The new power of the extreme right

"Will the Democratic Party use the risk of fascism as an argument against Meloni?"

The question was asked this summer by La Repubblica to Enrico Letta, former Italian prime minister and new leader of the center-left formation, which is running with a small coalition for this Sunday's infamous elections.

"Of course I could talk about the risk of fascism, but I will not campaign on isms, but on concrete facts," was his response.

At this point, Letta knows that the moral condemnation of those who present themselves outside the consensus of the establishment has the effect of increasing their electoral attractiveness, since the break with the status quo gives an inevitable

.

During the last decade, many traditional parties have fallen into the performative effect of the provocation-reaction game.

The political scientist Yascha Mounk explains it in his celebrated

: “By basing the electoral campaigns on pure moral condemnation, affirming a reactive identity that only consists in warning about the perverse cataclysms that the ultra formations would bring, the traditional parties they stand as representatives of a real alternative, no matter how much their programs are built on empty proposals”.

Letta's response was intended to clear up one of the main unknowns of today's political dilemmas, that is, whether the cordons sanitaires are effective in curbing the new extreme right, as historian Steven Forti calls them.

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, is clear: its demonization is not slowing down its rise in Europe, with the Italian and Swedish examples leading the way.

Let us remember that the legislative elections of September 11 in Sweden yielded a disheartening result, giving power to a conservative bloc extended to the radical right, the Sweden Democrats, a party with an openly neo-Nazi origin.

Something similar is about to happen in Italy with another coalition extended to the extreme right, including Fratelli d'Italia, of fascist descent and with positions similar to those of their Swedish counterparts, with whom they share a group in the European Parliament.

But although Letta did not want to appeal to the old argument of "the wolf is coming!", the truth is that the Italian campaign has not been free of polarization.

And the truth is that Meloni had it easy:

refusing to enter Draghi's government of national concentration allows him to appear as the alternative to discontent and present the elections as a confrontation between the establishment and those who challenge it from this new trench.

The risk of the governments of national concentration consists, precisely, in putting a silver bridge to the extremes, which thus occupy the centrality.

When the ultras present themselves as an alternative, the rest of the parties implicitly assume the line of differentiation that interests the adversary, and then the least important thing is the political programs: the important thing is who stands as the target of the liberals, who of course they tear their clothes before the new barbarians.

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But let us suppose that there are more factors in all this, and that, whether its demonization is modulated or not, the new extreme right wing have learned and flirt with a softer radicalism

gaining centrality in the public agora and in the institutions.

This is what emerges from the closing of Meloni's campaign, who loudly appealed to fascist nostalgia after weeks of supposed moderation: "After our victory, they will be able to raise their heads and, finally, verbalize what they always thought and believed."

The acceptance of his message by way of sweetening would fundamentally obey two reasons: the ease with which his ideas circulate on our screens due to the effectiveness of his messages, and the unrepentant work of his activists.

That is the hypothesis of political scientist Jen Schradie in her

, where he describes well that context of radicalization that favors the mobilization of extremist messages.

The very algorithms of digital platforms are designed to endlessly circulate the most controversial and provocative messages, thus locking consumers into a profitable worldview of hate.

But there is a third factor that explains this new power of the extreme right, beyond its ability to give centrality to ideas that were marginal in public discussion: the links that it has been establishing with the institutional right.

Because the link between the traditional right and the new extremism is already an existential problem for the traditional conservative parties, and thus also for democracy.

The traditional left also participates in the error, which often abandons the problems that appealed to their natural voters to focus on others that harden their position, as has happened with immigration and the Swedish Social Democrats, with their already former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson as champion of change.

Integrate the extreme right into the Swedish political game so that the coalition of conservative Ulf Kristersson can govern, or that the party of Antonio Tajani, former president of the European Parliament and Berlusconi's number two, ensures that Forza Italia will be the guardian of Europeanism in the next coalition government, powerfully help to demonize the ultra discourse.

So let's ask ourselves: will Italy, again, be a window of things to come?

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Of course, there are enough elements to affirm that what happened in Sweden and what could happen in Italy are not isolated phenomena.

warns that the Swedish example of trivializing the radical right is being replicated in Finland and Denmark, which are committed to toughening immigration policies, even with social democratic governments.

And there are other examples.

The separation between the families of the American conservative right and the extreme right is already almost imperceptible in the Republican Party, and other right wing openly flirt with the extremes, such as the French, subjugated by Le Pen, but also the German or, right here, the Popular Party, increasingly closer to the radical nationalism of Vox.

But if the convulsive Italian politics teaches us anything, it is that populism and technocracy can be two sides of the same coin: one paves the way for the other.

And perhaps the key to breaking this vicious circle is to vindicate politics by understanding the profound reasons for the birth of populism and proposing technically efficient public policies that address the real concerns of citizens.

In the end, it is paradoxical that the

that Giulio Andreotti spoke of, and that Felipe González envied for an Italian-style party system without Italians like ours, has been the cause of the fact that the only relevant actor was the Government pseudotechnocratic of Draghi, the heirs of fascism, capitalized on the opposition.

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