WORD OF THE DAY
Meloni, the Funambulist
Anna Bonalume and Jeremy Frey.
The political rise of Giorgia Meloni is the most spectacular success story of the right wing in Western democracies. One explanation for this success is probably the fact that even when trying to demystify Meloni, the resulting portrait retains charm.
That’s the impression left by the documentary “The Meloni Case” by Anna Bonalume and Jeremy Frey, that recently premiered at the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights.
Raised by a single mother after her father abandoned the family when she was one year old, Giorgia demonstrated a rare skill for advancing on a tightrope and turning setbacks into victories. In her autobiography, “I Am Giorgia,” the Italian Prime Minister stated that the early experience with her father’s abandonment left a lasting wound that fueled her motivation to relentlessly prove herself, particularly in male-dominated environments.
“We are faced with a phenomenon of an unprecedented kind in Italy today: a woman who takes power and brings back into the constitutional fold a far-right, post-fascist party like the Brothers of Italy, and thus successfully trivializing the far-right ideological universe,” Anna Bonalume tells CounterPunch in Geneva.
What led her, along with Jeremy Frey, to embark on this documentary was the desire to understand how about 80 years after the fall of Mussolini this successful normalization could occur. “We must truly understand the reasons that led to this if we want to prevent a full and definitive authoritarian shift from taking hold in Italy, as in other European countries,” stresses Bonalume.
Meloni understood the crucial importance of investing both in the emotional connection with her electoral base and in carefully balancing radical aims with economic and geopolitical constraints.
“The question we were also asking ourselves was whether this is the new face of the far right, or even the European right,” says Jeremy Frey. “We wanted to shed light on the narrative she has constructed about herself and see what lies behind it. The image we have of her is perhaps a little simplistic. So we needed to investigate, to find a more nuanced portrait, and to compare her rhetoric and storytelling with the facts.”
“From her teenage years, Meloni has made references to Mussolini. But she does not adopt Mussolini’s fascism, she adapts it to the present day,” adds Bonalume.
The documentary follows Giorgia’s militancy in neo-fascist movements and her meteoric rise, ten years after co-founding Brothers of Italy, to the top of Italian politics. She quickly learned to use an emotional and simplified communication style effective in reducing intellectual effort and creating a bond with the people.
With the help of historians, journalists, sociologists, and experts on Italian fascism, Bonalume and Frey highlight the dissonances between Meloni’s radical slogans in the race for power and the balancing acts of adjustment to the constraints. From Eurosceptic to supporter of Ukraine and NATO; from personally opposing abortion to vowing not to repeal Italy’s 1978 law legalizing it, while allowing anti-abortion activists into counseling clinics and funding initiatives to discourage the procedure; from calling for a naval blockade to bar the way for migrants to building two migrant centres in Albania which were blocked by the Italian courts.
Another area where the Italian Prime Minister is forced to perform difficult balancing acts is the equilibrium between the European partners and the privileged American ally. “She has always been quite close to Trump, as they share a very similar worldview,” signals Bonalume. “However, the decisions taken by the Trump administration regarding tariffs are not well received by the Italians, and Meloni will have to demonstrate the benefits that should result from her close relationship with the American president.”
New obstacles challenge Meloni’s path of success. The “premierate” reform that would allow direct election of the Prime Minister has faced significant parliamentary delays. And it remains to be seen whether she will be able to regain control of the situation after Italian voters rejected judicial reforms in a referendum with unexpectedly high frequency.
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