Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government in Italy has been in power for over three years now. If she lasts to the end of her full term, in October 2027, she will be one of only two Italian prime ministers to do so since the second world war. But what exactly is the character of Meloni’s government? Is it fascist, or ‘pre-fascist’, as some left groups claim? What explains its stability relative to many other European governments? And in what direction is it heading, asks CHRISTINE THOMAS?
Giorgia Meloni became prime minister of Italy in October 2022, almost exactly 100 years after around 40,000 of Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts marched on Rome. The assembled march was a prelude to King Victor Emmanuel III making Mussolini prime minister, opening up the ‘ventennio’ – 20 years of totalitarian fascist rule. Given that Meloni was previously a member of the MSI – the post-war successor of Mussolini’s fascist party – it was inevitable that analogies would be drawn between the two events.
‘Why we say the Brothers of Italy are fascists’, declared the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in their newspaper on the 22nd of October 2022. They were referring to Meloni’s party, FdI, which had secured the most votes (26%) in the right-wing governing coalition alongside Matteo Salvini’s Lega (8.7%) and Forza Italia, the party set up by the late media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, (8%). This was followed in May 2023 with an article titled ‘Call Giorgia Meloni what she really is – a fascist’. “If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, but it quacks that it is no longer a duck, then it would be naive for the left to call it a rabbit”, they wrote.
When writing about the rise of fascism in Germany in the early 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that for Marxists “it is necessary to say what is”. He was referring to the German Communist Party’s overestimation of its own forces and rejection of the necessity of a united front with workers who supported the Social Democratic Party in order to fight the fascists – a tragic mistake that allowed Hitler and the Nazis to come to power. Having a correct assessment of the balance of class forces in society, ‘saying what is’, is vital for Marxists at every stage of the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Underestimating the class enemy could be a serious error, as in Germany, but overestimating or incorrectly appraising the forces waged against us can also miseducate and mis-orientate the working class, leading to incorrect tactics and demoralisation. The SWP in their assessment of Meloni and the Brothers of Italy are doing the latter.
What is fascism?
They back up their argument by pointing to Meloni’s former membership of the MSI, which she joined when she was 15; the fact that the FdI still has the same party symbol as the MSI – the tri-colour flame; and that the speaker of the upper house, Ignazio La Russa, has fascist memorabilia in his house, while his brother was seen making a fascist salute at a funeral. In addition, they cite Meloni’s ‘authoritarian policies’, including her treatment of migrants, and her ‘fascist’ ideas regarding the family and gender.
Former membership of a political party is not exactly a reliable indicator of an individual’s current political orientation. After all, before the first world war Mussolini himself had been a left-wing member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and editor of its newspaper Avanti! More seriously, Marxists don’t define fascism by symbols and superficial characteristics, nor by authoritarian measures or the embracing of ‘traditional family values’. Historically fascism was a specific social phenomenon – a mass movement based primarily on the despairing and enraged middle classes and peasantry, funded and supported by sections of the ruling class in order to attack and destroy the workers’ organisations. It arose in particular objective conditions – an acute economic and social crisis, with workers defeated in the wake of failed revolutionary movements that, with the correct political leadership, could have resulted in the working class taking power in society.
In Italy, the big landowners and large-scale industrial and finance capitalists began seriously bankrolling Mussolini’s brutal blackshirt squads after the ‘biennio rosso’ – the two red years from 1919-20 when workers took mass strike action and occupied the factories. Trotsky wrote that “the dictatorship of the proletariat was an actual fact; all that was lacking was to organise it, and to draw from it all the necessary conclusions”. Unfortunately, because of the PSI leadership’s political paralysis, the revolutionary opportunity was thrown away. (See When Workers Seized The Factories, in Socialism Today No.141, September 2010)
The middle layers in Italian society – shopkeepers, small business owners, artisans, peasants, clerks and civil servants – crushed under the weight of capitalist crisis – had initially looked to the workers’ organisations to provide a way out from their dire economic conditions. When those organisations were found wanting, and with the workers’ movement in retreat, they turned en masse to the fascists for salvation. Beginning in the countryside and then moving to the urban areas, thousands of armed fascist gangs, with the complicity of state forces such as the police, army and courts, terrorised workers in bloody ‘punishment raids’, smashing up and burning trade union offices and party buildings, and beating, torturing and killing ‘reds’.
