Life is full of changes, and everything is complicated
This is the 8th issue of the character column of "One Skimming and One Twist"
"Without the state and the family, the shackles of common good, natural law, and collective morality will be dissipated, and egoism will rule over the people of this land."
At the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Marine Le Pen, a far-right politician from France, made the declaration, stabbing a sword at the fundamental values that have long underpinned Western society, and she is the niece of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Alliance, which almost became the new French president this year.
Although Le Pen did not become the "people's choice" in the French election, a similar political tenet was echoed more warmly by Italy's "neighbors".
On October 22, local time, the new cabinet led by Meloni was sworn in, and the new government may accept the vote of confidence of the Senate and the House of Representatives on the 25th. If approved by parliament, Meloni would officially become "Italy's first female prime minister".
Just last month, on the 25th of last month, against the backdrop of the government crisis and economic turmoil, the Italian Parliament held a snap general election, in which the center-right alliance of the far-right party Brothers of Italy won a decisive victory with a total of 44% of the vote. The party, led by Meloni, also became the largest party in the Italian parliament with 26% support, shaking the whole of Europe.
"I am Giorgia, a woman, a mother, an Italian, a Christian! You don't want to take away these identities! At a right-wing rally in Verona, Italy, in 2019 to "defend the traditional family," she proclaimed the core values of "Meloni" identity in short and powerful phrases, and her rhetoric was filled with strong hostility to left-wing forces that "seek to deprive Italians of their identity." Now, she may be able to add a label - "Italy's leader".
After Meloni declared his victory in the election, the powerful and inflammatory speech video went viral again, once again going viral on Western social media networks, and was even censored on social platforms for being too inflammatory. As early as 2019, with the double assistance of left-wing "black fans" and right-wing supporters, Meloni became a household name in Italy with the help of this short video.
The speech also follows Meloni's leader's declaration of struggle against the "rootless" pluralistic liberal values centered on individual rights: "We refuse to be mere numbers, we will defend the value of being human beings... We will defend God, the nation, and the family, and we will defend people's 'freedom' from 'those who reject these values'. ”
Meloni's speech went viral
"Defend God, the country and the family" – this was Meloni's loudest slogan in this election, and her response to the questions of the times. She did not shy away from using these words so characteristic of early 20th-century European political thought, holding high anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and other banners, advocating "racial substitution", Meloni firmly stood on the right position than most of the right, and even in the degree of mixed religion and nationalism, many Italians recalled the banner held high by Italian fascist dictator Mussolini.
In fact, the Italian Brotherhood Party, founded and led by Meloni in 2012, was also known as the "Italian Social Movement" (MSI), which no longer exists, which was founded by Mussolini's fascist supporters after World War II and inherited Mussolini's political ideas in many ways. This inheritance explains the shadow that people see in Meloni, and the fraternal party she leads has a strong religious nationalism and conservative temperament.
A triumph for feminism? Far from that
Statistics Italy once announced that the employment rate of women in Italy in 2021 is less than 50%, and in Germany this figure is 75%; In terms of employment of young women between the ages of 25 and 34, Italy ranks last in Europe. At the same time, many Italian women may be unemployed or work part-time, and about 62% of women work unpaid every day, such as domestic work. The proportion of men in this regard is 30 per cent.
In Italian politics, where 90% of the population is Catholic, masculinity and conservatism are particularly strong, and Meloni tells a very inspiring story with his identity as a woman, mother, grassroots, Christian, as well as hard work and luck.
Born into a working-class family in Rome, Meloni, 45, moved closer to her grandparents with her mother at the age of three to live in Garbatella, a then impoverished neighborhood south of Rome, because her father abandoned the family early. The neighborhood has traditionally been a place of left-wing ideology, with a large number of pre-World War II buildings still in use, the Italian Communist Party and other left-wing organizations active here, and many of the more destitute.
The children of the poor are headed early. As early as his student days, Meloni worked part-time outside the home to gain social experience. Due to her difficult family's circumstances, she did not go to school after graduating from high school, worked as a nanny, waiter, stall, and even worked as a bartender in a nightclub, working hard to support her family, and it was these experiences that shaped her strong and down-to-earth public image. "I did all the work a girl could do to help my mom." Meloni recalled years later.
At the age of 15, Meloni joined the youth organization of the Italian Social Movement, insisting on a part-time job while actively participating in protests against left-wing social reforms, and it was from this that she began to accumulate her political capital, rose to prominence in politics, and won local elections for the first time at the age of 21.
