The writer’s ‘Homelands: A Personal History of Europe’ will be published next spring
With the victory of Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy, BBC radio listeners were told that the country’s parliamentary elections last weekend would result in “its first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini”. It is true that, as a young woman, Meloni became a passionate adherent of a neo-fascist party and was once caught on camera describing Mussolini as “the best politician of the last 50 years”. But to present her today as a national leader in a direct line from Mussolini is a journalistic flourish too far.
With her fiery rhetoric of “God, homeland and family”, Meloni is undoubtedly an anti-immigration, rightwing populist, a strong social conservative and a Eurosceptic nationalist. She spells trouble for Brussels and misery for many would-be immigrants into the EU. Congratulations immediately came from French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and kindred spirits in Hungary, Poland and Spain. Italy’s election brings these tendencies further into the mainstream of European politics.
Besides that, there’s a wrinkle peculiar to Italy: a somewhat relaxed, even indulgent attitude to Mussolini’s fascism, particularly in parts of the Italian right. The historian Paul Corner explores this phenomenon in his timely new book Mussolini in Myth and Memory. Mussolini also did “positive things”, said Antonio Tajani, when president of the European parliament in 2019. Silvio Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia party is one of Meloni’s coalition partners, told the Spectator magazine in 2003 that “Mussolini did not murder anyone”. Two of Mussolini’s grandchildren have stood for election under the neo-fascist tricolour flame on the Brothers of Italy banner. It is simply impossible to imagine anything comparable in contemporary German politics.
Yet these two things together do not add up to a serious charge of fascism — not in the likely policies of the new government, let alone in Italy’s wider political system. In fact, post-1945 Italy has had an unusual combination of political instability and institutional continuity. There are strong constitutional checks and balances. Italian democracy is less seriously threatened today than is US democracy.
Reactionary and nationalist Meloni’s ideology may be, but it has little if any of the glorification of martial violence, let alone the actual violence, that are characteristic of fascism. The Italian writer Umberto Eco singled out the Spanish Falangist motto Viva la Muerte: Long Live Death!
There is, however, a serious contender for this label: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So many of the historical features of fascism can be found there. The state-organised cult of a single leader. The cultivation of a deep sense of historical resentment. Indoctrination of youth and demonisation of the enemy. The propaganda of the big lie — in Putin’s case, that Ukrainians are fascists. An ideology of domination by one Volk over others: for Putin, Ukrainians don’t really exist, they are just a variant of Russians. An aesthetic of martial machismo and heroic slaughter — recall the Russian president’s praise of the brigade responsible for the atrocities in Bucha. Above all, the practice of fierce repression at home and genocidal violence abroad.
For many years I shared the reluctance of other scholars and analysts to use the word fascism in the present tense. A polymorphous phenomenon even in its heyday in the 1930s, fascism subsequently suffered from an excess of definition. To cry “fascist!” suggested a lazy equation with Adolf Hitler, total war and the Holocaust. The far left further devalued the term by hurling it around to denounce everyone from capitalist bosses to mildly disciplinarian schoolteachers.
Putinism has a post-Soviet dimension that is new, while historically characteristic elements such as active mass mobilisation are largely absent in today’s Russia. But no historical phenomenon recurs in exactly the same form. We lose something important in understanding the full variety of contemporary rightwing politics if we forbid ourselves to talk of fascism, as we would if we forswore any mention of communism when discussing leftwing politics. With all due caveats, we can speak of Russian fascism.
Both Berlusconi and Meloni’s other coalition partner, Matteo Salvini of the League, have spoken admiringly about Putin. Fortunately, the woman destined to be Italy’s next prime minister has expressed staunch support for a united western stance against Russian aggression in Ukraine. It’s a measure of how far we have come from the heady European optimism of the early 2000s that we now rely on a democratically elected post-neo-fascist leader to help us defeat a fascist dictator.