In power, while Mussolini attempted to rein in the violent and unpredictable fascist gangs, he also moved to totally eradicate every vestige of workers’ independent organisations, abolishing political parties and trade unions other than the fascists, and eliminating the right to strike. In conditions of acute economic crisis, the capitalist class entrusted control of their state apparatus to the fascists with the precise aim of crushing workers’ resistance to draconian attacks on their wages, jobs and working conditions in order to restore profitability and safeguard their system.
Meloni government
In a slightly more nuanced article in the SWP’s online theoretical journal, International Socialism (issue 178), Mark Thomas is forced to admit that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy “lacks anything approaching such paramilitary forces” and, therefore, “in this sense… resembles a conventional electoral political party… rather than the model of classical fascism”. Nonetheless, he still goes on to argue that however it may appear on the surface, whatever its declared intentions, and whatever its record in government, the FdI is “a much more defined fascist force than the far-right Lega, let alone the conservative Forza Italia… concluding that “the sense of alarm and danger must be far greater”. Yet if a definition really was merely a question of racist language and rhetoric, an authoritarian bent, and association with neo-fascist groups, as the SWP incorrectly argue, then Salvini’s Lega would in fact appear much more ‘fascist’ than the FdI.
The reality is, however, that in its three years in power, Meloni’s government has behaved almost exactly like any other bourgeois electoral party in this period of capitalist crisis, including those that would not even be characterised as right-wing populist or far-right. On 16 October last year the Economist magazine wrote that “Ms Meloni’s government has pursued an agenda scarcely more radical than that of other democratic conservatives”, “far from delivering the full throttle fascism many feared, it offers a kind of caretaker conservatism, long on stability but short on reform”.
It is not even the case that Meloni’s election marked a shift to the right in Italian society: the total votes the right-wing coalition received in 2022 (12.3 million) were virtually identical to those gained in the previous election in 2018 (12.1 million). The votes were simply redistributed within the right-wing coalition, mainly from the Lega to the FdI. Turnout was 64%, the lowest since 1946, collapsing to 43.6% in recent regional elections – revealing massive disillusionment with all capitalist political parties.
Meloni has introduced policies to crack down on ‘illegal’ migration, although at the same time issuing 450,000 migrant work visas from 2023-25, and is expected to issue another 500,000 in the next two years. In reality, her immigration policies are barely distinguishable from other capitalist governments in Europe, including Starmer’s Labour government, whose recent harsh proposals prompted one Reform MP to offer home secretary Shabana Mahmood a party membership card!
Attacks on migrants serve as a diversion from governments’ lack of solutions to the economic and social problems facing working-class people as well as a means of exploiting those problems in an attempt to shore up electoral support. It is precisely the absence of mass workers’ parties, with a programme to unite workers in struggle around those economic grievances, which allows migrants to be scapegoated and instrumentalised uncombatted in that way. Therefore building such parties is an essential part of countering division, in Italy and elsewhere. But anti-migrant policies are not in themselves characteristic of fascism. Nor was racism necessarily a feature of fascism historically. In Italy itself (although not in its colonies such as Abyssinia/Ethiopia) racial laws were only introduced in 1938 after Mussolini had formed the ‘Pact of steel’ with Hitler. Until then many leading fascists had been Jewish.
Balance of class forces
What about Meloni’s authoritarianism? There have been verbal and legal attacks on the media; a proposal to ‘reform’ the judiciary will be put to a referendum in March; and there are also plans to change the constitution to increase prime ministerial powers at the expense of the president. Other governments have pursued similar moves to limit or bypass the normal legal and constitutional checks and balances on the ‘executive’, including Tory prime minister Boris Johnson’s move to ‘prorogue’ parliament during the Brexit debate.
One of the first pieces of legislation passed by the Meloni government was the so-called ‘Rave decree’. Supposedly aimed at stopping illegal rave parties, it means that any gathering of over 50 people considered ‘dangerous’ could face penalties of up to six years in prison. This was followed in June 2025 by a new security law that criminalises certain protest actions such as roadblocks and ‘passive resistance’, which could clearly be used against striking workers. In addition, there have been attempts by the transport minister, the Lega’s Matteo Salvini, to limit the hours of national transport strikes.
