The Daily - Italy’s Giorgia Meloni Charts a Path for the Far Right

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Last year, Giorgia Meloni, an Italian far-right politician, became prime minister on an agenda that many feared would mark a radical turn for the country. Now, her visit to the White House last week has bolstered her credentials on the international stage.Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief for The New York Times, explains how she got here and the path she has carved out for Europe’s far-right parties.Guest: Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: At the White House, President Biden embraced Ms. Meloni as a friend and cast aside initial doubts that her far-right party might prove to be troublesome for Washington.Ms. Meloni has surprised many by showing a pragmatic streak since coming to power, though some still fear an authoritarian turn.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Matina Stavis-Gritneff. This is The Daily. Italy about to see the country's most right-wing government since World War II, Georgia Maloney. Her party, Brothers of Italy, draws its roots from Italy's fascist history. and others of Italy draws its roots from Italy's fascist history. A year ago, Italian far-right politician Giorgia Maloney became prime minister on an agenda that many feared would mark a radical turn for Italy. Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here today to testify the deep friendship that bonds the United States and Italy. I want to thank President Biden for his hospitality.

Last week, she visited the White House for the first time. And this closeness is based on common values and cultural roots. A move that bolsters her credentials on the international stage. bolsters her credentials on the international stage. Today, my colleague, Rome Bureau Chief Jason Horowitz, on Georgia Maloney's rise and the path she has carved out for Europe's far-right parties. It's Monday, July 31st. Jason, The Daily Team tells me that the show doesn't normally cover visits from foreign heads of state to the White House. But there was a state visit last week that surprised me, and you covered it. Tell me about it. Yeah, so last week, President Biden welcomed Prime Minister Giorgio Maloney of Italy to the White House. And at first look, this seemed like

a regular visit from a foreign head of state. They seem in sync on several things. Giorgio Maloney has been a rock-ribbed supporter of Ukraine and the war, and the United States appreciates that. She's considering pulling out of an infrastructure deal with China, which the United States has never liked, and so the United States appreciates that too. And, you know, at first glance, again, it just seemed like your regular meeting between allies. But if you take a step back and you look at what symbolically Maloney represents, it was much more interesting because Miss Maloney is not just any prime minister. She is arguably the leader of the far right within Europe. And Italy has been sort of the hotbed of populism within Europe for years now. And for many, she represents

the culmination of that movement. And even President Biden, when she was first elected last year, he was very wary of her election. And in the days after her victory, he publicly said that Maloney was a warning sign for the progress of the far right around the world. And so I think how she got to where she started from as that very hard right sort of symbol to where she is now, meeting with President Biden, that's an interesting story. Tell me that story. How did Maloney go from someone the White House was clearly concerned about to someone they're rolling out the red carpet for? Well, to understand Giorgio Maloney, you really have to understand the far right in Italy.

And that starts with Benito Mussolini. He was the Italian dictator who got Italy into World War II, and he brought fascism not only to Italy, but to all of Europe. So after the war, fascism is defeated, Mussolini is dead. But unlike Germany, where the Nazis were held accountable for their actions, Italy takes a different path and has a different story. Italy bans the support of fascism, but the people who were the fascists, they're allowed to stick around. They don't disappear. And they're allowed to form parties. So yes, those parties are marginalized, but they become entrenched in Italian society. And that goes on for decades

until the early 1990s, when a very young Giorgia Maloney, she's only a teenager at that point, decides she wants to become a youth activist for this post-fascist far-right political party. Right. So this is clearly not a very sanitized or popular part of the political spectrum or Italian society. So how does Maloney get there? So Georgia Maloney has a very interesting personal life story. And she shared it with me in an interview at a hotel restaurant in Sardinia last year. Anyway, well, thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. You're welcome. with me in an interview at a hotel restaurant in Sardinia last year. Anyway, well, thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it.

