THREE LANGUAGES, TWO COALITIONS, ONE VOTE.

Ciao!
You're listening to "Il voto nello stivale". "The vote in the boot".

I'm Alberto Spatola, and this podcast is about navigating the coming Italian elections.

Today we will find out why the primary political leaders started the electoral campaign by speaking in French, English and Spanish.

But first, we need to go back to the 90s.

Italy opened the decades by hosting the Football World Cup.

A hopeful note embodied by the song of that event: "Notti magiche", "magic nights".

Still, the country went through a dark, transforming time just after a few years.

For Italian politics, the first years of the 90s were a long night, not that magic.

Corruption, killings and public anger were the norms.

During that long night, Italian politics found the strength to reform itself, at least apparently.

And so, with dawn started the so-called "II Republic".

No change of the Constitution happened, but a radical transformation of the electoral laws from municipalities to the Parliament.

Italian politics became a wild mess; nowadays, it is even more.

Still, a common theme of the electoral laws in Italy is that we have something no other functioning democracies have: pre-election coalitions.

Parties have to claim, before the elections, with which allies they would like to form a majority

and the electoral system rewards the creation of these pre-election coalitions.

With this in mind, let's go back to the present.

We are in the summer of 2022, and I introduce to you Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing coalition,

a coalition made up of three lists and seven parties.

An alliance refers to three European political families

(Identity and Democracy, Conservatives and Reformists, and the European People's Party).

Then, there is Enrico Letta, leader of the centre-left,

a coalition of four lists and thirteen parties.

An alliance refers to four European political families 

(Socialists and Democrats, Renew Europe - Liberals, Greens, and the Left).

Yes, it is complex. Welcome to Italy.

That's a vote in the boot.

To make it easier for me, these two leaders decided to address the foreign audience in a trilingual video (French, English and Spanish).

Giorgia Meloni started and Enrico Letta followed.

The leader of the right defined herself before others started to do so.

The risk for Meloni was the foreign press would frame her as a danger, focusing more on her past political affiliation and less on the novelty of her candidacy.

The risk was that the entire world would start to convince enough Italians that they were electing a dangerous post-fascist politician.

So, Meloni said three crucial things:

1. The Italian right has left fascism in the past, and she condemns the suppression of democracy and the anti-Jews laws;

2. Meloni condemns Nazism and Communism, underling how the left today struggles to distance itself from the latter.

3. Meloni is from a few years the leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists,

so her models are the Tories in the UK and the Republicans in the US;

in short, she is an "Atlanticist".

There is a lot to unpack.

Letting fascism in the past is not a condemnation, as many commentators in Italy said;

it simply means that she might come from there, but for shaping society, she will look elsewhere than Italy during the 30s of last century.

Moreover, Mussolini, in 1938, while announcing in Trieste the "Racial laws", didn't intend to target only Jews.

He linked the Racial laws to the building of the Empire (i.e. Colonies),

creating a strict racial hierarchy.

And he said that "the Jews issue" was just an aspect of the racial question.

Meloni cherry-picking one element of the "Racial laws" and calling them "anti-Jews laws"

doesn't only misrepresent the past but indicates her idea of the future.

She didn't distance herself from her fascist past.

And don't be fooled by the fact that she condemned Nazism.

In Italy, and more broadly in southern Europe, we don't put Fascism and Nazism in the same basket.

Among Italians, it is a common theme to differentiate Fascism from Nazism

because it makes it easier to look at our history, to look at ourselves in the mirror.

What is unbearable to think was running in our society, we link it to the alliance with Berlin,

and so we have been able to sleep tight for decades.

But still with a dirty conscience.

Giorgia Meloni wants to sound like a solid democratic leader rebuking Nazism and Communism. 

Still, the stress she put into underling the danger of Communism is a way to attack the opponents.

In Italy, the intellectual argument that Nazi fascism is a criminal idea,

instead Communism is a legitimate idea that gave birth to criminal dictatorships found particular ground.

If this differentiation might sound like a little thing in Cambodia with Pol Pot, or in the former Soviet Union with Stalin, etc.,

in Italy, history gave a chance to the largest Communist Party in the Western World, the PCI,

to be a pillar of the democratic institutions.

Many Italian Communist leaders, until 1981,

were in bed with the Soviet Union and regarded Moscow as a model.

Still, Communism in Italy has been a democratic force despite many downfalls.

Ultimately, Giorgia Meloni gaslights her credentials,

presenting the US Republican Party and the British Conservatives as her models.

But again, she is not talking about the past but the future.

She means the Republican Party of Donald Trump and the Conservative Party of Brexit.

Reading between her French, English and Spanish,

we can see a New Right with a deep political culture and the capacity to reinvent itself,

staying the same while adapting to the new times.

In front of this sophisticated and effective rebranding, Enrico Letta replied with a video in the same format,

and he stated dry facts, thinking that "the electoral campaign cannot cancel the facts".

That's a pure illusion.

There are many words, in his video, about the Democratic Party's pro-European stance.

Still, a pro-EU message about institutions, nation-states, veto power, and money.

One day we will learn that Europe should be about the Europeans.

In the meantime, it is hard to grasp which society the Italian centre-left wants to build.

There is no identity and story in sight.

Maybe in the following video.

You've listened to "The vote in the boot".

I'm Alberto Spatola.
Goodbye, and good luck!