She couldn't turn Italy into Hungary even if she wanted to.
 | By Tim Schneider Staff Editor, Opinion |
These are grim days for European politics. |
The sucker punch came on Sunday when Giorgia Meloni, the head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, which traces its origins to Mussolini's regime, triumphed in Italy's general election. At the head of a right-wing coalition government, Meloni is set to become the country's next prime minister. Alarm seems an apt response. |
But perhaps not panic. In a guest essay, Mattia Ferraresi, an Italian journalist, argues that the warnings about Meloni's premiership — that she will be a "tyrant taking an ax to Italian democracy" — are misplaced. The reason is institutional rather than moral. "For all the rhetorical radicalism and historic extremism of her party," Ferraresi writes, "the fact remains that it will not be operating in circumstances of its choosing." |
It's those circumstances, chief among them the country's economic dependence on the European Union and the fractious, messy reality of coalition politics, that will determine the contours of Meloni's tenure. The path pursued by Hungary's Orban, seen by many as Meloni's desired route, is, in effect, closed off from the get-go. |
Ferraresi is under no illusions about the tenor of Meloni's "nativist and radical" political platform. But in a precarious geopolitical and domestic situation, he argues, her room for maneuver is strictly limited. It's perhaps scant consolation that the European Union, in a paradox worth pondering, may prove to be at once an incubator and a container of the far right. |
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