There is no gentle way of saying this: The spectre of fascism hangs over Italy once again, well over seven decades after the execution of Benito Mussolini in 1945. It is an irony that in perhaps one of the most patriarchal countries in Europe, Ms Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party that has a decisive lead in the opinion polls, could become Italy’s first female Prime Minister at the head of a hard right coalition after the 25 September general election. If she wins, she will be the country’s first head of government whose political party has never fully renounced its fascist provenance. During her campaign, Ms Meloni has swung from trying to reassure people to making extremely provocative statements about her political agenda.

She has also infamously defined Mussolini as a “personality who needs to be framed in a specific historical context”. That next month’s election comes almost exactly 100 years after Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ that paved the way to his dictatorship, experts say, is just one more irony. European politics expert Carlo Bastasin writes that from a statistical perspective, Brothers of Italy’s rise is no different from that of all other Italian anti-system parties from the 1990s onwards. The current developments, though traumatic for Italy’s post-World War II political culture, appear to be a new round of the same phenomenon, “with single parties suddenly rising and surfing the waves, one after the other, of endlessly protesting Italians”. In the 2008 and 2013 elections, Brothers of Italy won less than two per cent of the vote and in 2018 it got around four per cent.

Credible opinion polls have pegged current support for Ms Meloni’s party at about 25 per cent which, with the votes projected to be polled by its coalition partners, should give it a comfortable win. But, adds Bastasin, the same pattern has been methodically replicated over the last three decades. In 1994, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, founded only five months earlier, got 21 per cent of the vote. The Lega political party obtained only about four per cent of the popular vote between 2001 and 2006, but rose above 37 per cent in 2019. The Five Star Movement, founded in 2009, got 25 per cent votes only four years later, and 32 per cent in the 2018 General Election. But all three parties that started as anti-political protest movements now garner only a third of their earlier maximum support.

Anti-fascist forces in Italy and across Europe, however, assert that throwing in the towel in the hope that this also happens to Brothers of Italy is just not enough. The pushback against Ms Meloni leading Italy, come September, into the league of what liberals have taken to terming as “illiberal democracies” (such as Poland and Hungary) is gathering pace. Instead of getting their own act together, however, centrist liberals are lobbying for the use of the coercive power of European Union financial institutions whose support for Italy’s economy is tied to an anti-authoritarian agenda. That is perhaps the greatest irony of all.

A version of this story appears in the print edition of the August 30, 2022, issue.