The far-right government wants to limit freedoms, repress those who oppose it, and overturn the 1948 Constitution. It is the continuation and completion of a drift towards authoritarianism that began decades ago, which the extreme right-wing majority wants to accelerate and possibly complete.
We have always pointed out the success of Giorgia Meloni and her project. In international forums whether EU institutions, G7 meetings, other planetary summits, bilateral meetings in Washington or other capitals, the Italian prime minister has fully succeeded in accrediting herself as a ‘conservative’, but also a ‘liberal’, authoritative leader, committed to the ‘defence of the West’ and ‘democracy’. She has managed to remove the stigma of her neo-fascist culture from view. In order to achieve and consolidate this undeniable success, she has also chosen to at least formally distance her party (Fratelli d'Italia - Brothers of Italy) from the more radically far-right sectors. Meloni has even paid a not insignificant price in the (perhaps only temporary) differentiation at EU level between the group of ‘European conservatives’ she has joined and the ‘patriots’ of Orbán, Le Pen and Salvini (the latter is her coalition partner and leaders of the Lega).
But this international success seems to be in contradiction with her policies at a national level, increasingly aimed at pushing Italian politics towards a more authoritarian system. At the national level, the Meloni government is not a conservative government pursuing right-wing policies. It is much more: it wants to control every sphere of political life, imposing its vision and working to deprive the country of any residual democratic vitality.
A few columnists in the opposition media have tried to warn the public, but they always put this authoritarian approach in contradiction with the international ‘conservative’ accreditation of the premier.
The evidence of this authoritarian project is manifold. For example, in September, at the suggestion of Salvini's Lega, the Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution banning 'gender propaganda ’ in schools.
But the clearest proof of the authoritarian project is represented by DDL 1660, approved by the Chamber of Deputies on 24 September and now being examined by the Senate. It is a bill that reinforces the repression of any real opposition initiative and severely restricts the possibility of even convening action. Heavy prison sentences will be handed down for any illegal occupation of private property, whether vacant houses or companies sacking workers and even for peaceful, symbolic blockades of a road or railway. The decree targets acts of peaceful resistance by students, workers, migrants and environmental associations.
Remember in 2021, Giorgia Meloni's party, then in opposition, demagogically supported the workers of the Whirlpool factory in Naples who occupied the streets to make their voices heard against their factory being outsourced abroad. Today, that party, installed in Palazzo Chigi, chooses to strangle any possibility of social or environmental struggle .
The right-wing coalition, with its ‘legal reform bill’, calls for the defence of the rich and powerful, cancels the crimes of the corrupt and condones tax evasion. On the other hand its DDL 1660 provides for the automatic detention of even pregnant women or women with children under one year of age, something that not even the fascist Rocco Code had dared to envisage.
It proposes to combat the overcrowding of prisons by building new and larger ones; it overlooks the dire conditions of detention, the blatant and repeated violations of prisoners' rights. But not only that, it cruelly attacks prisoners by punishing with further imprisonment those who do not comply or, worse, protest against the orders of the guards.
But, of course, one of the Meloni government's main areas of repressive action concerns immigration. The Cutro decree of 2023 strengthened the repressive arsenal and reduced the right to asylum. It was as a result of that decree that Giorgia Meloni signed a protocol with Albanian ‘socialist’ premier Edi Rama to open detention centres for migrants across the Adriatic.
There is quite a debate in Italy as to whether or not these policies confirm the neo-fascist orientation of the government and the Fratelli d'Italia party. The differences between the policies of the current government and what was ‘historical fascism’ are obvious and, in some respects, functional to Giorgia Meloni's strategy. Moreover, even historical fascism was not ‘fascism’ until 1925-26, when the regime became institutionalised with the approval of the ‘fascist laws’, putting an end to a period of formal respect for the Statuto Albertino and ordering liberal and Catholic MPs (who until then had supported Mussolini or had been in a ‘neutral’ position) to choose sides.
There are those who point out that no destabilising threat to our country's power structures has come from the left and social movements for many years. Moreover that this difficult circumstance of semi-passivity of the movements would make it useless and even inappropriate for the ruling classes to opt for fascist solutions that would only risk provoking democratic opposition and a risk of international isolation.
