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Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni poses with her ballot at a polling station in Rome.
What We’re Watching: Italian far-right wins big, Russia holds sham votes in Ukraine
Far-right sweeps to power in Italian election
As expected, a three-party coalition led by the far-right won Italy's legislative election on Sunday, paving the way for Giorgia Meloni to become the country's first female PM and most rightwing leader since Benito Mussolini. With almost all ballots counted, Meloni's Brothers of Italy party came in first with over 26% of the vote. Along with Lega and Forza Italia, the coalition she leads will get more than 43% — enough for a majority of seats in both the 400-member lower house of parliament and the 200-member Senate. What happens next? The three parties have about six weeks to form a government captained by Meloni, who's pretty radical on some things but less so on others. She wants to stay in the EU but for Brussels to have less power over Italian affairs. Meloni also backs EU and NATO moves to support Ukraine against Russia (unlike one of her two junior coalition partners, former PM Silvio Berlusconi, a longtime Vladimir Putin pal who seemed to defend Russia's invasion on the eve of the election). Still, Meloni's top priority now is ensuring that Italy gets all the EU pandemic relief cash it needs to weather high inflation and an energy crisis.
Russia pushes to annex occupied regions in sham referenda
Russia keeps moving to formally annex four Ukrainian regions currently under its occupation. On Friday, five days of referenda got underway in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. While the Western media reports that armed soldiers are going door-to-door to collect votes, Russian state media says they’re just around for security. Expected to wrap on Tuesday, the referenda could end up with Russia gobbling up some 15% of Ukraine. Annexations would be in violation of international law. Still, they would also give Russia cover to resist future Ukrainian advances by claiming any assaults as attacks on Russian sovereignty, which could lead to further escalation. Fighting in the region continues, and the Ukrainians claim to have taken out several Russian armor and artillery systems. Kyiv, for its part, has appealed to loyal residents in affected areas to “resist” the plebiscites. Meanwhile, the White House has called the referenda a sham, and the G7 has followed suit. The Brits claim to have evidence that Russia is planning to formalize the annexation by the end of the month.
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Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italian far-right party Brothers of Italy, gestures during a campaign rally in Turin.
How far to the right is Italy’s soon-to-be prime minister?
Until recently, Giorgia Meloni was on the fringes of Italian politics. Now the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy Party is likely to become the country’s first female prime minister when Italians head to the polls on Sept. 25.
A self-styled anti-globalist, Meloni has for the most part embraced her far-right reputation within an Italian electorate that relishes anti-establishment candidates. But in an age when the term ‘far-right’ has become a catchall, what does Meloni really stand for and what will her election mean for Italy’s politics and economy?
Mother of the Brothers
Meloni – a former minister for youth in then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet – has headed the breakaway nationalist Brothers of Italy Party since 2014. Avowedly anti-immigrant and proud of its nativist bonafides, the party has roots in Italy’s neofascist parties of the 1940s.
Meloni’s party is currently slated to reap 25% of the vote, while her three-party coalition – including Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega Party and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – would together secure around 45%. The bloc, expected to win majorities in both legislative chambers, could even win a two-thirds supermajority. Importantly, this would allow it to make constitutional changes without holding a referendum.
Indeed, Meloni’s conservative far-right credentials are well-established. In refusing to join former Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s center-left national unity government last year, she emerged as an attractive candidate for protest voters (Salvini and Berlusconi both supported it). She has called immigration to Italy a form of “ethnic substitution” and has rallied against globalist elites as well as the “LGBT lobby.”
A former journalist and Italy’s youngest-ever cabinet minister, Meloni is not your run-of-the-mill far-right nationalist. Unsurprisingly, she is not a huge fan of the European Union, saying at a recent debate: “If I win, for Europe, the fun is over,” adding that Brussels should leave “the issues closest to the lives of citizens” to member states. What’s more, the Brothers have aligned in the European parliament with Poland’s Law and Justice Party that’s long been on a collision course with the EU.
Still, Meloni’s not a proponent of tear-it-down politics. Unlike her coalition partners, Meloni is firmly pro-NATO and supports Brussels’ ongoing economic sanctions on Russia. But Meloni also says that European solidarity “has limits,” calling out Germany in particular for opposing caps on the price of gas because of contracts with Russian state energy companies.
A tricky balancing act. Meloni appears to have tempered her tough-on-Brussels stance in recent weeks, emphasizing that she’s not keen to pick fights and will prioritize Italy’s economy, burdened by massive debt and an energy crunch.
A savvy politician who joined the political fray as a student, Meloni also knows that solid ties with Brussels are crucial to keeping Italy’s economy afloat. As part of Brussels’ bloc-wide pandemic recovery plan, Rome is slated to get almost 200 billion euros from the EU Commission. Brussels also bailed out Rome in 2012 from a debt crisis, and although Italy’s debt to GDP ratio remains sky-high – more than 150% at the end of 2021, which puts it in the world’s top 10 – it is manageable only because the European Central Bank has bought much of Italy’s debt.
“European debt substitutes Italy's debt,” says Carlo Bastasin, a Europe economic and political expert at the Brookings Institution. Indeed, the ECB bought 250 billion euros worth of Italian debt between March 2020 and December 2021 to stabilize the eurozone.
However, the doling out of post-COVID funds is contingent on Italy enforcing structural economic reforms. The incoming far-right coalition has said the EU provisions should be amended given recent geopolitical developments. But it has also proposed broad tax cuts among other big spending schemes that will certainly make for some frosty conversations in Brussels.
One of the most important factors in determining the stability of the government, Bastasin says, “is how the European Central Bank will manage the required increase in interest rates” to curb inflation. If its intervention is too heavy- handed, he says, it might “corner Italy’s government, making its financial situation unstable and the basis of the government wobbly.”
