and Asylum that the European Commission and European Council have been trying to put together since 2020, a very complex framework is being shaped slowly, negotiation after negotiation.