You're welcome. She's from a working class neighborhood and she's raised by a single mother. And I read that your mom was a writer, right? Yeah. My mother has a very particular story. She wasn't so lucky in her life, so she did lots of jobs. And as you know didn't uh we didn't have a problem my mother left us her her father and her mother split her father took off to the canary islands so at the end she was uh directing um a shop and it failed so she was without nothing and i don't know how she began to write in the night a love story. Her mother, to make ends meet, took up writing romance novels. And at the end, she wrote 144 of these small books like Harmony.

And wrote a lot of them, but even still. And they failed too. Me, I joke with my mother about that. It was not a very lucrative venture. She was not successful at the time. So, you know, Maloney comes from a very different point of view than many in the Italian political spectrum come from. She felt that maybe she didn't fit in, but she found a home with the far-right post-fascist party,

which was sort of born from the ashes of fascism. So let me just pause there. Can you explain what you mean when you say post-fascist? What is post-fascism? Yes, that's actually a tricky question. So post-fascism refers to far-right political parties and movements that can clearly trace their roots back to fascism and Mussolini. So when the first post-fascist party forms right after World War II, there's still within it a strong strain that had a skepticism of democracy. There were still people who believed in politics through violence. There's a nationalism, a very strong feeling that Italy should be first, a hatred of communism. There's an embrace of the traditional family and of the church.

But the question has long been how much parts of fascism lingered and how much Maloney is tinged by them and how much she ever embraced them. What is clear is that the young people drawn to this world, their political ancestors, the people they could draw a direct line to, those were people who had been disgraced, who were taboo, who had brought Italy into World War II and devastated the country. There were people who committed atrocities and passed racial laws. So these young people who all of a sudden found themselves drawn to this party, they say not for those terrible things, but for other reasons, for the traditional family, for the belief that Italy should be patriotic. They needed to establish new heroes. They need to create new origin stories for themselves. And so, strangely enough, the Lord of the Rings ends

up being an extremely powerful document or testament or Bible for that world. Wait, Lord of the Rings as in like the J.R.R. Tolkien epics with the hobbits and the elves, that stuff? Right. Jason, it is a long time since I last read Lord of the Rings, but it's not exactly obvious to me how it relates or how it's appealing to the far right. to the far-right youth at the time is that it gave them clear archetypes, warriors and regular folks, in the case of the books, hobbits,

who were defending individual cultures. In the book, we're talking about elf culture or dwarf culture, but in their mind, they're talking about Italy. They're talking about Christian culture. They're thinking of all the people who have an interest in canceling out what they view to be historic Italian values. So you're a huge Lord of the Rings fan, I found out.

Oh yeah, I can tell you whatever you want. Me, I read the book when I was 11 years old. And Maloney, being a hard right youth, looks to Lord of the Rings, and she still quotes it to this very day, as sort of a very clear way to see good and evil. So the Lord of the Rings in sort of right-wing Italian politics means something. Is that right? What is it? I think that Tolkien could say better than us, for a conservative belief. Okay.

You find everything in that. And I am very linked to... There's lots of archetypes in it. And again, those archetypes in reality were no longer available to her and to the others in the youth groups of these post-fascist parties. So that's how the Lord of the Rings becomes so influential to them.

And they actually dress up as hobbits at certain points when they go to school. They would have code names for each other because it was a world where they felt constantly in battle with the communists in the other part of town. So there was a warlike mentality, so they had code names. And the code names were often characters from Lord of the Rings. Wow. So, okay. So how does she go from cosplay to professional politics? So right off the bat, she finds herself at home in this group of like-minded young people and activists. They're hitting the streets, they're demonstrating, they're giving speeches, they're putting up posters, they're ripping down the leftist posters. They're out there every week and every day.

posters. They're ripping down the leftist posters. They're out there every week and every day. And, you know, she's getting noticed. I mean, when a French TV crew comes to Rome, they interview her. And one of the things that she says, which sort of comes back to haunt her decades later, is that she describes Mussolini as a good politician and says, everything he did, he did for Italy. Wow. But regardless of whatever admiration Maloney may or may not have harbored for Mussolini in her youth, her party at the time was going through a major upheaval. It was trying to join a new coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, the conservative mogul who was reorganizing

