For me, fascism is essentially a movement that makes systematic use of violence, a hierarchical ideal, and a desire to move away from the alternative between socialism and [economic] liberalism. The current Italian right is bourgeois and reduces liberalism to its most minimal level, i.e., neoliberalism. It believes that all wealth is created by the market and has absolutely no notion of changing society. It does not propose any alternative model of civilization. Of course, within these movements there are people who have been neo- or post-fascists. But none of them have the slightest intention of reinstating fascism.

On the other hand, this twenty-first-century right puts Italy at the end of a movement leading us to what we might call “post-democracy.” It did not initiate this movement; it did not create it. These are dynamics that have been going on for thirty or forty years. Technocratic governments started it, and left-wing governments have continued it. Silvio Berlusconi obviously accelerated the process.

Post-democracy is not the formal abolition of democracy. There is still a parliament, elections, and political parties. Rather, it means that the real power no longer lies with parliament but is concentrated around the government and in particular its leader. The Right sees this process as irreversible and intends to see it through to the end. In so doing, it does not even have the hypocrisy to pretend that it is giving parliament a role. It believes that all powers should be concentrated in the hands of the prime minister.

It’s important to understand that post-democracy is already present in Italy. What the Right is doing with the premierato is putting it in black and white in the constitution. But today, the prime minister has a direct relationship with the people through the media. There is a kind of daily plebiscite — confirmed by the polls and formalized by an election every five years. The heart of power no longer lies with parliament; we have entered a new phase that is no longer the liberal-democratic order of the past.

The major politicians of postwar Italy — Alcide De Gasperi, Aldo Moro, Amintore Fanfani — did not derive their legitimacy from the media but from the party system. This system disappeared in Italy in the 1990s. It created a vacuum that was filled by mediation by the media and the concentration of power in the hands of the head of government. The great leap into post-democracy was of course made by Berlusconi. It was he who introduced this daily plebiscite, which no Italian politician could have tolerated before.

The printed press is no longer a hegemonic means of communication; it’s an elite medium. People no longer read newspapers. The collapse in sales proves it. Certainly, part of the press is hostile to the Right because the journalistic community is “liberal” in the Anglophone [“progressive”] sense of the term. But direct confrontation is in nobody’s interest. In Italy, the press is owned by the big capitalists, who treat it as a secondary activity designed to facilitate their core business. As a result, the printed press no longer has much influence. If the owners need to have a nonconfrontational position with the government, the press will follow.

Opposition newspapers do exist. There are four main ones: La Repubblica and La Stampa, which belong to the Agnelli family’s Gedi group, Domani, which has a low circulation, and Il Fatto Quotidiano, which is economically weak. As far as the first two are concerned, I’m convinced that everyone will realize that their opposition will gradually become less harsh. The government has no qualms about bothering this press, but I don’t think it’s the Right that has created the difficult conditions in the sector. Rather, it is the cultural conditions. Information via social networks and TV is much easier for citizens to access.

On both these fronts, the Right has a presence — a big one. Admittedly, television is a medium that primarily reaches older people, but control of TV — and radio — is still a key point for any government. The Right has a huge appetite for seats [on the board of public broadcaster] RAI. So it’s given the opposition positions of secondary importance, so much so that the [center-left] Partito Democratico has refused to take part in the game. This is important for the Right because they believe in the communicative power of radio and TV, and as such they are media that help build support.

But we mustn’t forget that, for young people, it’s the social networks that build this consensus. And the Italian right-wing parties, whether the Lega or Fratelli d’Italia, have a strong presence and are highly organized in this type of media. For me, this is just as important as controlling radio and TV.

There are three reasons that have underpinned the success of the Right, and they are partly contradictory. The first is the upsurge in protests that has been going on for the last twenty years or so. These movements are rooted in the contradictions of the neoliberal paradigm. Around ten million votes have switched from one party to another on the mere promise of change, with one party suddenly becoming the central party in the political game. This was the case with Matteo Renzi’s Partito Democratico, then Matteo Salvini’s Lega, Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle, and finally Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia.

