He knows Italian politics like no one else. Former political adviser to Matteo Renzi, Giuliano da Empoli, the author of Kremlin Mage and Chaos Engineers (which has just been released by Folio), deciphers for L’Express the lightning ascent of Giorgia Meloni.
L’Express: Six months after Giorgia Meloni came to power, are you reassured or worried?
Giuliano da Empoli : I am not reassured at all! Admittedly, fascism is not back, but we are seeing a kind of double talk emerge – in Italian, we say ‘dopi binary’, like two parallel rails that progress together. On the international scene, Giorgia Meloni shows a real desire not to make waves.
She is trying to find an agreement with Brussels, she is aligning herself with the positions of NATO… But in Italy, she is taking very tough positions – whether it is about blocking the ship ocean viking last November or his xenophobic remarks after the sinking of the migrant boat on February 26. Even in the ecosystem, very degraded in Italy, of the media and public opinion, this attitude shocked. But it is his strategy: to hold a double discourse.
In Brussels, Meloni strives to reassure his partners. Is his European transformation sincere?
Listen, I’m already in Putin’s brain, I’m not going to get into Meloni’s too (laughs) ! More seriously, I think she integrated this dimension in a tactical and opportunistic way. In fact, it succeeded quite well in this high-flying exercise, on a purely political level. She’s been pretty good for six months. The problem is that it goes bad when you go down to a level below. One would have thought that she would seek skills in universes different from hers, but she remains surrounded by the same faithful. We do not really see the emergence of a political class that would reflect its evolution.
Has the coming to power of a right-wing coalition liberated racist or revisionist speech?
In Italy, the Overton window, this concept which allows to establish which ideas and arguments can be used in the public debate without being blacklisted as an infrequent extremist, has not ceased to widen. Today, it is quite possible to make racist and xenophobic remarks in Italy. The changeover took place in 2018, under the impetus of the Five Star Movement, on themes as promising as immigration, security and justice. Matteo Salvini was the first to take advantage. This “expressible window” closed a little under Mario Draghi, but it reopened with Meloni, who, in turn, released speech in an outrageous way.
Giuliano da Empoli, November 23, 2022 in Paris.
© / Damien Grenon for L’Express
Without arriving however, you say, at a total trivialization… Did the shipwreck of February 26 mark the end of its state of grace?
I won’t go that far. Admittedly, the government has piled up mishaps and errors in its handling of the crisis, but Meloni has – and it was, in my view, a deliberate strategy – done everything to erase any humanity in his speech. She had words of incredible coldness and she let the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, go to the scene of the tragedy. The night of her press conference, she attended Salvini’s birthday party. On a video, which circulated very timely, we see her singing… During this crisis, Meloni wanted to convey this idea of a fundamental indifference to the fate of the victims, betting that this feeling is largely in the majority in the country. . And I’m afraid his bet won’t pay off.
About Salvini, precisely, do you think that she managed to “ringardiser”?
She was able to take advantage of the Covid and the war in Ukraine, two turning points that Salvini, on the other hand, completely missed.
On the Covid, he was in the improvisation and in the permanent agitation, saying one day that it was a little flu, changing his mind the next day… Conversely, Meloni felt that the atmosphere had changed in Italy. The Italians were afraid. They no longer wanted to hear Salvini confused and in continual one-upmanship. Meloni felt she had the opportunity to project the image of a stateswoman, calm and responsible. She succeeded, and this perception was then reinforced when the former chairman of the board, Mario Draghi took her under his wing.
Then there was the war in Ukraine, which put Salvini in difficulty, due to his relationship with Putin. Even if Meloni had also, in the past, expressed sympathies for the head of the Kremlin, she did not suffer from it, especially since she quickly turned around by adopting a very effective Atlanticist position. Since then, nothing has changed. Salvini is, indeed, outdated. When such a thing happens, it is very difficult to get back into the political game.
On the left, another Matteo has never returned either: Renzi. What do you think of his successor, Elly Schlein, elected head of the Democratic Party on February 26, and who is already being presented as “the anti-Meloni”?
For several years, the Democratic Party (PD) has been pursuing the Five Star Movement, the other engine of the opposition. For the moment, this competition has not had a virtuous effect and has rather turned to the advantage of the Five Stars. Faced with this movement which, like its leader Giuseppe Conte, shows an astonishing plasticity, the PD, the last traditional Italian party, is a big bureaucratic machine. It is in this landscape that Elly Schlein was chosen. What is amusing is that certain “elephants” of the PD have, in a totally transgressive way, come out in favor of this 37-year-old woman, who advocates an asserted wokism. Is she capable, through her youth and her leadership, of restoring energy to the left? Yes, of course, but will that be enough to reconstitute a majority, an alternative? What is certain is that we are witnessing in Italy an ‘American-style’ polarization of politics with an increasingly hard right and, on the left, the risk of a woke drift. It’s quite worrying.