Ahead of the September 25 general election, the coalition that Italian media calls “center right” is close to 50 percent in the polls — and near guaranteed a large majority in Parliament. Worse news comes when we realize that the phrase “center right” is a euphemism. Both the main party in the alliance — Giorgia Meloni’s postfascist Fratelli d’Italia (polling around 24 percent), and its second force, Matteo Salvini’s Lega (on around 14 percent), combine their plans for sweeping tax cuts with a stream of hateful propaganda against immigrants, LGBTQ “lobbies,” “plans for ethnic replacement,” and such like.

Fratelli d’Italia is not guaranteed to be the most popular party. It is neck-and-neck in polls with the center-left Democrats, though this latter is in a much weaker position in terms of converting votes into seats, given its lack of major allies. The Democrats insist that they will continue the work of Mario Draghi’s cross-party government, created last February to disburse European recovery funds. Former European central banker Draghi’s majority had also relied on Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the Lega, and the eclectic Five Star Movement; but with these latter forces pulling their support this July, the Democrats alone uphold its record.

This has, in turn, recreated a typical optical illusion of Italian politics, in which the latest wave of right-wing insurgents claim that they are overcoming an ever-hegemonic Left, even though Italy has almost no Left of which to speak. Draghi’s cabinet was the latest of a series of grand coalitions and “technical governments” in recent decades, backed among others by the Democrats, determined guarantors of institutional stability. But given the basic declinist-neoliberal substrate of all Italian politics, the 2022 campaign is again fought between this neoliberal-managerial center left and far-right outsiders who claim they will put an end to “a decade of left-wing rule.”