Italian politics. He had just become prime minister and he needed coalition partners. So either as an effort to rebrand or as a sign of sincere conversion, the party makes a real effort to distance themselves from fascism and Mussolini. So she sounds like she's a rising star in the youth movement from the street up, but where does she go once she has established herself as an ambitious, upwardly moving young activist? So she catches the eye of the party leader who recognizes a talent in her and he grooms her. And then she wins a small seat in Rome government in 1998. But really, she remains a

highly local and deeply unknown figure to the political establishment. And when does she get her big break? So her big break comes in 2008. And that's when another Berlusconi government is in charge in Italy. And Maloney is brought in as the youngest minister at that time in the history of Italy. She's then 31 years old, and she becomes the minister for youth affairs for all of Italy. politics. But by 2012, she's ready to strike out on her own. She decides with a few others to leave Berlusconi's big tent to form her own political party. And they call it the Brothers of Italy. What are some of the things that she's calling for in her new party? So when the populists are really ascending, everyone's sort of trying to outdo one another and be more extreme than the other. And Maloney is very much part of this. When it comes to migration, she's saying that migrant ships should be sunk,

though she's very clear always that the migrants should be off the ships when it comes time to sink them. She commemorates the 100th anniversary of World War I by running a video in which there are an empire of invaders coming intoulators. And the invaders are Wall Street and they're Soros and they're Macron and they're Merkel. So it's the European Union and it's the banking interests who are the invaders who are trying to ruin Italy. On November 4, 2018, 100 years since the victory, we announce our victory. Today, as yesterday, the foreigner does not pass. And this wilderness period continues for Maloney, and she keeps trying to look for an issue to gain popularity on. And how does it go? How's her party received in Italian politics and society at the time?

Is she succeeding? It doesn't go terrific. The party is sort of relegated to the margins. Polite society sees them as unacceptable, even though she is clearly, as I said, not alone in this space. She's just not winning it. She's stuck in the low single digits and she's not doing very well. So she's really just looking for any issue that she can to gain some political traction. And she keeps giving speeches, and these speeches, she has a very particular speaking style. I think the safest way to describe it is full of energy. So one of these speeches that

she gives in Rome really hits a nerve. And it is in opposition to identity politics. So she gives this speech in which she bellows, I am Georgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian. I am Christian. And one of the main parts of the speech is she rails against this idea that gay couples can adopt children or have children through surrogacy

and on the birth certificates instead of mother and father, it says parent one, parent two. So this speech did not go unnoticed. It was seen as hyperbolic, a lot of people on the left and even the center, and even some of her allies on the right sort of teased her about it. And it was considered so much of a, almost a joke, almost a joke that some house DJs decided to put it on a dance track. And the chorus of the song is Giorgia Maloney saying

parent one, parent two, parent one, parent two in Italian. And that song was everywhere. In fact, she says in her book, she said that these DJs made a mistake, is that they made the song too good and too danceable, and it went everywhere, and her message went everywhere,

and her popularity went up. Now, I don't think that this song on the radio is what caused Giorgio Maloney to catapult into power. But I also don't think that it's completely irrelevant. I think that it was Giorgio Maloney being everywhere. And it was Giorgio Maloney not being dangerous. So she has this inadvertent hit. Where does she go from there? The key thing that happens for Giorgia Maloney is that during the bleak years of COVID, Italy formed what is called a national unity government, which is basically everyone got in the government because it was such a major challenge to the country that everyone needed to be a part of it. And so her competition in the populist space

enters this government. Giorgia Maloney stays out of this government. And so when that government ultimately, as governments in Italy often do, collapsed, all of a sudden, she is left alone. And her former competitors are now tinged with this deadly establishmentism, right? They are seen as cooperating with all the people that they have sworn that they would fight. And their support plunges, and her support takes off. Their support plunges and her support takes off. And it didn't hurt her that the Italian left tried to frame her as a fascist. Italian voters didn't believe that. They knew Georgia Maloney.

