Why would anyone vote for Giorgia Meloni? The woman is a fascist! A lot more fetching than Il Duce, it must be said. But then, Italian women and conservative women generally are. Which is what, of course, Meloni actually is: not the “fascist” bogey-woman of the left-media’s hysterical imagination, but a standard, centre-right conservative.
Which is why Italian citizens, like Rocco Loiacono, a senior lecturer at Curtin University Law School in Western Australia, voted for her. “With great enthusiasm.”
Over the last 30 years, Italy has been in decline. In 1992 and 1993, the tangentopoli (bribe city) scandal rocked Italy’s political system to the core. It all started when a Socialist Party (PSI) member of the Italian Parliament, Mario Chiesa, was arrested after taking a bribe from a cleaning service company. At the time, the Socialist Party was the second largest party in Italy’s governing coalition, after the Christian Democrats.
The scandal widened, of course, taking in the Christian Democrats themselves, including several former prime ministers. The political class who had held sway in Italy since the end of the war was decimated.
That didn’t do much to improve the political offerings.
The country has essentially been stagnant ever since, and the politicians that took over, as it were, have proven themselves (with a couple of notable exceptions) to be completely inept and probably more corrupt. In Italian we call them iene (hyenas) and sciacalli (jackals). Many of them are former members of the old Italian Communist Party (PCI), which for years had a stench of illegal funding from the Soviet Union surrounding it.
The left media, who make such histrionics about the dim historical links of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, were notably silent about all that.
As silent as they were about the EU trampling Italian democracy by installing Brussels-annointed technocrats like outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
Draghi was feted as ‘Super Mario’, the ‘great reformer’ who would relaunch Italy’s stagnant economy. However, his legacy is that he increased national debt by €30 billion and Italy will experience the slowest economic growth in the EU bloc next year, at just 0.9 per cent, owing to a decline in consumer spending due to rising prices and lower business investment – a result of rising borrowing and energy costs, as well as disruptions in the supply of Russian gas.
Then there is the toxic issue of EU-favoured open borders and mass illegal immigration.
Italy is on the front line of a wave of illegal migration that started in 2015 and never fully stopped. Of course, the EU has not lifted a finger to help, and neither have its member states. I have cousins that live in the town of Ventimiglia, near the French border on the Riviera. They tell me that any illegal migrants that manage to cross the border simply get taken back to Ventimiglia by the French police, leaving Italy to deal with them.
Meloni stands against all of that, as well as draconian lockdowns and vaccine passports.
Most of all, she says what ordinary people – not just in Italy, but across the West – have been forbidden from saying, under threat of ostracism by the Twitter class.
Please answer me these questions … why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening?
Everything that defines us is now an enemy for those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves.
And so they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity.
I must be citizen x, gender x, parent one, parent two … I must be a number.
We do not want to be numbers … we will defend the value of the human being.
“I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m Christian, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, they won’t take that away from me.”
These words are ‘literal fascism’ to the globalist elite who talk and act more and more like fascists themselves by the day. To a great many Italian voters, they are plain common sense.
Meloni’s program is a perfectly legitimate centre-right amalgam. She wants more police, less crime, cost-of-living relief, control over illegal immigration, lower taxes, reassertion of traditional Italian identity, support for moderate conservative social values and more independence from the dictates of the EU. She wants to address the energy crisis in part by increasing the supply of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Spectator Australia
If only we in Australia and New Zealand had an actual conservative opposition willing to put forward such sensible policies.
No matter how many times the media screech “fascism!”