Far right takes over also Italy - with first female prime minister

The Caiman (2006):

A skewering of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Il signore delle formiche (2022):

Italian poet, playwright and director Aldo Braibanti is jailed in 1968 due to a fascist-era anti-gay law.

Rome - After a historic national election, Italy is set to elect its first female prime minister. Leading the “Brothers of Italy” party, Meloni is set to form the most right-wing government since World War II. Thus, while one may celebrate a woman being elected for the first time, she also represents a party that is rooted in a post-war movement that rose out of dictator Benito Mussolini's fascists.

Meloni’s ideas for change are highlighted in her raucous speech to Spain's far-right Vox party earlier this year: "Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"

Meloni has also said that she will maintain the country's abortion law, which allows terminations but permits doctors to refuse to carry them. According to The Guardian, she does not describe herself as a feminist, instead says she is against “pink quotas” and that roles should be achieved through merit, not gender. According to The New York Times, while she is a strong supporter of Ukraine, her coalition partners deeply admire Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have criticized sanctions against Russia.

Concerns have risen among some, including Germany and the European Commission, about a far-right government coming into power, while others have welcomed Meloni’s victory. The first to hail Meloni's victory were hard-right opposition parties in Spain and France, as well as Poland and Hungary's national conservative governments, which both have strained relations with Brussels.

With Hungary, Poland and France already being in this direction, Meloni’s victory in Italy will form another right-wing government in Europe.
It may be tempting to connect the failure of the European left to the recent economic recession. According to Charles A. Kupchan, a European expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, as reported in The New York Times, “The economic impact of Covid and now of the war in Ukraine, with high national debt and rocketing inflation, has deeply damaged centrist parties all over Europe. Far-right parties have not only pushed centrist parties to the right, but have also become “normalized,” no longer ostracized.”

But the reality probably is that the left and the center will probably have to reassess if they leave topics such as immigration and integration or gender and sexual identity discussions to the far right or put them back into the center of society.