The second entry in the column Times of Tyranny, written by Ben Gordon.
‘That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.’ – Malcolm Gladwell.
The day when socialist politician Giovanni Matteotti’s body was found, dismembered and dumped in the woods of a village just north of Rome, marked a point of inflection in the history of Italian politics. An open, candid critic of Benito Mussolini’s fascist government, Matteotti actively denounced its use of fraudulent elections and violent intimidation to maintain power. Once it became clear that his death had been organised by the regime, it was widely assumed that Mussolini’s time was up. Members from across the political spectrum called for his dismissal, including factions of his own party and the King, Emmanuel II. With his back to the wall, Mussolini took to the chamber on 3 January 1925, almost a century ago to the day.
‘I assume, I alone, the political, moral, historical responsibility for everything that has happened.’
In an astonishing admission of guilt, referring not only to the Matteotti case but to the degradation of Italian society into a fascist state, Mussolini paralysed the country into a state of shock. Fascist dictatorship was confirmed as the legitimised political system. It would take almost twenty years for him to be deposed. Years of acquiescence and reticence allowed for Mussolini’s rise to power. Political adversaries and others underestimated his brutality, as the minority that understood the fraught future ahead were broadly ignored. This gradual tumble into fascism was not a clean break, until all of a sudden it was, and it had become too late to revert the process.
Today, after almost a century of effective constitutional exclusion of fascist politics (though a failure to prevent its underlying continued support), a party sympathetic to Mussolini runs the country. Giorgia Meloni’s far-right coalition government, with overt links to the rebranded post-war fascist party, has been in power since 2022. The smallest party in this coalition, Forza Italia, was founded by Silvio Berlusconi, the scandalous former president who in many ways epitomised the dawn of new authoritarianism. Despite all the court cases, corruption, open misogyny, censorship and repression, which led him to leave government in disgrace in the 2011, Berlusconi died a man in power. The country took three days of national mourning as voices from across all sectors of public life expressed their condolences.
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On the 19 September, Giorgia Meloni’s government announced a security bill, named DDL sicurezza, with a raft of new repressive laws clamping down in particular on migrants, asylum seekers, prisoners and activists (particularly climate protestors). This violent legislation was just the latest, though most extensive, set of repressive laws enacted by the Brothers of Italy government. In recent months, the sustained attack on LGBTQ+ rites in the country has accelerated, namely in relation to surrogacy rights, in a country now considered one of the the most homophobic in Europe. Immigrants are continuously demonised and violated in law and discourse, leading to the devastating cases of migrants being left to die hundreds of metres off the Southern coastline. If they do manage to arrive, increasingly unjust labour and asylum laws, alongside violent rhetoric, have led to rampant exploitation, and in some cases even death, at work. The affront on public gathering and demonstration over recent years has culminated in the DDL laws, labelled as ‘dangerous for our democracy’ by the country’s principal trade union, CGIL. The 24 laws effectively attack the most vulnerable and demonised people in Italian society and anyone who seeks to support them, namely younger people and protestors. In response, vast numbers of demonstrations were organised last September. These were repeated again in recent weeks, prior to the bill going through the senate at the start of this month. The serious police violence at the September demonstration in Rome demonstrated the increasing crackdown on freedom.
Having said this, a focus solely on the implementation of and resistance towards DDL obscures the reality of a silent majority who are not engaging with it. There is inevitably a vast amount of the population who have not reacted strongly either way to the bill, presumably because they subtly agree with then anti-migration or anti-activist rhetoric, have underplayed the bill’s dangers, or sense they have ‘more personal problems to deal with,’ given they feel unaffected personally by it. This brings us to an important failure to contend with how authoritarian sweeps in. The reality of the slide into dictatorship is that it occurs not in the context of a grand, dichotomous battle between a polarised left and right, but because of a sense of reticence, begrudging acceptance or underestimation across much of the population, accompanied by the naïve complacency of the political and elite classes.
