There will be elections in Europe this year and there are worrying signs that far-right forces will do well.
The seams of the world, as it has long functioned, are fraying, and the decomposition of old models threatens to reach Brussels as well.
In June of last year, Silvio Berlusconi died, that businessman who entered Italian politics like a whirlwind and who triumphed with a way of proceeding that had nothing to do with the style that until then set the standards in the public space of his country. of Europe, perhaps of the entire world.
He was funny and cynical, he spoke boldly about making money and encouraged Italians to act without complexes, he despised politicians, he preferred communication (or propaganda) to the management of specific problems, and he loved football, television , the
sails
and, above all, the power.
He showed the same ease that Trump would later show when it came to breaking the hitherto
good manners
and, from very early on, he had no hesitation in opening his arms to the neo-fascist positions defended by Gianfranco Fini, whom he defended in an interview in 1993. , and in which he stressed that the real danger was communism.
He was convincing, so much so that a few months later he won the elections as a newcomer, and later repeated two other times to govern between 2001 and 2006 and between 2008 and 2011. Luciano Cafagna, an important economic historian and politician, said around 2009 that , after Berlusconi, “a right-wing tendency would certainly persist in the electoral body.”
He was right, now Giorgia Meloni governs Italy, a woman who started with the heirs of fascism.
Professor Loreto di Nucci remembers Cafagna's observation in
Distributive Democracy
(Presses of the University of Zaragoza), an essay on the political system of republican Italy.
He explains that what Berlusconi managed to gain power was to group under the same umbrella “three rights that were very different from each other”: the post-fascist National Alliance of Fini – national, statist, anti-liberal –, the Northern League —which was strengthened by a territorial ideology, which was anti-national, half anarchoid in the economic, protectionist in the agrarian— and his own, which in the economic fluctuated between
letting things be done
and representing “the thousands of sectoral interests of Italian society,” and that he blatantly showed “a general indifference to all ethical-political values.”
He forced things to win and ended up changing them.
In the Clean Hands process, the judges had shown the corruption of the politicians, and they lost all credit.
So the old competition of the parties was replaced by a bipolar system, in which on each side a lot of proposals were piled up that had little in common: Prodi's Olive Tree coalition, which competed with Berlusconi, came to join numerous forces policies of very diverse origins and objectives.
Or one or the other, without bridges between one pole and another, almost parallel lines in which what counts is massacring the rival and in which anything goes.
If the European elections are held in June under that logic, and the spectrum where the radical right has positioned itself wins, the outlook will be bleak.
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