Meloni is still proving her Leftie critics wrong
Giorgia Meloni's opponents and their many friends in the media are cock-a-hoop that the Left has managed to win elections in a couple of large Italian cities. They are treating the victories of the Left in Genoa and Ravenna earlier this month, when elections took place for control of 126 councils, including a handful of major cities, as the beginning of the end for Italy's first female prime minister.
It helped the headline writers that the victor in Genoa was a glamorous ex Olympic hammer thrower who had delivered a mighty blow to Meloni.
But it is all surely nonsense. If it were true that Meloni's days were numbered, the Right-wing party she founded, Brothers of Italy, would not be consistently leading national opinion polls by a country mile. Nor would Brothers of Italy be more popular now than in September 2022, when it received more votes than any other party at the general election to lead a Right-wing coalition to a resounding victory.
Such impressive popular support halfway through the life of a parliament is virtually unprecedented in a European democracy. It is especially so in a country like Italy, which has had 68 governments since the fall of fascism in 1945.
But to read the press headlines readers would be forgiven if they thought the end was truly nigh for Meloni. Elly Schlein, leader of the main opposition – the Democratic Party – reacted as if on the verge of power.
'If I were Giorgia Meloni I'd be beginning to worry, [this] is the symptom that something in her rapport with the country is broken,' she said. 'What is now clear is that the centre-Right crows about the polls but we win elections.'
At least Schlein had the decency to refer to Meloni as 'centre-Right', unlike most of the global media. True, they have given up calling her 'the heir to Mussolini' because she was once in Italy's long-defunct post-fascist party. But they still call her 'far-Right' despite the fact that she has not done anything far-Right – unless you count her attempts to stop mass illegal migration across the Mediterranean. And even Sir Keir Starmer, who has had talks with her on the issue twice in the past year, has said she has made 'remarkable progress'. He wants to copy her scheme to off-shore asylum seekers from safe countries (thus technically not refugees) to Albania for swift processing of their asylum requests and deportation. Is he now 'far-Right' too?
On the world stage, meanwhile, Meloni continues in the role of key player whose astute down to earth realism, infectious charm and youthful good looks often produce surprising results.
What makes it even more laughable that the Left should regard victory in Genoa and Ravenna as the writing on the wall for Meloni is that traditionally these two port cities have been citadels of Italian communism. Genoa has always been among the most devoutly Left-wing cities in Italy. And Italy, it should be remembered, is the country that not only invented fascism but had the largest communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc until the end of the Cold War. Schlein's party is its heir.
In Ravenna, the Left won as it always has done since the fall of fascism in 1945. Worse for Schlein is that the Democratic Party did not win Genoa and Ravenna on its own but only in coalition with the anti-establishment populist party, Five Star, with which it enjoys a love-hate relationship.
These two parties are normally sworn enemies but have nevertheless, on occasion, allied at local level and once at national level to form a coalition government that lasted a year and a half. Even if they were to strike a deal to fight the next general election in 2027 together they would get nowhere near enough votes to win: the Democratic Party is currently polling 22 per cent, and Five Star 12 per cent. Meloni's coalition government, by contrast, is way ahead with Brothers of Italy polling 30 per cent, and its partners Forza Italia and the League both on 9 per cent.
Schlein's only hope would be to ally as well with what is called the campo largo (large field) – not just with Five Star but with the other much smaller Left-wing parties of shades of pink and red. This is what her party did in Genoa. But its real problem is Schlein's lack of charisma and winning policies. Her party seems to be, as journalist Aldo Cazzullo, no friend of the Right, wrote in the Corriere della Sera 'a little 5 per cent party of the extreme Left' with no concrete ideas. 'If there were a general election now, the Right would win convincingly,' he said.
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