A specter is haunting Italy’s highways: the specter of Chavismo. “Highways: the Venezuelan model has won,” claimed journalist Nicola Porro in a video addressed to his 700,000 Facebook and 400,000 Twitter followers. Porro is a famous face on Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset TV stations and deputy editor of the tycoon’s newspaper Il Giornale; and within just hours, his talk of “Venezuela” had been adopted by dozens of right-wing commentators, but also a large part of the liberal establishment.

Such fury was not exactly well-grounded. Earlier in July, Giuseppe Conte’s government decided to take back a 33 percent public share in the company that manages Italy’s highways, twenty years after it was privatized. This was perhaps a rather tepid move, given the appalling — in recent years, deadly — neglect of the highways under private management. Yet comparisons with Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro abounded in national media, presenting Conte’s move as extreme and illegitimate.

His attackers drew on tropes already well-established in European and US public discourse, resorting to Cold War anti-communism even three decades since the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Faced with the slightest deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy, defenders of the status quo wheel out the classic rhetoric of economic failure, “foreign ideology,” and associations with “uncivilized” non-European countries — deploying anti-communism against even forces that stand far from any kind of Marxist politics.