Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
You needn’t hallucinate to see Il Duce in contemporary Italy. Pass a newsstand, and you might glimpse a calendar of the dictator for sale. Head to a soccer game at Rome’s Olympic Stadium, and you’ll walk by an obelisk inscribed “MUSSOLINI.” Travel to his tomb, and you’ll find visitors filling in the condolence book with lines like, “Come back!”
But could fascism come back, a century after Mussolini grabbed power in 1922? Giorgia Meloni – a nationalist who dabbles in far-right conspiracies about “ethnic substitution” – is expected to prevail in elections Sunday. She could become Italy’s first female leader, and its first with roots in neo-fascism.
While Germany de-Nazified after the war, establishing a culture of penitence and shame, Italy undertook nothing as cleansing. Thankfully, Ms. Meloni repudiates the Fascist Party regime, its suppression of democracy, its anti-semitic laws. Yet the far-right has a practice of obfuscation, portraying its activists as harmless pussycats when the normies are looking. Her supporters certainly include some with a fondness for the stiff-armed salute, yet most have no taste for autocracy.
So, should you worry?
As the novelist and scholar Umberto Eco wrote in 1995, discussing a previous generation of post-Fascists who played down their past: “It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple.”
For a picture of the 45-year-old Ms. Meloni, you should watch her swaggering before a crowd, declaiming in her working-class Roman accent as if with elbows out and chin high: You do not mess with this.
“They want us to be Parent 1, Parent 2, LGBT genders, Citizen X – just codes. But we aren’t just codes! We are people! And we will defend our identity!” she told a rally in Rome, shouting: “I am Giorgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am Italian! I am Christian!” (This flurry was remixed into a hit dance track that spread her notoriety and fame alike.)
Ms. Meloni, of the Brothers of Italy party, is only the latest politician-saviour offering to revive the country, each soaring for a spell, then falling. There were the amateur-hour populists of the Five Star Movement. Next, the far-right agitator Matteo Salvini of the League. Now, Ms. Meloni.
Each vowed to end the rot, to support the honest, to rid Italy of purported corruptors (shady politicos, or globalist elites, or non-white foreigners). This populist rhetoric connects with a bipolar self-image that pervades Italy, alternating pride at the culture and despondency at its stagnation. The Italian debt is staggering, as is youth unemployment. The tech revolution seems to pass it by. Nepotism is endemic. To many, life feels worse than a generation ago.
In a country led largely by men, Ms. Meloni challenges the suits, addressing them with the brashness of one who handled a stall at the Porta Portese flea market and slung drinks at the trendy Piper nightclub: She’s used to talking over pushy men. She damns them for quibbling, not cracking down. She rails against gay adoption. She has tweeted footage of an asylum-seeker allegedly raping a woman in Italy.
Ms. Meloni’s story traces to an earlier phase of Italian discontent, when prosecutors implicated scores of politicians in corruption scandals during the early 1990s. Outraged, the 15-year-old Giorgia joined MSI, a party founded by diehard Fascists after the war.
Soon, her cohort rebranded as a mainstream right-wing party, Alleanza Nazionale. In its ranks, Ms. Meloni entered parliament at 29, soon becoming the youngest Italian cabinet minister. The man to invite the post-Fascists into power was Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was always more worried about commies. He once reportedly claimed that Mussolini hadn’t killed his opponents, merely “sent them on holiday to the islands.”
For the coming vote, Ms. Meloni has again allied herself with Mr. Berlusconi of Forza Italia, who is now 85 and resembles a wax figure at Madame Tussauds. More worrying is her other coalition partner, Mr. Salvini, long an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ms. Meloni herself opposed the invasion of Ukraine, and assures the West that she rejects authoritarianism. “The Italian right has handed Fascism over to history,” she insisted in a video directed at the international community.
Or should you believe a different video: Ms. Meloni at the age of 19, praising Mussolini?
George Orwell noted in 1944 the slipperiness of defining who and what is “fascist.” He settled on a useful shorthand: Consider “fascist” a synonym for “bully.”
The foulest leaders of late – from Donald Trump to Mr. Putin – lord their power, target the weak, exalt in primacy. In short: bullies.
If Ms. Meloni sides with the bullies, too, we’ll know.