Italy’s election result is another far-right breakthrough — and another indicator of the radicalization of the Right. The right-wing coalition scored 44 percent, but the big winner was just one part of it: Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, whose 26 percent score was far up on the 4 percent it took in 2018.

Meloni’s allies performed feebly. In the case of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (8 percent), this was expected. Yet the Lega led by Matteo Salvini (9 percent) — just a few years ago the rising star of anti-immigrant politics — slumped well below poll ratings and did badly even in its old Northern heartlands.

Part of Meloni’s success lay in the sense she was an “outsider” — or at least, she used this framing to rally the right-wing electorate. Fratelli d’Italia was the only one of the three right-wing parties not to join Mario Draghi’s “national unity” government in February 2021; throughout the last eighteen months she combined outward respect for Draghi with a promise that only she could lead a government directly chosen by Italians.