As Italy prepares to usher in its most Eurosceptic government in years, some analysts have pointed to Hungary’s complex relationship with Brussels as a sign of what’s to come. Under ultra-conservative PM Viktor Orbán, Budapest has refused to comply with EU reforms needed to unlock much-needed cash. But Bastasin says the comparison between the two is flawed: “Hungary has been subsidized by the EU Commission and EU partners forever, while Italy is a net creditor to the Commission. It gives to Brussels more than it receives.”
What’s more, he adds, Italians, for the most part, have a lot of love for the European Union. “In Poland and Hungary they don't have the same affinity for European integration. They never have.”
Meloni is likely to come into office with a solid mandate to govern, but the road ahead will be anything but smooth.
From left to right, Lega leader Matteo Salvini, Brothers leader Giorgia Meloni, and former Italian PM and Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi.
How will the far right run Italy?
On Sept. 25, Italians head to the polls to vote in a snap parliamentary election triggered by the collapse of PM Mario Draghi's fragile coalition government in late July. Political instability and short-lived governments are nothing new in Italy, which has churned through 18 of them in the past 34 years. Now, though, an alliance of far-right parties is widely favored to win power for the first time since the end of World War II in a country with bitter memories of fascist rule. What will that government look like, and what can we expect from it? We asked Eurasia Group analyst Federico Santi.
What would a far-right government look like?
It'll probably be a coalition led by the far-far-right Brothers (Fratelli d’Italia) Party, with the far-right Lega and the center-right Forza Italia parties as junior partners. If the Brothers and Lega do extremely well, there’s a chance they could do without Forza Italia (probably the smaller of the three), but this is unlikely, and they sort of come as a package.
Who would lead it?
The smart money is on Giorgia Meloni, Brothers’ shrewd leader, since the deal is that whichever party wins the most votes gets to pick the prime minister. Brothers will most likely win the most votes (and seats) of the three, and probably of any party in fact. The next PM need not be the leader of the party; in fact, looking at the last few years, prime ministers come and go every 1-2 years on average, but party leaders tend to be more durable. So it’s possible that Meloni could select another high-profile figure for the post, contenting herself to run the show from the sidelines. But she has recently dispelled this, signaling very clearly that she has her eye on the top job.
What would it mean for migration?
Given the structural drivers of migration (population growth, climate change, drought, food prices, food insecurity), the problem is only going to get worse. With chronic instability in Libya, and an unpoliceable border at sea, Italy cannot rely on Europe’s time-tested methods of co-opting autocrats to police migration flows from Algeria, Egypt, or Turkey.
Lega boss Matteo Salvini was Italy's interior minister from 2018 to 2019, when his party briefly ruled the country in a coalition with the populist 5-Star movement after the 2018 election. So we have an idea of what that looks like: generate as much noise as possible while shifting as much of the blame as possible to the EU for what is in fact a largely intractable problem. In practice, this may involve denying safe harbor and rescue rights for migrants in waters under Italian jurisdiction, while clamoring for a more equitable distribution of asylum-seekers in the EU, and more EU funding to deal with the issue – neither of which is likely.
The other option, to which Italy has resorted with some success in the past, is paying off Libyan militias to police flows — effectively holding tens of thousands of migrants in jails and internment camps, usually in appalling conditions.
What about relations with the EU?
Meloni has so far been careful to come across as moderate and as a credible partner, including vis-à-vis Brussels and Washington. None of the three parties wants to ditch the euro, let alone the EU. Having seen what the Eurozone debt crisis meant for Greece, they are not keen to go down that road, and probably won’t openly antagonize the EU initially.
However, Brothers and Lega remain fundamentally populist nationalist parties. Their basic instinct will be to reject unpopular demands from Brussels if they go counter to their electoral interests, or to foster and leverage anti-EU sentiment to shore up support for their cause in the face of a faltering economy.
Despite the leadership’s moderate turn, Brothers’ base remains rooted in the far-right, as do its rank-and-file lawmakers. Competition within the coalition also has the potential to lead to a dangerous race to the bottom, notably between Lega and Brothers — who are competing for the same electorate to some extent. Indeed, this was arguably one of the main structural factors leading to Draghi’s downfall.
Also, the fringe Italexit party — which does want Italy out of the EU — will probably meet the 3% of the vote threshold to enter parliament. Although it'll likely remain out of the coalition, Lega and Brothers will have a new competitor to contend with outside government as well.
Lastly, the broader macroeconomic context is also unhelpful. Rising inflation will prompt greater demands for fiscal stimulus and salary increases across the board, which the government will struggle to manage.
What would it do with Draghi’s stalled reforms to get EU pandemic recovery cash?
Many of the reforms required for the December review have already been legislated, so in a sense, the hard work is done. However, in most cases, the government still has to issue the legislation necessary to actually implement the reforms, which will be difficult to do by the end of the year. So the December tranche (just under 1% of GDP) of EU money will at the very least be delayed well into 2023, with direct repercussions for Italy's economic growth outlook.
Going forward, the reforms calendar will suffer, and further disbursements will also be at risk. There is also a chance the new government might want to renegotiate parts of the Recovery Plan, which could lead to further delays.
Do these far-right parties stand a better or worse chance of getting along compared to previous coalition governments?
Italy’s complex electoral system gives electoral coalitions a big advantage over parties running individually. Lega and Forza Italia formed part of Draghi’s national unity coalition. Meanwhile, Brothers had been leading the opposition and climbed steadily in the polls as a result, mainly at Lega’s expense. Yet, true to form, the three quickly closed ranks once elections were triggered, and announced they would run as a bloc.
Going forward, they also have strong incentives to keep the coalition together, though competition between them could have important implications for the policy outlook. Only a significant decline in support for any of the three parties could increase the risk of another snap election.