The DDL is painstakingly clear evidence of Meloni’s increasingly authoritarian rule and has occurred alongside a plethora of violent and exclusionary policy changes. The Albania migration plan faces accusations of human rights violations towards asylum seekers, nicknamed ‘Rwanda-light’ by some British commentators following Keir Starmer’s apparent ‘great interest’ in the project. However, this has also included has also included far more subtle, insidious shifts from the government towards greater control and exclusion in daily life, including quiet tweaks to certain laws, greater media control and the marginalization of dissenting voices.
The combination of a broad sense of reticence, and a government enacting lots of small, insidious changes which feel difficult to actively combat (punctuated by clearer attacks) is a recipe for the gradual erosion of freedom given how these actively reinforce one other. Challenging the slow degradation of democracy requires actively engaging with and combating these more subtle shifts. By ignoring or underplaying these ominous signs, the far-right pushes gradually forward, violently excluding and repressing marginalized people along the way, until it eventually reaches a tipping point for the whole nation, as it did with Mussolini in 1925.
A prime example of these pernicious shifts in Italy, and their direct relation to an enforced sense of apathy, can be seen with television and its continued shift towards government-controlled, mind numbing content. The media in Italy has had a fraught political history. Berlusconi, the populist who was president intermittently in the late 20th and early 21st century, owned the three most popular television channels in the country and maintained his power through this control. More recently, Meloni has made efforts to turn the state broadcaster Rai, the country’s equivalent of the BBC, into a propaganda tool for government by changing certain measures on bipartisan presenting, seeking to change the channel from state broadcaster into a ‘megaphone for the government.’ This has included swathes of people being fired or resigning, often without any substantial reporting. Some more high profile cases include that of Antonio Scurati, who was fired the day before he was due to read a monologue on the 25 April, the national day of anti-fascism. Serena Bortone, another Rai journalist, then read the speech, which condemned the neo-fascist tendencies of Meloni’s administration, resisting the explicit censorship of her colleague. She then temporarily suspended herself.
I spoke with a friend, Carla, who has worked for 32 years for Rai, and evoked the sense of duty which she had felt working for a bipartisan state institution, as perhaps a civil servant might in the UK. This has obviously begun to crumble upon witnessing the gradual shift of the institution into a government tool. Increasing censorship and media control is not only enacted for the government to promote its agenda – Carla explained the proliferation of apolitical, ‘mind-numbing’ television content, which she understood as a concerted effort by government-selected workers to reduce political engagement and the challenging of mainstream narratives. Government intrusion and censorship has been occurring throughout other aspects of public life as well. In the sphere of arts and culture, for instance, museum directors and other ambassadors are increasingly linked with or selected by Meloni’s allies, narrowing the possibilities for creativity, critique and subversion.
An interesting example of the way television has come to serve as a government tool, both through direct censuring and depoliticization, can be seen with the wildly popular Sanremo national television music festival, held every year and viewed by millions around the country. While the show was never necessarily a hub for politics, it was historically a space for innovation, where artists could speak out about certain socio-political issues. More recently, it is an increasingly commercialized and intentionally apolitical event. Some artists do continue to voice their political opinions, but this is increasingly censured and condemned. In 2024, the rapper Ghali condemned the genocide in Gaza and was subsequently criticised by members of Meloni’s government, who lamented that a ‘music festival is not the space for politics.’ Ghali, along with other artists who had anything remotely political or subversive to say, were not invited back to this year’s event, while the longstanding host of the show for Rai, Amadeus, stepped down over a dispute about having freedom over who to invite. As well as shifting the political narrative towards the right, there is an active intent to dampen any form of political passion or ideas and to depoliticize arts and culture. It feels almost like a process of anaesthetization, epitomised by the mind-numbing spectacle that Sanremo is increasingly becoming. I am not saying here that that popular, non-political, entertainment is necessarily bad – much like watching a football match or a slightly trashy Netflix show, there is value in switching off momentarily. Nor am I saying that political agency relies on what we watch on the telly. Several factors are at play in the general political numbing of a country which not so long ago had 34% of the electorate voting the communist party into government. The disarray of once powerful left-wing parties, the sense of wider disillusion in politics and the reality that many people just want to make ends meet in a country where almost 6 million live in absolute poverty cannot be ignored.