A mural of satirical Meloni painted by a street artist
Handing out flyers in schools, putting up posters on the streets, and trying to gauge public sentiment on social issues by chatting with people in the market, Meloni gradually mastered the art of politics through student politics. At the age of 19, she became president of the student chapter of the National Union (formerly MSI), was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 2006, and two years later became Minister of Youth at the appreciation of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, serving until Berlusconi resigned due to a scandal in November 2011.
Meloni (left) with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (right)
"Grassroots and down-to-earth" is the traffic code that attracts many right-wing "basic disks", and her female identity and strong political speech style are the icing on the cake. Political observers have noticed that she can find some of her supporters in Italy's mainstream left-center-right, even the gimmick of "Italy's first female prime minister in history" is not a small topic. Like Britain's Truss and Germany's Merkel, in the eyes of many, no matter which country, the defeat of women candidates over men means "feminism's victory."
However, as the "first female prime minister", the strong woman Meloni seems to be more inclined to play the "mother" identity card than the status of a woman, because it is more in line with the concept of "family" that is at the heart of her political platform.
Naivety and naivety are the prerogatives of the well-off, and Meloni is not. In Meloni's many speeches, people will notice her emphasis on family, which may be related to her childhood growing up in a single-parent family, and may even be somewhat traumatic. In her autobiography, she repeatedly exaggerates the influence of her childhood experiences on her political views, the incompleteness of her family has caused her to suffer a lot of painful experiences, the absence of fatherly love makes her feel a sense of strangeness and "rootlessness", and she is instinctively attracted to far-right parties, because she can find her "roots" in this close-knit but marginalized community.
Meloni's emphasis on "family" is a completely conservative concept, even if her own status as a "born out of wedlock" is not so conservative — she has children, but she is not married to their father. This concept presupposes a natural, "normal" conception of the family for the purpose of procreation, rather than a pluralistic view of the family centered around individual rights, which is undoubtedly in line with Christian conservatism and is destined to conflict with feminism. At a rally of Spain's far-right Vox party, Meloni, as always, roared: "Yes to natural families, no to LGBT groups!" ”
Meloni speaks at a rally in December 2018
"She has no intention of fighting for women and no desire to be a role model for feminists." Milanese sociologist Serugeti said in an article. As a woman, she never defines herself as a feminist, preferring to play the role of an advocate who defends traditional values. In line with her support for the natural family, she opposes all "left-wing" values, including the right to abortion.
Although Meloni said before the election that she did not want to touch the abortion law, she did want to further restrict women's right to abortion, claiming that she would push for financial assistance for women who decide to have children rather than have abortions. What she wants to protect is not women's right to make autonomous decisions about their bodies, but women's "right not to have an abortion" — which sounds paradoxical. About two-thirds of obstetrician-gynecologists in Italy refuse to provide abortion services, while only 63 percent of public hospitals allow abortions to be performed in their facilities. In the future, women in Italy may have to travel to other regions for abortion, as they do in the United States.
In fact, Meloni, who ran for mayor of Rome during her pregnancy in 2016, also faced gender discrimination. Even so, she opposes Italy's "pink quota" in recent years, which aims to guarantee women's right to work, criticizing the government's intervention as a handout to women, arguing that women must work harder (or even double) to deserve the same status as men. Obviously, even with such a bright female identity, Meloni selectively ignores the structural problems behind the gender dilemma.
Meloni's opponents argue that she has done little to promote the social and economic advancement of women. "She didn't do anything to remove the barriers that women face every day." Italian Democratic politician Laura Bodrini said.
Why Italy?
"Italy is a global laboratory for populist and nationalist revolutions," has asserted Bannon, the far-right "godfather" and Trump's "national teacher." Not only that, but Italy could even be a testing ground for testing people's tolerance for fascism.
In 1996, at the age of 19, Meloni declared that he admired Mussolini because he "did everything for Italy" - which was absolutely unimaginable in Germany, which was also a defeated country in World War II, and no German dared to publicly approve of Hitler.
In recent years, although Meloni has deliberately distanced herself from the label of fascism, promoted that "the ideology of fascism is history", and even compared her values to the British Conservative Party and the American Republican Party, I am afraid that not many people will believe that she can be equated with the traditional right wing of Britain and the United States. The fraternal party she co-founded retained the symbols of the "Italian social movement" and the "Tricolor Flame" and its successor, the "National Union", and clearly deliberately identified themselves as their spiritual descendants, as evidenced by the "matryoshka style" logo.
