PLANS are underway for a big anti-government demonstration in Rome on June 1. Politics are exceptionally fractious in Italy and a long hot summer beckons.
 
The 100,000-strong Festival of Liberation celebrations in Milan on April 25 brought to the surface divisions across the left and centre-left with insurgent pro-Palestinian demonstrators contesting the official rally which takes place under the political leadership of the dominant Democratic Party.
 
In a scenario complicated by provocateurs with Nato, Israeli and Ukrainian flags, the official leadership was challenged.
 
As elsewhere in Italy, demonstrators interceded with the Palestinian issue both at the April 25 Liberation Day celebrations and the May Day marches. In Milan, and preempting the arrival of the official procession, Palestine solidarity activists challenged those “who invoked the spirit of the anti-fascist resistance while endorsing or tolerating the assault on Gaza.”
 
These ruptures indicate a sharpening of polemics on the left that is but one factor at play in national politics.
 
Giorgia Meloni has been prime minister since October 2022 as head of the previously marginal but now resurgent Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdL) that has established a new hegemony over the right.
 
Naming the FdL — the successor to the postwar fascist formation — with the title of Italy’s national anthem is just one aspect of the Italian right’s change of strategy. With the late media magnate Berlusconi’s Forza Italia much diminished and the right-wing populist Lega both weakened and behind DdL in votes, Meloni is the most powerful figure in government.
 
A calculated ambiguity and the nuanced rhetoric deployed by Meloni have conveniently confused those who find confusion convenient.
 
Refashioning the national conversation to suggest that the deep political and ideological divide since Liberation Day — celebrated as the Festival of Liberation on April 25 in every piazza — has been overcome is a device that suits those elements in Italian society who seek capitalist continuity in government policy.
 
It is thus convenient to reframe the FdL as a conservative and national formation, more or less completely integrated into parliamentary politics. To this aim, Meloni has bent her efforts while at the same time carefully avoiding any repudiation of the clear fascist tradition most evident from the dominance in her party leadership of veterans from the Fronte della Gioventu, the youth organisation of the neofascist Italian Social Movement from which FdL emerged.
 
Her public posture — representing the neofascist presence in post-war Italian history as simply the reflection of historical phenomena — has the strategic and ideological purpose of erasing anti-fascism as the dominant discourse in public life as represented by the Festival of Liberation.
 
This goes alongside a bid to present the continued celebration of the victory over fascism as dividing the nation. This is accompanied by a rearticulation of the common themes of European reaction — a renewed anti-communism, nationalism and ethnic particularism, patriarchal social policies and repressive measures to contain the class and social conflicts that characterise modern Italian society as every other developed capitalist country.
 
But at the economic level and in relation to the European Union, the European Central Bank and in relations with Washington, Meloni’s government loyally rules according to the neoliberal paradigm that entails economic orthodoxy and an almost absolute continuity with the previous regimes.
 
This late capitalist economic orthodoxy — most closely associated in Italy with Mario Draghi, Meloni’s predecessor as prime minister — has been enforced with one or two flourishes. The Keynesian financial boost to construction and renovation of the previous government has ended and the “citizen’s income,” which secured support for the Five Star Movement, particularly in the south, was abandoned plunging a significant slice of poor people into deeper poverty.
 
Draghi’s trajectory — working for the World Bank in Washington DC; head of the Italian Treasury; a spell with Goldman Sachs; governor of the Bank of Italy then president of the European Central Bank before becoming prime minister in Italy’s crisis government of 2021-22 — makes him the guarantor of neoliberalism in the guise of stability.
 
Meloni’s government has abandoned the earlier calculated ambiguity of the Italian right towards Putin and has committed to full spectrum support for the Nato posture on the war in Ukraine.
 
Naturally, Meloni’s enthusiastic Nato alignment is reflected in support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. Conventional anti-semitism which has a diffused but active presence in right-wing Italian political discourse is necessarily muted in the service of this alignment which, of course, converges with the anti-migrant and Islamaphobic practice which suffuses Italian politics.
 
It was young north Africans that the police and carabinieri arrested in Milan.
 
Constitutional changes and new electoral laws have weakened the elements of proportionality in parliamentary politics. At the same time, the more or less collapse into European Union economic orthodoxy of the Democratic Party has narrowed its opposition to the main thrust of government policy and trapped it into a too-narrow terrain of social issues over which the right enjoys substantial support and around which the millionaire mass media has extraordinary purchase.
 
With no challenge on the main pillars of economic policy, culture wars are the terrain on which the right prefers to contest the left and on which all sections of reaction share assumptions.
 
Within the Italian right, there are of course powerful elements who still adhere to the protectionist traditions associated with historically weaker industrial capitalist states. The particular prominence of small and medium-sized enterprises in Italy — who face particular problems in a globalised economy — is the ground on which these ideas are constantly renewed and contribute something to the anti-EU and anti-bank and big-business ideas which found some expression in Lega, whose base is in the north.
 
The long shadow of the EU
 
The popular mood is not content with the way things are developing. Industrial, social and political struggles proliferate at every level in Italian society. The situation for young people is especially disastrous while protest and repression are constant features of life in Italian universities.
 
There exists a scenario, familiar to British observers, in which — in domestic politics, on the economy, foreign policy and war — it is difficult to secure the depth of unity necessary to achieve profound change or to breakthrough in formal representative politics.
 
When, at the Milan events, the president of the local National Association of Italian Partisans invoked the spirit of anti-fascist unity, he revealed the impossibility of reconciling a principled anti-fascism with imperialist war, racism and Israeli war crimes.
 
The parliamentary opposition, the Democratic Party and its periphery, and the Five Star Movement — and to a large extent the “official” trade union federations — are hobbled by their failure to challenge the foundations of existing economic and foreign policy or even to conceive of an alternative.
 
The radical left, only weakly represented in parliament, is an insurgent if fragmented force, and while there are welcome signs of rank-and-file trade union revolt the official union leaderships — despite their clear sense that the Italian political Establishment casts its austerity policies within the framework of the EU Stability Pact — remains bound by these limits.
 
Indeed, in a parliamentary hearing, the CGIL confederal secretary Christian Ferrari warned that government delays in publishing its Economic & Financial Document — the main instrument of economic planning — has the clear objective of making the “bad news” known only after the European elections.
 
He warned that ministers planned a new “stability pact” characterised by the return of austerity and lower GDP growth. Familiar territory!

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.