Bella (Italy) bye

Italian singer Laura Pausini recently refused to play

on a Spanish TV show.

The anecdote is useful to analyze the moment that Italy is facing with the legislative elections called for this Sunday and in which, according to the polls, a coalition of right-wing parties will win with the enthronement as Prime Minister of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers from Italy.

If confirmed, it will most likely be the formal epitaph on a long political stage that emerged from anti-fascism.

As is well known,

is considered the symbolic song of the

resistance that took up arms against fascism and that was the foundational military and political experience of the Republic that would emerge after World War II.

As Norberto Bobbio said, the Italian Constitution was born “from militant anti-fascism”.

An anti-fascism that was a heterogeneous universe, like the armed resistance itself, where there were fighters of leftist, Christian Democrat or liberal inspiration.

His cooperation was not easy at any time, as can be seen in the pages of

, by Beppe Fenoglio, an extraordinary novel written by Italo Calvino that represents the culmination of Italian literary efforts to portray the Resistance.

But this heterogeneous universe managed to overcome the difficulties and —after capturing, summarily trying a handful of high-ranking officials and hanging the Duce by his feet in Piazzale Loreto in Milan— converged in the drafting and approval by a very large majority of the Constitution for the newborn Republic.

, who became popular after the war, belonged equally to the various souls in that universe.

The Italian newspaper archives point out that it was sung at the end of a Christian Democracy congress, in the seventies, in which Benigno Zaccagnini was elected as leader.

Hence comes what the Republic has been in subsequent decades.

Of course, that spirit of extraordinary foundational convergence was soon damaged.

However, throughout republican history, there were other moments of considerable political union —with governments of national unity in critical periods—, and also, for many decades, a widely shared view of the past from which the experience was born. common, and the essential values ​​of the same.

This last element has suffered a clear deterioration for some time.

The coming to power of Giorgia Meloni and the political gaze that she champions would represent the final touch to that parable on a downward trajectory.

His springboard for the boom was, furthermore, precisely his refusal to converge like the other parliamentary forces in the coalition that supported the Government of Mario Draghi.

From the opposition to this shared project, he got electoral momentum.

Politicians of the ideological lineage that she represents have already been in power in Italy, but not as Prime Ministers and in different contexts.

When Silvio Berlusconi brought Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance into the government, environmental pressure on the extreme right was high.

Today, at least in Italy, not so much, with a large sector of society that considers these approaches normalized.

And that she sees in

just a leftist song.

It is no longer a shared heritage, and that is why a singer like Laura Pausini does not want to sing it.

Meloni's victory may turn out to be the final great success of the Constitution born of the anti-fascist impulse, with a path of democratization of the extreme right.

It is possible that a government under his command avoid impulses to erode the founding values, among other reasons because, if the environmental pressure in Italy is low, that of Brussels will be high - and with powerful levers, such as aid funds or the good disposition , or not, of the ECB—.

We can't know now.

What we do know is that the arrival at the summit of that ideology would mean a deep break with the previous republican history, and that we will have to watch more seasoned than ever.

Because, as Bobbio said in that 1976 speech in reference to the Constitution, “from freedom he was born, and from freedom he will live”.

Freedom.

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