The spectacular victory of Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing alliance in Italy has triggered a wave of outrage and disbelief among Europe’s political elites and the mainstream media establishment. In Sunday’s general election, the Meloni-led three-party bloc won over 44 percent of the votes and secured a majority in the parliament.
Many European commentators feared that Italy’s next government could block key European Union projects, such as keeping Europe’s borders open to third-world immigrants and stripping the member nations of their sovereign rights.
While it is easy for unelected EU commissars to harass small countries like Hungary and Poland, bullying Italy — EU’s founding member and the bloc’s 3rd-largest economy– will be a different ball game for Brussels.
“Italy’s shift to the right is dangerous for EU,” Germany’s state-run Deutsche Welle rightly worried.
The German broadcaster recalled Meloni’s words during her campaign:
Meloni blasted the European Union as an incompetent monster and promised that the “fun” was “over.” She said she would represent Italy’s interests in the European Union, and insisted that EU law should not stand above national law.
Media reports confirm that the nationalist victory sent tremors across Europe’s ruling political class. German weekly Der Spiegel carried the headline, “Italy voted, Europe is Shaking.”
“For the first time the neo-Fascists are taking control of a government in a large EU country,” the most influential German news magazine panicked.
German newspaper Die Tageszeitung reported the news with the Italian headline: “Disastro italiano.”
Slamming Italy’s likely next prime minister, the German daily commented that “Meloni has never made a secret of her reactionary, staunchly nationalist view. The paper also accused her of standing up for family values as she railed against ‘gender madness.'”
It might get more challenging for illegal immigrants, primarily sturdy men from the Middle East and North Africa, to land on the shores of Italy, Die Tageszeitung feared:
The tide will turn against the migrants, as they did in 2018-19, when then Interior Minister Salvini implemented the “closed ports” policy. Meloni, on the other hand, is even talking about a naval blockade on the refugee ships in the Mediterranean. Her vision is that of an ethnically pure, white Italy — just a few years ago she spoke of the supposedly impending “ethnic replacement”.
The mainstream media was equally enraged to see a woman lead the right-wing charge against the woke establishment.
“The election of Italy’s fascist-adjacent Giorgia Meloni is a public reminder that women can be just as awful as men,” the UK newspaper Guardian came to the stunning conclusion.
Displaying how low the journalistic standards have fallen in the British establishment media, the newspaper proclaimed that women were “just as awful, just as evil or just as hopelessly shit as men.”
Listing Meloni’s “crimes,” the Guardian went on a vile rant:
Meloni is a radical ultraconservative who opposes gay adoption, fetishises idealised confections of a “traditional” family unit she did not herself grow up in*, associates refugee arrivals with “crime and prostitution” and rallies against the influence of those eternally slippery, hazily undefined “globalists”.
(*Meloni was raised by a single mother after her father abandoned them when she was two years old.)
The French government showed some measure of restraint in commenting on the election result in the neighboring country.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported the official French reaction:
Can a political earthquake in Italy cause an after-shock tremor in France? The day after the triumphant victory of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the post-fascist party Fratelli d’Italia, in the Italian legislative elections, the French government was showing great caution. “I am not going to comment on the democratic choice of the Italian people,” explained French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne (…)
But the low-key French reaction was an exception, the newspaper explained:
The reaction of the French administration is a notch below the reaction from its European neighbors. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares stated that “populism always ends in disaster.” A German government spokesman expressed that Berlin expects Italy to remain “a country very much in favor of Europe.”
Germany’s ruling socialist-led coalition was alarmed by the election outcome. “German politicians of differing political hues reacted with concern” over the victory of the right-wing bloc in Italy, Germany’s state-controlled Deutsche Welle reported Monday.
Noting the collective shock across the German establishment, Deutsche Welle added:
Katharina Barley, a vice president of the European Parliament and a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD), was concerned that Meloni would align herself with Hungary and Poland. Leaders of both countries have clashed with Brussels over the issue of rule of law, with Hungary keen to dilute sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. (…)Members of the SPD’s two junior coalition partners also said they were anxious about the likelihood of Meloni coming to power.Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, of the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), echoed the sentiment that decision-making processes at the EU level could be made more difficult. “It is becoming more and more laborious,” Lambsdorff told the German public broadcaster ARD on Monday, referring to the issues of migration, financial reform and the internal market.Omid Nouripour, the co-leader of the environmentalist Greens, Germany’s other junior coalition partner, described the election results as “worrying.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban welcomed the election results with a Facebook post saying: “Bravo, Giorgia!”
France’s Marine Le Pen-led Rassemblement National (RN) party, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) congratulated their Italian sister-party Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) on the stunning victory.
“We rejoice with Italy,” senior AfD politician Beatrix von Storch declared.
France’s Le Pen warmly cheered the election outcome, saying that “the Italian people have decided to take their destinies back in their own hands” against “an anti-democratic and arrogant European Union.”
The Italian people have given the EU a “lesson in humility,” NR party’s acting president Jordan Bardella said.
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