Yet, once again, how do these differ from attacks on the right to protest and strike in other European countries, where capitalist governments have been building up their armoury of anti-protest laws? These are as much in preparation for the future class battles that the crisis in their system will inevitably generate as to combat current protests.
Thomas writes that Meloni’s government represents “another step in creating a more hospitable environment for future authoritarian shifts and the further radicalisation of the fascist project”. Yet how far bourgeois governments can go in attacking democratic rights depends on the relationship of class forces in society. On 3 October last year the Italian working class dramatically showed that it is still a mighty force to be reckoned with. Two million workers were involved in a general strike called jointly by the CGIL and the USB, as well as smaller unions. So, according to the SWP, and others who share their mistaken analysis, a ‘fascist’ prime minister has presided over the biggest strike movement in Italy for at least 20 years!
The trigger issue for the general strike was the genocide in Gaza and the seizure of the Global Sumud Flotilla by the Israeli state, but the strike also became a lightning rod for opposition to all the economic and social problems working-class and young people are facing in Italy. Further strikes took place on 28 November, organised by the USB and other smaller ‘unions of the base’, and on 12 December, by the CGIL, involving tens of thousands of workers protesting against the 2026 budget law, which imposes cuts to healthcare, education and social services, and raises the pension age.
During the 3 October general strike, tens of thousands of workers and students protested in more than 50 cities around Italy, occupying buildings, blocking roads and railways, and demonstrating in practice that authoritarian laws attacking the right to protest and strike can become nothing more than impotent pieces of paper when the collective power of the working class is brought to bear.
Fascist groups
Has Meloni’s government created more favourable conditions for the growth of a “fascist street force” as Thomas argues? Neo-fascist groups like Forza Nuova and CasaPound do exist in Italy. In October 2021, before Meloni became prime minister, Forza Nuova led an attack on the CGIL’s headquarters in Rome during an anti-Covid vaccine protest. It is important that the trade unions and workers’ movement organise to defend workers and local communities against such attacks by fascist thugs and to counter their demonstrations wherever possible. But it’s also important to have a sense of perspective. These groups still remain quite small at this stage. Exaggerating their forces, or declaring that they are already in the government, only serves to disorientate and even demoralise the working class. Commenting in 1932 on the importance of distinguishing between fascism and Bonapartism, Trotsky wrote “names are used to distinguish between concepts: concepts, in politics, in turn serve to distinguish among real forces”.
Of course, in the future, as capitalist crisis deepens, sections of the ruling class in Italy may attempt to use the fascists, as they did during the ‘strategy of tension’ from around the late 1960s to the early 1980s, when fascist groups carried out bombings and murders to create instability and conditions that could favour the introduction of more authoritarian ‘strong’ government. However, using the fascists in this way, or to attack or divide the workers movement, is very different from the ruling class handing over state power as they did to Mussolini in 1922 and Adolf Hitler in 1933. They will have learnt their own lessons from that desperate experiment, when losing control of their own state apparatus ended in the horrendous destruction of the second world war. And, of course, it’s far from an incidental factor that the middle layers in society which historically provided the mass base for fascism are greatly reduced today.
Building workers’ opposition
In his International Socialism article, Thomas spends a long time writing about the “dual strategy” or “two masks” of fascism: the “moderate, legalistic, constitutional mask that cloaks fascism’s ambition to destroy liberal democracy” and its “‘anti-system’ mask, claiming it desires revolutionary transformation in opposition to the existing elite and even aspects of capitalism”, thus “disguising the reality that fascism is a counterrevolutionary enterprise seeking to entirely eradicate the ability of the exploited to collectively resist the predations of capital”. So, even though Meloni may present as a bourgeois nationalist politician today, she is really a fascist wearing a mask that will be removed in the future. After all, the argument goes, Mussolini came to power through ‘legal’ means, and it was three years before he moved to completely destroy bourgeois democracy and crush the organisations of the working class.
