Nicholas Farrell Nicholas Farrell

Giorgia Meloni’s first 100 days have proved her critics wrong

Macho Italy’s first woman prime minister Giorgia Meloni has now governed for 100 days and I cannot help but notice the enormous elephant in the room: the failure of the global media even to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, how wrong they were to warn the world that Italy was on the verge of a far-right, ergo fascist, take-over.  

During the election campaign and immediate aftermath the crème de la crème of the world’s media were chock-a-block with warnings that Meloni and her party – Brothers of Italy – were the equivalent of a Biblical plague of locusts in jackboots about to engulf Italy and from there Europe.  

These awful people were the heirs to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, we were relentlessly told. They were authoritarians, ergo dictators, who threaten democracy – it was insisted – and nationalists, ergo deplorables, itching to destroy the noble serenity of the supranational EU.  

A much discussed piece in the New York Times entitled ‘The Future is Italy – and It’s Bleak’ claimed that Meloni’s programme is ‘nakedly reactionary’. It offered no evidence.  

Virtually everyone, including CNN, the BBC, and the Economist, even the Daily Telegraph, defined the coalition government Meloni leads as the most right-wing in Italy since Mussolini.   

One German magazine defined Meloni in its cover story that late September election week as ‘the most dangerous woman in Europe’ who ‘wants to transform Italy into an authoritarian state’.   

Their truth – as must surely now be clear – was not the truth. 

Yes, the roots of Brothers of Italy which Meloni co-founded in 2012 as a centre-right party are in neo-fascism, but she has repeatedly condemned the evil done by fascism.  

When I interviewed her during the election campaign, Meloni defined herself as a conservative whose inspiration is not the revolutionary socialist founder of fascism, Mussolini, but two quintessentially English Tories: J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sir Roger Scruton.  

Not even Italy’s media, which like the media everywhere in Europe and America is predominantly left-wing, call her far right, let alone fascist.  

Their truth – as must surely now be clear – was not the truth

They would love to do so but they cannot.

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