Of course, the weakness of the social movements and the left makes the open use of violence by extreme right-wing formations against the left unnecessary, although there are sporadic but not negligible exceptions. But these considerations cannot conceal the underlying tendency that sees a large part of the ruling classes (in Italy, but not only) in favour of, or at least not against, accompanying increasingly anti-popular economic and social measures with an authoritarian management of politics and institutions, aimed at subjecting society to rules that silence dissent.
The ruling classes have always considered the 1948 Constitution to be an obstacle to the free exercise of their power. All the more so since it represents the crystallisation of national and international power relations that is no longer favourable to the left and the working classes. Even after the triumph of the neo-liberal counterrevolution, the constitution continues to proclaim that ‘Italy is a republic founded on labour’, with all that this means symbolically, culturally and politically. The founding statement constitutes an open provocation in the face of an increasingly aggressive ruling class. This social class is made up of big, small and very small bosses. However today there are also all the would-be bosses and small bosses and all the fans of the idea of ‘me against all’, who aspire to a republic (but why not perhaps also a monarchy?) ‘founded on the interest of the individual’. - and fuck society.
This intolerance for the Constitution and its principles has grown over the decades, urged on by Silvio Berlusconi ‘s TV and then by his governments, which not surprisingly brought the extreme right into the Italian institutional game, legitimising the neo-fascist MSI party and its subsequent “evolutions” into the National Alliance and then into Fratelli d'Italia.
The anti-constitutional intolerance was heavily favoured, we cannot forget, by the fact that most of the articles of the 1948 text remained a dead letter from the very beginning and that the country's ‘labour foundation’ has been overwhelmed since the 1950s by the logic of private and corporate profit. The world of labour fought back with the struggles between 1968 and 1978, but was then again heavily defeated in the hell of neo-liberal politics.
Impatience with democracy was fuelled by the personalisation of politics, by the myth of ‘someone in command’, capable of bypassing and ending the endless inter-party agreements, a myth inaugurated by Bettino Craxi and then by Berlusconi himself. The ‘presidentialisation’ of power has always been an obsession of the Italian extreme right, but it has also enjoyed great sympathy on the ‘left’. The ‘American model’ of the ‘president’ was one of the myths that guided the transformation of the PCI into the Democratic Party (PD), passing through support for the 1993 ‘Segni referendum’, for majoritarian electoral reforms such as the ‘mattarellum’, to Matteo Renzi's proposal of the ‘mayor of Italy’.
Of course, all those projects seem lukewarm in the face of Giorgia Meloni's ‘premierate “ (enhanced premiership with direct election) project, ”the mother of all reforms’, which would constitute a decisive step in the dismantling of the Constitution. At the same time this government is trying to put through the so-called ‘differentiated autonomy’ for the regions. This is only apparently in contrast with the centralist spirit of the new institutional configuration that the ‘premierate’ proposes.
In this regard, it is worth recalling the intention to elect the jurist Francesco Marini, author of the very bill implementing the ‘premierate’, as a member of the Constitutional Court, i.e. the body that will be called upon to pronounce on that reform.
We can choose whether or not to call all these reforms ‘fascist laws’. It remains that these laws, admittedly in a softer way, because they take into account a profoundly different context, are like those of Mussolini in 1925-26. They point to a political and institutional qualitative leap that the extreme right wants to impose on the country. In this sense, Giorgia Meloni is right when she calls her people to rally around the proposals, reminding them that ‘they are making history’, or at least that they would like to make it.
The premier and her shrewd collaborators know that the road is still fortunately strewn with obstacles: the approval of DDL 1660, the appointment of the constitutional judge, next spring's referendums on the premierate, the definition of a new electoral law...
But they also know that they have parliament solidly in their hands, not only because they hold a comfortable majority, thanks to the centre-left's electoral reforms, but because a large number of deputies and senators are conniving with the structural emptying of legislative power by the executive, through the flurry of decree-laws issued by Palazzo Chigi.
The question, however, is: will the left, in its various political, trade union and social forms, and more broadly the opposition that claims to be ‘democratic’, be able to find the channels of united struggle to transform denunciation into action capable of barring the way to these laws and the overall Meloni project?
It is here, on this level, that we must all be capable of transforming our ‘pessimism of reason’ into ‘optimism of will’.
The 30th of October