Italy's far-right threat has vanished, but a familiar dread returns as Meloni settles into office
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Loading... - Antonio Cruz
- 07 Feb 2023
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'What Italy needs now are ideas ... and there aren't any,' political commentator says
After Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni won the national election last September, many expressed alarm that the leader of the once outlier Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-fascist origins, would wrench the country sharply to the right.
As she reached the first 100 days of her mandate this past week, though, those fears have all but evaporated, replaced instead by a familiar dread that the 46-year-old first-time prime minister is steering Italy along the exact same course as almost all other leaders have in the past three decades: a slow, steady decline.
The country suffers from low productivity and meagre salaries; is tied up in cumbersome red tape and under-invested in research; has no real immigration plan and is ever increasingly drained of its most promising young people, with 1.2 million young Italians now working abroad for better opportunities.
"What Italy needs now are ideas," said Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist and director of Istituto Affari Internazionali, the Rome-based International Affairs Institute. "And there aren't any."
Low expectations for Meloni
Meloni was elected after a brief technical government led by the well-respected former EU banker Mario Draghi. Many Italians had pinned their hopes on him to turn the country around.
Compared to expectations of Meloni so low they bordered on catastrophic, Tocci said, she has performed well as prime minister so far.
During last fall's election campaign, Meloni delivered fiery denunciations against political correctness and "LGBT lobbies," expressed zero tolerance for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea and mocked the European Union, whom she'd long dismissed as useless, for fearing her.
Yet already in the early hours of the morning following her election victory, a toned-down Meloni took the stage: sombre, serious, looking more spooked than celebratory. Read More…