She was a known quantity on the stage. And so to all of a sudden say, oh, you can't elect her, she's a fascist, when she had been working with some of the people who were calling her a fascist for years, seemed disingenuous and helped her too. And all of a sudden, Georgia Maloney, who was for years, you know, stuck in the single digits, was by far the most popular politician in the country. And there was an election for the first time in five years on the immediate horizon. She wins the elections, and she becomes the first woman to be the prime minister of Italy. And all of a sudden, all of Europe is looking at Giorgia Maloney. And they have a big question.

What is Giorgia Maloney actually going to do as prime minister, after years of saying all the things that she has been saying? We'll be right back. So Jason, for the first time since Mussolini, there is a far-right politician leading Italy. How does Maloney govern when she gets to power? Does she stay true to her more extreme ideas? So when Maloney takes office, there was apprehension all across Europe of what she would be like. And so when she goes into these sort of halls of Brussels and meets with these other leaders, people around the continent were surprised that Georgia Maloney

didn't present as a fire-breathing dragon, the one that they had read about. And on the major issues, she was playing within their rules on economic issues. And most importantly, on Ukraine, she is not wavering. She is an absolute supporter of Ukraine against Russian aggression. This is something that a lot of people were worried about. They were questioning whether she was just saying this in the campaign to seem more acceptable. And right away, she made it absolutely clear she was not going to change. And so this immediately put people at ease in Europe. It especially put people at ease in the White House. So that's sort of the most important sign that, oh, wait, I think this might be okay.

And on the issue of migration, she's arguably become a leader in Europe on the issue. She's holding conferences with lots of nations, not just in Europe, but in Africa and the Middle East, raising money to aid development in the countries that are the source of migration. She is striking deals with leaders in North Africa to keep migrants from coming to Europe. And she says she's doing this because she's trying to save the migrants at sea. Critics say that she really just wants the migrants out of Italy and that she's pushing for a harsh policy to crack down even more on asylum seekers' rights. But what's clear is that Maloney, who was a bomb thrower from the margins,

is now playing a central role in Europe's migration policy. Right, so as prime minister, she's basically governing and speaking like a run-of-the-mill conservative. And I guess, granted, the EU conservative movement has also lurched to the right, too. But I'm guessing that her base is still, in in part far right. How does she keep her core voters happy? How does she ensure that they don't feel abandoned? Well, I think this goes back to Maloney's credibility. She spent her time coming up the ranks. She was actually out on the streets,

living it, breathing it. So I don't think her hard right base has any questions about her. it, breathing it. So I don't think her hard right base has any questions about her. But she's also been careful to dole out some red meat to keep them satisfied. After a court ruling, her government has cracked down on same-sex couples that have tried to have children through surrogacy. And her government is actually erasing the names of those parents from birth certificates, saying, as her song said, you can't have parent one and parent two. There has to be a mother and a father because she insists that's the only way a child should be born. And her priority in government, she said, is to raise the Italian birth rate. And that's sort of an existential problem for Italy. They have the oldest population in Europe and have a very low birth rate.

But for a lot of her liberal critics, it raises alarm bells because it's something that the fascist government cared a lot about. The idea was a traditional Italian family populating the country with lots of Italian babies. And that that was the way you projected power was also through population. And so Maloney emphasizing birth rate, even though really it's something that is agreed upon across the political spectrum, has made some people uncomfortable. So, Jason, Maloney as a far-right European leader actually looks quite unusual. First of all, unlike all other far-right leaders in Europe, she wins, she gains power. But it also feels that once in power, she starts to chart a more moderate path,

maybe not fully at home, of course, but definitely internationally. And I wonder, is she creating a new template for other far-right parties in Europe or other leaders like Marine Le Pen in France? You know, I think that Maloney has sort of become evidence to be used on both sides of the biggest debate going on in Europe right now, which is there's this eruption of far-right parties, and what is the best way to deal with them? So one side would say what you need to do is marginalize them. We need to get rid of them, keep them taboo, which has been the way Europe has handled this since World War II. And then the other side says they are coming up too often, too fast. They're all over the place. They're in France,

