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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.
Anyway sorry for the rant. It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety) has just won the Italian elections and will very likely going to provide the prime minister to a cabinet that will include a 85 year old Berlusconi among others. Italy is the 3rd most populous and wealthy country in the EU. It also acts as a perennial threat to the stability of the Brussels-led order and the euro, since an Italian default or currency exit would almost definitely trigger the collapse of the euro with who knows what consequences. The EU looks determined to fight. Meloni herself does not sound like the type of politician who will accept to be crushed as easily as her predecessors. Here is a French interview with a 19 years old activist Meloni. She still sounds like a true believer to me. To get the gist of just how radical (from the EU-norm) she is willing to be with regard to cultural issues, I recommend this speech from 3 years ago (with English subs).
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown? How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe? Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions? Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard? When the ECB will have to start increasing interest rates substantially and Italy has to choose between bankruptcy or euro-exit, how will this go under this government?
P.S. Italy was one of the most anal countries with regard to vaccine oppression and corona measures in Europe. Does anyone know what the position of the Fratelli was back then? And how they talk about these things now?
I don't believe "anything" will happen, nothing ever does.
These are not new elements in Italian politics and she is euro-ambivalent, pro-nato and pro-ukraine. Who gives a shit about the culture war stuff given the circumstances here?
There is a major war in Europe, massive inflation, energy crisis and a looming depression. Who gives a shit if she is stricter on immigration or doesn't like trannies or wharever?
I've often heard such sentiments with the implication "and since what you're talking about is much too unimportant, just shut up and go along with us." If the claim is taken at face value, then a Machiavellian impulse would say that this is exactly the time to slip in all sorts of culture-war maneuvers: to strike while the enemy is distracted, for why should they get to set the defaults that everyone "has to" go along with because there are "more important things to worry about right now?"
I think that Machiavellian impulse would be both unsporting and unlikely to work (right-wing culture warriors seeking to not let a crisis go to waste would probably find that their enemies do have plenty of energy to spare on such trivialities when called on it, even at the expense of what really is supposed to be important.) But who knows; maybe I'm wrong.
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Perhaps (even probably) you are right. But we really do not know much about what she and her party really thinks about any of these "more important" issues. Were they recently just hiding their power level to not spook away the elderly vote? Or were they actually being radicals in the past as a decoy? And more importantly which direction they might pivot since with Draghi or a good-old PD technocrat this was always obvious from the beginning. Nobody seems to know or at least openly speculate yet.
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