Stuff Digital Edition

Far right poised to take power in crucial vote

– Washington Post –AP

Italians will vote today in what is being billed as a crucial election as Europe reels from the repercussions of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

For the first time in Italy since the end of World War II, the election could propel a far-right leader into the premiership.

Soaring energy costs and prices for staples like bread have pummelled many Italian families and businesses. Against that bleak backdrop, Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party – with neo-fascist roots, and an agenda of God, homeland and Christian identity – appear to be the front-runners in Italy’s parliamentary election.

They could be a test case for whether hard-right sentiment is gaining more traction in the European Union. Recently, a right-wing party in Sweden surged in popularity by capitalising on voters’ fears about crime.

Meloni’s main alliance partner is right-wing League party leader Matteo Salvini, who blames crime on migrants. Salvini has long been a staunch ideological booster of right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland.

Salvini, who draws his voter base from business owners in Italy’s north, has donned proVladimir Putin T-shirts in the past. He has also questioned the wisdom of maintaining Western economic sanctions against Russia, saying they could hurt Italy’s economic interests too much.

Polls indicate that Meloni’s party will win the most votes, just ahead of the centre-left Democratic Party headed by former prime minister Enrico Letta.

A campaign alliance linking Meloni to conservative allies Salvini and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi confers a clear advantage over Letta under Italy’s complex system of allocating seats in parliament.

Lorenzo Pregliasco, who heads the YouTrend polling company, says Italy’s last three different governing coalitions since the last election have left Italians ‘‘disaffected, disappointed. They don’t see their vote as something that matters’’.

To Meloni’s annoyance, criticism still dogs her that she hasn’t made an unambiguous break with her party’s roots in a neofascist movement founded by nostalgists for dictator Benito Mussolini after his regime’s disastrous role in World War II.

Some political analysts say worries about the fascist question aren’t their main concern.

‘‘I am afraid of incompetence, not the fascist threat,’’ said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at LUISS, a private university in Rome. ‘‘She has not governed anything.’’

Meloni served as youth minister in Berlusconi’s last government, which ended a decade ago.

Recent incidents have fed worries about Brothers of Italy.

A Brothers of Italy candidate in Sicily was suspended by the party after he posted phrases on social media showing appreciation for Adolf Hitler. Separately, a brother of one of the party cofounders was seen giving what appeared to be the fascist salute at a funeral for a relative.

For years, the Italian right has crusaded against unbridled immigration, with hundreds of thousands of migrants reaching Italy’s shores aboard smugglers’ boats or vessels that rescued them from the Mediterranean Sea. Meloni and Salvini have thundered against what they see as an invasion of foreigners not sharing what they call Italy’s ‘‘Christian’’ character.

WORLD

en-nz

2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/287251716329232

Stuff Limited