However, Mussolini was handed the office of prime minister in an entirely different economic and political context. The working class had come close to seizing power in 1919-20. The capitalist class’s entire system was at risk and they could no longer rule through the old methods. With the Italian workers’ movement disorientated by the defeats of the ‘bienno rosso’, but still intact and with the potential to recover its position, important sections of the capitalists turned to the fascists to save their system.
Today the Italian working class has not suffered a crushing defeat. Its potential collective power was clearly evident during the 3 October general strike. Of course, there are still serious weaknesses that need to be overcome. The leadership of the main trade union federation, CGIL, has spent most of the last three years looking to avoid mobilising the working class against the austerity measures Meloni has pushed through, relying instead on ‘legalistic’ means, such as the failed referendum to repeal previous anti-worker legislation.
The October general strike was particularly impressive because of the unity shown between the CGIL and the USB. There’s no doubt that Maurizio Landini, general secretary of the CGIL, came under enormous pressure from rank-and-file members who had participated in their tens of thousands in the previous strike for Gaza on 22 September, even though it was called by the USB and other unions of the base, and not the CGIL. But when it came to striking against the budget law, the unions were once more divided, with the USB and unions of the base organising action on 28 November and the CGIL calling its own strike on 12 December.
There is evidently still much that needs to be done to strengthen and rebuild the trade union movement; to provide a leadership that can overcome divisions but also has a strategy for building strike action, with clear aims and objectives, rather than calling strikes as a means of ‘letting off steam’ (CGIL) or as a routinist ‘show of strength’ (USB). It’s also important that the unions have a political strategy that is independent from the opposition Democratic Party (PD) and other capitalist parties, and embraces the need for a mass political alternative that is firmly rooted in the organisations of the working class.
These are the main tasks for the working class at this stage in opposing Meloni, the FdI and the right-wing coalition, in contrast to the SWP’s abstract and meaningless call for “constantly exposing and explaining the Fratelli, and not just the smaller street groups, as fascist” which Thomas claims “is central to insisting that they should be denied legitimacy and driven out of public space – driven from the streets, the media and, ultimately, the government”.
Political perspectives
The absence of a mass political alternative to Meloni and her coalition is one of the main factors explaining their superficial stability. In reality, they have been wracked by divisions, particularly between FdI and the Lega on almost every issue, whether over the latest budget or aid for Ukraine. Meloni has also been helped by the more than €150 billion Italy has received from the EU’s Covid recovery fund. Government borrowing costs relative to Germany’s are at a 16-year low, and the government is aiming for Italy to come out of the EU’s ‘excessive deficit procedure’ on the back of the current austerity budget.
However, beneath the surface, none of the underlying economic problems that plagued Italian capitalism during the euro crisis of 2010-2011 have been resolved. Italy’s public debt is still a gigantic 138% of GDP, and the Covid lifeline is coming to an end. The economy is virtually stagnant, and real wages have barely increased in the last 25 years. That is why capitalist mouthpieces like the Economist, are pushing for more ‘reform’ – ie, more savage cuts to public spending and attacks on the working class’s share of GDP – all of which is preparing the ground for even greater working-class and trade union struggle.
Of course, in the future, the Italian ruling class, like other capitalist classes in Europe, might look to more authoritarian means of governing, including through military police dictatorship, if they no longer feel that they can rule through bourgeois democracy – their preferred option. But this is not an immediate prospect in Italy. Nor is it without risks for the capitalist class, as Yoon Suk Yeol, the former president of South Korea found when his attempt at introducing martial law provoked a mass uprising in the country at the end of 2024.
There is no automatic linear process towards increasing authoritarianism, as the SWP’s alarmism implies. Even in the period of ‘classical’ fascism, the military police dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-30) led not to the immediate rise of fascism but a prolonged period of class struggle during which, as Trotsky pointed out, the working class was presented with multiple revolutionary opportunities before General Francisco Franco eventually seized power in 1939, at the end of a three-year civil war.
Today in Italy the working class is just beginning to reassert itself after a period of relative quiescence. In this period of capitalist decay and crisis, how far reaction will be able to go will depend not just on the will of the ruling class but how the potential power of the working class can be mobilised. And mobilising that power requires a balanced assessment of the real forces in society at every stage.