I spent two months in Italy this summer, one of my longest visits since leaving the country of my birth for America sixteen years ago. I had stops in Ferrara, Rome, the Alps, and Palermo. And I can confirm that Tancredi’s observation in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard holds more and more true for Italy every day: “If you want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” Tancredi was speaking to his aging uncle, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, who was struggling with the social and political changes brought about by the Risorgimento in the 1860s. The clever and ambitious Tancredi has a real-life successor today in the person of Giorgia Meloni, the first female prime minister in Italian history and a youthful forty-seven-year old.
Two years ago, Italy elected its most far-right parliament in the post–World War II era, bringing Meloni to power in the process. Like Tancredi, Meloni has a supporting cast of characters who share both ideological and familial connections—including former allies of Silvio Berlusconi (after whom Milan’s international airport has embarrassingly just been renamed) as well as members of the Brothers of Italy party, some of whom exhibit nostalgia for Mussolini. She controls the party in part through the appointment of family members to various government and administrative positions, which helps keep the Duce enthusiasts in line and burnishes the party’s moderate image. When commemorating the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti carried out by Mussolini’s henchmen a hundred years ago—a grim landmark of Italian history—Meloni’s party behaved with institutional decorum. But there was no public acknowledgment of, or reflection on, the party’s ideological roots in that era. The Meloni government’s control of state-owned television outlets (a network opponents refer to as “TeleMeloni”) probably helped quash talk of this. And as in other countries, readership of mainstream newspapers in Italy continues to fall drastically, standing, according to some estimates, at half the number it did just ten years ago. Deculturation aids populist political entrepreneurs, even in Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance.
Meloni’s right-wing populism has a touch of American culture-war attitude on gender and LGBT issues, just enough to help in election campaigns. It doesn’t hurt Meloni that her main opponent—Elly Schlein, the leader of the Democratic Party—started out in politics as a volunteer in the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and came out as bisexual in 2020. But the conservatism of Meloni’s party embodies a “cultural Christianity” that can’t credibly lead moral crusades, and, at any rate, Italy does not have a militant religious culture. There is no appetite for upsetting the balance established in the 1970s with Law 194, which, with some limits, legalized abortion. Italians in general are reluctant to change, which says something about Meloni’s ability to push through bills that Christian-Democrats and the Left had tried to pass multiple times since the 1980s: on self-government of the justice system (which is now allegedly less independent), greater regional autonomy (which means more disparities between rich and poor regions), and a stronger role for the prime minister vis-à-vis the president of the republic (a significant change from the existing balance of powers in the Italian Constitution).
Meloni and her government have no interest in reforming Italy’s migration policies, unless perhaps it’s to make them harsher. The media continues to depict immigrants and refugees as an invasive force, while the business community benefits from employing immigrants illegally. The Catholic Church is the loudest advocate for migrants, and among the faithful there is little division on this issue—at least in public. The truth is that Italy needs immigration. Italy is still the destination for many migrants, but less favored and less attractive compared to previous years and to other European countries. Despite declining mortality and a slight increase in the resident foreign population (now almost 5.5 million), the country is rapidly depopulating due to falling birth rates and a high number of Italians leaving every year. In the past ten years, almost 1.5 million Italians, especially young people, have left the country. Italy is projected to lose five million more residents in the next twenty-five years (from 59 to 54 million). In his annual state-of-the-economy speech on May 31, Fabio Panetta, chairman of Italy’s central bank, stressed the key role of legal migrants for Italy’s economic future. Meanwhile, Italy is graduating far fewer university students than other European countries. Prestigious universities that have played an important role in Western culture (Bologna, Milan, Padua) are being joined by startup-like online universities subject only to lax regulatory oversight and bearing suspect credentials. The brain-drain as young people leave the country only stands to be compounded by a faltering education system—which in turn does little to attract new immigrants.
As to where Italy stands internationally, the last two years have been a test for Meloni and her government. In some ways its turn away from radical populism resembles what happened in countries like Poland, Greece, and Spain. But polarization between Left and Right has grown, with little space for reformist and moderate forces in the center. Meloni’s choice to keep Italy’s commitments with the United States and the West—including support for Ukraine, despite her own previously expressed sympathies for Vladimir Putin—has in some ways helped mainstream Italy’s populist Right. The country’s ties to the United States and NATO could become more complicated if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election; Italy has no alternative to NATO, given the relative size and weakness of its armed forces.