they're in Finland, they're in Spain, they're all over Europe. The only way to handle this is to normalize them, to bring them in, to bring them into government. And so the people who would make that argument would point to Georgia Maloney and say, see, here's Georgia Maloney. She was the most far right of the far right politicians. And now she's in government and she's governing like a normal center right conservative. She has been normalized by reality, by the constraints of budgets, by the constraints of foreign policy. That is the cure here to this fever. That's what that side of the debate would say. So it sounds like this new approach that you've just outlined to let the far right in in order to normalize them as opposed to ostracizing them has kind of

worked in Maloney's favor here. I mean, here she is meeting with Biden and continuing to gain legitimacy on the international stage. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely working for her. I mean, she's got this coveted meeting. But I think that from the White House perspective, you know, which, by the way, the United States has been willing to hold its nose to plenty of dictators and unsavory characters throughout history. But in this case, I think that the United States feels that it has a dependable partner on the issues it cares about most. Jason, this leaves me wondering if she's truly moderated at some level, or if she hasn't. What that means for people or groups that she regularly targets? Well, I think it's hard to imagine that after,

you know, decades in politics and decades steeped in hard right ideology, that Maloney has had a conversion within the last year to centrist politics. And there are plenty of people throughout Italy and Europe who remain very worried about what her intentions actually are, whether it be rolling back civil rights or gay rights, whether she intends to do something destructive to the European Union. She has, though, rejected her connections to some of the most vile parts of Italy's far-right past. That's beyond doubt. But still, it's complicated. People in her party keep getting caught acting in ways that, to put it mildly, seem very nostalgic for fascism, whether it be complimenting someone's swastika tattoo or getting caught doing a fascist salute.

When I talked to Maloney a year ago, just before she became prime minister, we talked about all this. We talked about all this. And I was very interested to hear from her how much she was willing to really break with that past. What is your view of fascism and Mussolini now? My view of fascism and Mussolini now is that, is what I said about 18 years, 15 years ago, not now, that Russia loves war and the privation of freedom counts more than all the rest. And one of the things that I was interested about is often people in that world, they will condemn Mussolini and they will say he was terrible for Italy because he got Italy into the Second World War, because he aligned with Hitler and because he passed the racial laws. But then there's often a but. Then if you ask me, was the opera maternity and infancy a good thing to help mothers to do children? Yes, of course.

Okay. It doesn't change. Right. And the but is usually, but he did many great things, right? But he drained the swamps in Italy. But he, you know, passed welfare reforms. He did some good things, but my judgment about democracy, about the Russian laws, was a negative one. But we cannot know it.

But I pressed her. We're cherry-picking policies, right? Regardless of all the caveats, did she think, not the historical judgment, but did she think that Mussolini was bad for Italy? Like the consensus historical view of Mussolini is that he was a bad figure in history and very bad for Italy. Like the consensus historical view of Mussolini is that he was a bad figure in history and very bad for Italy. Is that something you agree with?

Yeah. Yeah. And in a sort of quiet voice, she said, yeah. And so a few months later, she's now prime minister. And one of the first and most important things she does symbolically is that on Liberation Day in April, liberation from fascism, liberation from the Nazi-run puppet government, she writes an open letter to the country's largest newspaper. And in it, she says, quote, So she was immediately trying to get rid of the shadow of fascism, to cast it off of her. But at the same time in this letter, she sort of dipped back into the old grievances of her and her friends being unfairly kept out of society for so long.

So she's walking a fine line there. She's walking a very fine line. Jason, thank you. Thank you, Martina. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In Pakistan on Sunday, an explosion at a political rally killed at least 35 people and wounded 200 more in the country's latest act of terrorism. The attack, believed to be a suicide bombing, occurred at an event organized by an Islamist party that is part of Pakistan's governing coalition. Militant groups have become more active in Pakistan over the last two years since finding a haven in neighboring Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Today's episode was produced by Rochelle Bonja,

Shannon Lin, Alex Stern, and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Liz O. Balin and Michael Benoit, with help from Marc Georges. Fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Itup, and Marion Lozano. And was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg

and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Matina Steves-Gridneff. See you tomorrow.