As an Italian citizen resident abroad, I have the right to vote in Italian elections and referenda. While in past elections the options available may not have filled me with great enthusiasm, this time I was eager to put my cross over the centre-right coalition headed by Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) and its leader, Giorgia Meloni.

Over the last thirty 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. 

Within a couple of months, the Milan branch of the party was under investigation (which was called mani pulite – clean hands) and the net was closing in on its leader, Bettino Craxi, himself a former Prime Minister. 

The scandal then proceeded to engulf the Christian Democrats, in particular leading figures such as Giulio Andreotti and Arnaldo Forlani, themselves having held the office of Prime Minister several times.

The political class of the time, which had governed Italy since 1948, was decimated.

Unfortunately, the tangentopoli scandal, while sweeping way the old political class, didn’t lead to any real improvement in Italy’s governance. 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. But of course, none of that was investigated as part of tangentopoli and mani pulite, but that is another story!

These iene were able to expertly adopt, as I have alluded to before in these pages, the mentality of the Gattopardo (the Leopard), that is to ensure that any change is paradoxically implemented so as to preserve their power and privilege. Despite the obvious need for serious economic and structural reforms, the country is prevented from enacting them, principally as a result of this mentality.

One of these leopards is outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi. He was appointed prime minister by President Sergio Mattarella in February 2021 to head an ‘emergency government of national unity’ after Parliament had failed, as often happens, to find a prime minister from among its ranks. Draghi is a former President of the European Central Bank, ex-managing director of Goldman Sachs, and chief inventor of ‘quantitative easing’ or Magic Money Theory. He is, therefore, the ultimate ‘Leopard’, which explains why his government imposed the most brutal vaccine passport regimes in the world.

Draghi, in fact, was President of the ECB in 2011 when a sovereign debt crisis was engineered to justify removing the last democratically elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and install a bunch of euro-friendly technocrats to ‘save the single currency’.

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. 

Italy’s anaemic economy has led to, among other things, a generation of brain drain – a new wave of young, mainly professional, Italians leaving the country, looking for a better future elsewhere. Governments to address this have encouraged immigration, but 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.

Fratelli d’Italia was the only major party that refused to join the Draghi government on the not unreasonable grounds that it is illegitimate given his unelected status.

What is more, Fratelli d’Italia was the only party that opposed not only Draghi’s brutal vaccine passport regime, but the draconian lockdowns as well.

Yes, the political elites, the iene, and sciacalli, are the ones who fear Meloni the most, and they will do whatever they can to bring her down. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said, as Italians went to the polls, that Brussels would ‘punish an Italian government that violates the EU’s social policy consensus’. There is an Italian expletive which readily comes to mind in response to such insolent arrogance.

Day after day Meloni has been called a fascista, and the legacy media is writing the most disgraceful garbage, accusing her, believe it or not, of engaging in identity politics! Probably because in a famous 2019 speech, she declared: 

‘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.’

As Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian, if we’re going to be forced to endure identity politics then there is nothing wrong with Meloni declaring proudly that she is a woman, a mother, a Christian, and an Italian. As she declared: Difenderemo Dio, patria e la famiglia che fanno tanto schifo a qualcuno! (We will defend God, country, and family. These things that disgust people so much!).

Moreover, as Sheridan, among others, also notes, 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.

That is why I voted for Giorgia Meloni. Viva l’Italia!

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