"Italian Social Movement"
National Union Party
Italian Brotherhood Party
Many of the far-right parties across Europe are moving through a slow process of "moderation" to integrate into the political mainstream. In the past, Berlusconi's Italian Power Party, which had attracted voters with populism, was gradually moving closer to the "middle way", as was Meloni's "Italian Social Movement" and later the National Union, a transformation that gradually dissatisfied many, including Meloni, who feared that the party would lose its "identity" and even "pride". Therefore, when Berlusconi's government suffered a crisis of governance in 2012, Meloni joined the denunciation of the party bosses and used this as an opportunity to set up another portal.
It is worth noting that the Italian Brotherhood Party has previously been a fringe opposition party in the opposition, and its influence is not comparable to that of the mainstream right-wing parties led by Salvini and Berlusconi. Even when the center-right coalition with the latter two parties participated in the 2018 election, the brotherhood itself received only 4.4% of the vote, and looking at the 26% vote won by the brother party in this election, it is simply a leap forward.
Meloni and her supporters
The rise of fraternal Italian parties is closely linked to social unrest, which is the result of the multiple crises facing Italy's domestic and foreign affairs. Italy's elections have always had a tradition of punitive voting, and considering that the government crisis that triggered the early election and caused social unrest was caused by the withdrawal of the "opposed" Italian "populist stronghold" Five Star Movement Party from coalition government, so the Five Star Movement Party (15.4%) had nearly half fewer votes than in the 2018 election. As the opposition party of Draghi's government, the fraternal party also gained the upper hand in the general election, and Meloni rose to prominence.
The turmoil in Italian politics can be seen, with many political parties and separation of interests causing evil consequences. After World War II, Italy experienced 70 governments, but the average duration of each government was only 13 months, and political unrest was the norm. Moreover, since the 2009 European debt crisis, Italy has experienced seven prime ministers, basically a coalition of several major parties, such as the coalition government under Draghi and even eight parties in power, spanning the entire political spectrum from far left to far right, spanning a staggering span.
Behind the political turmoil is the economic situation that is not optimistic and the poor basic capacity of the country. Despite the successful entry into the eurozone through the privatization of state-owned industries, which reduced the level of government deficits and debt ratios, the economy has also deteriorated year after year after the European debt crisis.
From the outbreak of the new crown epidemic to the energy crisis caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict this year, Italy's government debt has been climbing. In March, Italy's government debt reached 152.6% of GDP, making it the second largest EU member state after Greece. Unlike France and Germany, Italy did not have a strong central government to lead the people through the crisis in the face of a national crisis, and thus fell into a cycle of "economic recession-political turmoil".
Italian government debt as a percentage of GDP Source: CEIC
In turbulent times, nihilism tends to become a trend, and people generally expect a drastic change. Breaking the cycle of decline is often an ideology that goes to extremes, whether on the far left or the right, that has the potential to bring the "solidarity" that Italy needs.
In Meloni's view, all the problems in Italy today stem from the lack of national "consensus", which is fundamentally a more abstract problem of identity. Her friends recalled that Meloni had previously been feverishly in love with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. For many on the Italian right, including Meloni, The Lord of the Rings was not just a novel, but a "sacred text" that found the ideal heroic image in fantasies about medieval Europe, and it was Tolkien who helped Italians recall "values that should really be defended."
The Lord of the Rings movie
"The world needs to watch Meloni very closely, recognizing that she will transform Italy from a failed, stagnant, bankrupt chaotic state into Europe's strongest economy, providing jobs and prosperity for all." As Meloni's ally on the other side of the ocean, Bannon made no secret of his confidence in Meloni.
Since the far-right government came to power, many Italians have feared that individual freedoms will be curtailed and the democratic space will shrink; Others worry that the relatively inexperienced Italian Brotherhood leads the coalition and lacks the technical capacity to help Italy through its current economic challenges; Leaders in other countries around the world are also closely watching Italy's relations with the European Union, predicting the future direction of their relations.
For the new prime minister and the government, at a time when the challenges are more severe, whether to cooperate or maintain independence, whether to adhere to a conservative position or to make compromises, will become the choice that will determine the future of the country. The far-right ideology of fraternal parties and the use of culture war-style politics have also created uncertainty about Italy's future.
The author丨Chen Miaosong, direct news editor of Shenzhen Satellite TV