A radical right-wing Europe: Giorgia Meloni has figured out how to do it Italy expects another heat wave next week

Will fascism return to Spain fifty years after the end of the Franco dictatorship? One thing is clear: for the first time since the generalissimo’s death in 1975, a far-right party could enter government in Spain on Sunday. According to polls, the Vox party, founded in 2013, is about to take power together with the conservative Partido Popular (PP).

Their program is radically right and contradicts just about everything that comes from the current social-democratic government around Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez: against foreigners, against gays and lesbians, against the memory culture of the Franco dictatorship, against climate protection, against abortion and women’s rights, against ‘wokeism’ and progressive elites, against the autonomy rights of the regions. Vox is a reactionary party through and through, and even though they officially want nothing to do with Francoism, their ranks are full of Franco nostalgics.

Everyone loves Giorgia: if she stays pro-European, Meloni won’t have any problems

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni cheered Vox from Italy. She regularly appears as a star guest at election events, most recently in Valencia about a week ago. She advised Vox supporters to follow her path and build a new conservative-patriotic alliance. “The hour of the patriots has come,” announced the head of government, connected by video.

If the Spanish like-minded people want to be successful, they would do well to actually follow the example of the Italian. Because unlike other radical right-wing parties such as Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or the Polish governing party PiS, Meloni has been sailing through European politics quite calmly so far. Moreover, Meloni is courted in Brussels. She has an almost harmonious relationship with the head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. In any case, there is no longer any fear of contact.

Meloni’s recipe for success is as simple as it is effective. Essentially, she seems to have understood two things. First, don’t mess it up with the international lenders. Second, don’t mess with the EU establishment. So as long as Meloni is pro-European, does not question the euro as a common currency and is on the right side of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, she has nothing to fear from anyone.

“Meloni was quick to make it clear she wouldn’t be a problem for the EU,” said Hans Kundnani, a researcher at UK think tank Chatham House. That was the end of the matter for most European partners. More important than Meloni’s commitment to the EU, however, is that the conservative center has joined the discourse of right-wing extremists in recent years. Kundnani: “Everything culminates in the slogan ‘Fortress Europe’.”

The sense that Europe and its civilization are threatened by immigration, by Islamism, by an arc of instability in the South has become a widely accepted narrative. Even French President Emmanuel Macron constantly talks about a “Europe that protects”, even though he originally talked about economic protectionism. As a result, a new ‘regionalism’ based on cultural identity emerged: the place of a liberal bourgeois Europe was replaced by an ethno-cultural ‘civilization’ that ultimately turned against everything non-white, as Kundnani writes in his book ‘Eurowhiteness’. A concept to which extreme right-wing parties can connect seamlessly.

Extreme right, but above all not eurosceptic?

The situation is difficult for traditionally progressive parties such as the Social Democrats or the Liberals. You are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, they are experiencing something that they themselves have repeatedly tried in vain in recent decades: the formation of a European identity. It just isn’t happening in the cosmopolitan and progressive way that the pro-Europeans envisioned. The left and liberals must therefore ask themselves how far they want to work with the new right. Kundnani: “Moderate conservatives, leftists and progressive liberals must decide whether they have a problem with right-wing extremism – or just a problem with Euroscepticism.”

A first test of this will be the European elections in spring 2024. At the EU level, the Christian Democratic People’s Party (EPP), led by Germany’s CSU MEP Manfred Weber, is already flirting with an alliance with Melonis Fratelli d’Italia in what could result in the most right-wing EU parliament ever.

But the real tipping point will come in the French presidential election in 2027. If Marine Le Pen manages to get her right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) based on the Meloni model out of the filthy anti-European corner and forge an identity alliance with the conservatives, the triumph would be complete. An extreme right Europe, something that was unthinkable until now, is increasingly within reach. (aargauerzeitung.ch)