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Giorgia
Meloni, October 21, 2022
In the space of
four years, Giorgia Meloni has gone from being the leader of a minor party to being the leader of Italy, with an absolute majority in both houses of parliament.
But she will not find it easy to put her electoral platform into practice.
Four
years ago, when I last wrote about Italy’s political situation, Giorgia Meloni
was leading a party that had won only 2% of the popular vote. Her party was, in
fact, the smallest member of a coalition dominated by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord. All of that changed with this
year’s election. Her party took 26% of the vote, and the coalition 43%. She is
now Prime Minister.
Meloni
rose to power because she lacked the weaknesses of her two coalition rivals.
She wasn’t an establishment conservative like Berlusconi, and she wasn’t a
northern regionalist like Salvini. She was thus seen as the one who could best represent
the entire country and deal with its problems, especially the existential crisis
of rising immigration and falling fertility. Will Italians continue to have a
homeland for themselves and their descendants? Or will they go the way of other
nations that are now footnotes in history?
That
may sound like hyperbole. With a population of sixty million, Italians will
surely enjoy a supermajority in their country for years to come. Keep in mind,
however, that their mean age is 47; therefore, more than half are past the age
of reproduction. With a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, the smaller "procreative fraction" of
the population will fall by almost 50% with each generation. Meanwhile, the foreign citizen
population has risen from 1.3 million in 2002 to 5.2 million in 2021. The total
number of immigrants is actually larger:
In 2021, Istat estimated that
5,171,894 foreign citizens lived in Italy, representing about 8.7% of the
total population. These figures do not
include naturalized foreign-born residents (about 1,620,000
foreigners acquired Italian citizenship from 1999 to 2020, of whom
130,000 did so in 2020) as well as illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers, difficult to
determine, are thought to be at least 670,000. (Wikipedia 2022)
The
demographic crisis is key to understanding Meloni’s electoral platform:
·
taxation
that takes the size of the nuclear family into account
·
a
lower sales tax of 4% on goods for young children
·
public
funding of housing for Italian families who do not own a home. Eligible
families must have at least one gainfully employed member
·
no
birthright citizenship and no decriminalization of illegal immigration
·
a
naval blockade to halt illegal immigration across the Mediterranean
Although
her coalition enjoys an absolute majority in both houses of parliament, she
will not find it easy to put her platform into practice:
She will very soon have to deal with the
European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union and
the United States, if she does not respect the treaties on the management of
immigration, Islam, free and undistorted competition and the European Union's
defence policy.
If she is really very brave, she will
carry on regardless and continue her policy. That is when the European Central
Bank will deal with her. Indeed, Italy has become, thanks to Berlusconi, a
beggar. It owes its survival only to the accommodative policy of the ECB, which
massively buys its abysmal debt, and protects it from hedge funds. Remember
that the ECB holds 780 billion [euros] of Italian public debt (30% of total
debt), and that this is only growing. Italy's 10-year borrowing rates have
already exceeded 4%, which is completely unbearable for the country's budget.
Then it would be enough for the ECB to stop its purchases, or even to sell part
of its stock on the market at a low price, to immediately raise this rate to
stratospheric levels, and make Italy look like Zimbabwe. And the same people
who were yesterday in the street with signs of support will throw stones at her
while insulting her. (Falento 2022)
Looking to the
future
To
date, nationalist victories have been on the periphery of Western Europe, and
not in its core. The periphery is home to people who have not fully assimilated
into the Western world-system, largely because they are less proficient in
English—the main conduit of neo-Western culture. So it is difficult to make
them understand ideas and social norms that emanate from the core, let alone
comply with them. As a general rule, the periphery is where a world-system has
the most trouble imposing its will, not only politically and economically but
also culturally and ideologically.
The
next decade will see rising tensions between the core and the periphery, and
it’s difficult to say which will prevail. The periphery is being taken over by
nationalists, like Giorgia Meloni, while the core remains dominated by elites
who are pushing the globalist project: on the one hand, they want to export
high-wage jobs to countries where labor is cheaper; on the other, they want to
import low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be exported, i.e., jobs in
construction, agriculture, and services.
That
is why median wages in the West have scarcely risen over the past half-century.
High-wage “breadwinner” jobs in manufacturing are largely gone, and the jobs
that remain are increasingly low-paying ones in services. During the 2020s,
wage stagnation will give way to a leveling downward of wages throughout the
West. Elsewhere, the leveling upward will be modest and uneven. The inner
periphery will get the worst of both worlds: they’re not poor enough to attract
low-wage industries, but not rich enough to attract the financial industry jobs
that are concentrated in London, New York, and other world centres.
It
is doubtful whether globalization will be a net benefit for the average person
in the world. Wealth is created most
efficiently in high-trust societies, and those societies are the ones most
affected by “replacement migration.” We may simply end up with a world where
most workers are equally poor and equally mistrustful of each other.
References
Falento, A. (2022).
Giorgia Meloni ne pourra rien faire si elle ne sort pas de l’Union
européene. Riposte laïque. September
26. https://ripostelaique.com/giorgia-meloni-ne-pourra-rien-faire-si-elle-ne-sort-pas-de-lunion-europeene.html
Frost,
P. (2017). Terra Nostra, for how long? Evo
and Proud, November 23. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2017/11/terra-nostra-for-how-long.html
Wikipedia (2022). Immigration to Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Italy