This attempt to depoliticize television is, however, a clear and powerful example of the government preying on this disillusion and disinterest to push their agenda forward. A collective sense of anaesthetization is crucial for a neo-fascist party to prevent outrage and revolt from the population. The echoes of these techniques reverberate from Italy’s past, as they do from other countries today. Trump’s administration seeks to achieve this same numbing effect, though with distinct techniques. While he employs a sort of chaos theory, keeping people in a constant daze with a barrage of outrageous, traumatic, announcements, Meloni’s government operates in a more measured style, seeking to prevent resistance by diminishing the possibility for political engagement. This more slow, calculated approach feels more disquieting than Trump’s, which one feels (hopes) could one day come crashing down.
Meloni’s character and form of governance has been analysed extensively, particularly given her increasingly isolated role as female leader in a world of ‘strongmen’. Playing into the layered aspects of gender, she simultaneously presents herself as the mother of the nation and a tyrannical matriarch, while also adopting traditional hyper-masculine traits (she has demanded the masculine article of ‘il presidente’ to describe her position). Her more icy, serious character, is more ominous than the pathetic hysteria of other contemporary leaders. Despite her neo-fascist origins and her continued ideological relationship with Orban and Trump, Meloni has worked closely with the EU and was one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine and has managed to gain the support of flailing centrist leaders across the continent, including Starmer. This sense of calculation and shifting identity has in many ways defined her rule, earning her a reputation of being ‘a shapeshifter’ and has been one of the greatest assets in her rise to prominence and power. However, a leader without concrete values or political stances to stand behind will inevitably encounter deep issues. The way she slips out of public debate when her government goes through a period of crisis or scandal, only to reappear at convenient moments to decry the Italian nation’s greatness is transparent of a lack of backbone, something which becomes increasingly exposed as time goes on.
Coming to terms with the depoliticization and slow degradation of democracy in Italy under Meloni is particularly challenging given the country’s complex post-war identity. Fascism was banned constitutionally following the war and while this was largely successful in terms of mainstream political influence, sympathy for Mussolini’s politics and rule remained simmering beneath the surface, present in many households across the country. Eventually, without an effective examination of the social conditions which had brought about those ideologies, similar ideas have come to boil over the edge once more and come tumbling into the mainstream. It is difficult to ignore the cyclical nature to these developments, which lead us to some deeply troubling questions. Is it an inevitability that hard socio-economic times will allow fringe politics, predicated upon fear and a violently exclusive sense of belonging, to come creeping out of the woodwork? Is our collective memory really that short?
It is all too easy to discuss the far-right rise in Europe without actually understanding how it is developing and what the impacts of it are. Italian socio-politics are deeply complex (many of the issues described here are partly moulded by the deep influence of the Catholic church, for instance). Despite the rise of populism and neo-fascism in recent decades, the unique political developments in the country in the 20th century and the ongoing resistance across the country today gives us something to hold on to. Italy’s proud communist past reminds us how radical left-wing politics can be captivating, popular and effective. The continued courage and solidarity shown by protestors against increasing intimidation and repression challenges the government’s politics of fear and division. A glance at the recent national election in Germany might be indicative for the following steps to take. Amid the surge in support and media attention for the far-right AfD and victory for the increasingly anti-immigrant ‘centre-right’, Die Linke, the strong left-wing party operating through grassroots and personal politics, made rapid gains, winning a majority in Berlin. Today’s Italy is far more depoliticized than the mid-late 20th century, something which Meloni’s government appreciates and reinforces. Perhaps a similarly radical, honest and grassroots political movements could bring people together and reinvigorate a sense of solidarity and hope. This would not begin with the actions of a lost political class, but must instead be led at the local level. More impactful ways of highlighting the increasing repression and exploitation of dissenting and marginalized voices are needed, alongside clearer alternative political paths.
Greater vigilance of the insidious, more discrete ways in which authoritarians are assuming control can be a start. If our memories have expired or failed us, and we can no longer learn from our past, watch how successful contemporary authoritarians all use this disorienting melange of drastic exclusionary politics and quiet insidious shifts to reinforce their control, inching them closer to the point where existences and systems we once thought impossible have become the norm.
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