Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
Italian police have arrested 12 alleged terrorists who are accused of plotting a Day of the Jackal style sniper assassination of Giorgia Meloni. Many more remain under formal investigation.
According to investigators, the plotters aimed to install the sniper in a room in the Albergo Nazionale, opposite the Italian Camera dei Deputati (House of Commons) in Rome.
Given that much of the global media continues to call Italy’s first female prime minister ‘far’ or ‘hard’ right, and ‘the heir to Mussolini’, you might assume that those arrested are far-left radicals.
But you could not be more mistaken. They are fascists.
That Italian fascists want to kill Meloni, who is steadily emerging as the most important head of government in Europe, puts the left and its media allies in a difficult bind.
Meloni may well regard herself as a conservative but her critics still portray her as ‘far right’ ergo fascist.
Catholic? Yes. Fascist? No
This prompts the obvious question: if Meloni is fascist, how come fascists want to kill her?
As Alessandro Sallusti, editor of the right-wing daily Il Giornale, wrote:
‘Who knows if now at least the intellectuals of the left will accept that Giorgia Meloni, not only is not a fascist, but that neo-fascists want to kill her precisely because she is not a fascist.’
Sallusti held out little hope, however, adding only half in jest:
“It would not shock me if in the next few hours someone in parliament or on television demands in solemn tones that Giorgia Meloni “distance herself” from her potential assassins otherwise “she is de facto complicit.”‘
Indeed, the left-wing media in Italy which include many leading newspapers and tv political talk-shows have been loathe to talk about why these fascists should want to kill Meloni.
One of Italy’s main left-wing daily newspapers, La Stampa, buried the news on page 16. Another, Il Fatto Quotidiano, did not mention it. The main left-wing newspaper – La Repubblica – Italy’s equivalent of the Guardian – carried the news on the front page but did not attempt to explain the paradox.
The investigation that led to the 12 arrests in several Italian cities on Wednesday (4 Dec) is being run from Bologna, where many of the alleged terrorists are from.
They are said to be members of a neo-nazi organisation called the Werwolf Division. Werwolf was the name of the Nazi plan to create a resistence force behind enemy lines to combat the Allies as they advanced through Europe in 1944/45.
Indeed, these Italian neo-nazis use the nazi Werwolf symbol on their logo – alongside the communist hammer and sickle.
This is undoubtedly – and not for the first time – an attempt to fuse far right with far left.
Bologna is the capital of the ‘red’ Emilia-Romagna and the historic power base of the left in Italy which, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, had the largest communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc.
But there have always been, and remain, as many similarities as differences between the far right and far left.
Mussolini himself was born and is buried in Emilia-Romagna. He was the rising star of Italian revolutionary socialism until he invented fascism after world war one. The Duce regarded fascism as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement to socialism that would replace international with national socialism.
Two of the 12 arrested had previously been anarchists. All are virulently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli. Investigators say they have found evidence linking the Werewolf Division to Islamic extremists.
Hatred of Israel and love for Muslim extremists are of course also very much part of far-left thinking – as Europe’s major cities have borne witness this past year since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October.
On Saturday in Milan, for instance, left-wing extremists carrying placards accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, dumped a huge pile of manure outside the La Scala theatre.
The demonstrators proclaimed that the ‘Israeli genocide’ of Palestinians and the red-carpet cat-walk of the rich and powerful about to take place at La Scala for the first night are ‘a spettacolo di merda’. To ram home the point, they planted in ‘la merda’ large close-up photos of the faces of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Meloni.
At recent demonstrations elsewhere in Italy, far left demonstrators have set fire to effigies and photographs of Meloni.
Yet Meloni’s government remains stable, her reputation abroad solid, and her party more popular than when it topped the polls in the September 2022 general election that brought her to power at the head of a right-wing coalition. Few elected leaders, after two years in power, can claim any of that.
It ought to be clear by now that Meloni, a 47-year-old single mother, is no fascist.
Her most authoritarian move so far has been her law that makes it a criminal offence for Italians to use foreign women, usually in America, to have their babies. Surrogate motherhood is illegal in Italy as it is in Germany, France and Sweden to name but a few.
Catholic? Yes. Fascist? No.
The ‘heir to Mussolini’ charge sticks only because as a teenager Meloni was a member, in its dying days, of Italy’s neo-fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which had been founded in 1945 by former fascists. The MSI renounced dictatorship and anti-Semitism and in 1995 became the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) which renounced fascism as well. Then in 2009 it merged with Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia.
When Berlusconi’s last government collapsed in 2011 at the height of the euro crisis, Meloni and other former members of AN founded Brothers of Italy as what many in Britain would simply call a proper conservative party. Among her favourite thinkers is Sir Roger Scruton.
As she told me during her successful 2022 election campaign:
‘I never hide. If I were fascist, I would say that I am fascist. Instead, I have never spoken of fascism because I am not fascist.’
I asked her about those members of her party filmed every now and again doing the fascist salute. ‘They are a tiny minority,’ she told me. “They are only the useful idiots of the left..”
So it is hardly surprising that real fascists who remain a tiny minority in Italy have an axe to grind against her.
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