The second reason is the demand for security. A large part of Italian public opinion is convinced that it lives in a world of insecurity. This is reflected in the issue of public order, where the focus is on migrants, but there is also a fundamental economic insecurity. There are no longer any fixed jobs; they have become precarious or poorly paid. There is no longer any hope of a stable future or belief in progress, which was once the basis of the success of Christian Democracy during the so-called First Republic of 1947–93.

The third reason for the rise of the Right stands in contradiction with the demand for “more government” implicit within the demand for security. It is a demand for less government, which translates into a rejection of fiscal pressure and bureaucracy. These sentiments are objectively understandable, but they are manipulated by the Right.

The Right is using these three factors, which brought it to power, to move even further into post-democracy. It cannot keep its economic promises, especially the one to cut taxes. It has not been able to keep its sovereigntist promises either. The Right is not sovereigntist. The Meloni government has bowed to Brussels’s positions and has done nothing to oppose the basic logic of the European Union. It has accepted the new [deficit-restricting] Stability and Growth Pact, for example. Nor has it shown any sovereignty in the area of foreign affairs, where it has taken an almost embarrassingly Atlanticist stance on the situation in the Middle East.

In the end, the Italian right is no more sovereigntist than it is fascist. The truth is that the Meloni government has accelerated all the worst dynamics that were already underway. The first of these is the disappearance of the public sphere. Italy has become a place where there are only individuals and no longer an articulated society. By an articulated society, I mean a society in which, for example, there are parties and trade unions involved in social conflicts. Now there are only atomized and frightened individuals. And that’s the aim of the Right: to maintain this individualistic fragmentation of society.

This individualism is not that of the aggressive, triumphant, heroic or even entrepreneurial individual. No, it’s a frightened, terrorized, worried individualism of people who want protection, tax exemptions, and to be left to deal with their own problems without too much fuss. And the Right feeds and facilitates this individualism.

That’s why the Right recently pushed through the law on “differentiated autonomy” for the Italian regions: the aim is to encourage the fragmentation that lies at the heart of this social thinking. It’s strange, a Right that doesn’t defend the idea of national unity. That’s because it prefers division; it’s the party of division. It’s no coincidence that this Italian right, which doesn’t make much reference to many European conservative intellectuals, takes its cue from Giuseppe Prezzolini, an intellectual from the early years of the twentieth century who defined himself as a skeptic. He believed in nothing. There is only strategy.

This individualistic particularism on the Right is not a cult of diversity. Admittedly, there are no specific positions taken against racial or sexual minorities. But the positions they have taken have focused on “woke culture.” And this also serves to reassure. It’s an important part of right-wing politics: keeping migrants away and defending “traditional values,” like the traditional family and received wisdom. It’s a defense of “normality” that helps to maintain the fear based on a supposed threat to this normality.

In fact, one of the most worrying pieces of legislation to come out of the Meloni government, after the premierato, is the draft law on security, which increases the penalties, up to and including prison sentences, for demonstrations, blockades, or picketing. This law is not specifically directed against minorities but against what remains of the public sphere. The political use of public space is being banned and subjected to heavy punishment. This is at the heart of the policy pursued by the Right: maintaining fragmentation worries people.

The Right is keeping the crisis going. We need to stop it. And to do that, we need to build a credible coalition based on the idea of solving the problems realistically. The problems exist, and we need to address them. We need to restore the role of the state in health, education, and security in the broadest sense. The Right believes in privatization, but that won’t solve these problems. So we need to build a political coalition that believes in the civil service, in state intervention in the economy and in society.

We need to believe that the state must provide security — not just border security but internal security, security of life chances, which gives people at least some baseline of belief in progress. And not in words but in deeds. Otherwise, the population will continue to turn to the Right. I think we still have the capacity to build a consensus against the Right. But it’s true that the party landscape doesn’t seem ready to move in that direction.

Italy is not the only country experiencing these difficulties. It is the effect of the neoliberal crisis that the Right is prolonging and not resolving. The goal has to be to overcome this crisis, which presupposes political will, intellectual capacity, and credibility. But that’s just what no one has at the moment.

We need to restore people’s life prospects through concrete policies. And if that means opposing European rules, then let’s put that question on the table. The Right doesn’t believe in state intervention; it responds to the crisis by breaking up the country. We need to reject this approach, if we are to recreate hope. But it’s true that, for now, the current Italian party landscape hardly suggests that’s about to happen.