From ‘Anomaly’ to ‘Laboratory’? Fratelli d’Italia,Illiberalism and the Study of Right-Wing Parties in Western Europe

Introduction

In politics, the truism that every country has its own peculiarities often comes with references to various types of exceptionalisms. One can think about the lack of a socialist party for the United States (Lipset, 1996), or French dirigisme and centralism (Godin and Chafer, 2004), not to mention the German ‘Sonderweg’ or the deeply embedded British exceptions that ultimately led to Brexit (Nedergaard and Henriksen, 2018). For Giovanni Sartori (1976), Italian peculiarities were mostly associated with the polarized structure of the party system. For at least four decades, during what subsequently came to be known as the ‘First Republic’ (1946–1992), Italy had both the strongest Communist party (PCI, Partito comunista italiano) and the strongest neo-fascist party (the MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano) of all Western Europe. The (different) anti-systemic nature of these parties meant that the country was marked by government instability and no alternation, elements that were in turn associated with corruption, low societal trust and increasing public debt. In line with the party system, the public sphere was also polarized (Mancini, 2013), and society marked by dissatisfaction (Morlino and Tarchi, 1996). Given these (and other) peculiarities, Italy was often considered an anomaly in Western Europe, long before polarization and dissatisfaction emerged globally, over the last two decades, fuelling the rise of populism. In general, Italy conforms to the European trend whereby radical right populist parties are, on average, more successful than radical left ones. However, the country is the only one in Western Europe where, thanks to the success of the Five Star Movement (FSM), ‘valence’ populism has also emerged on similar levels as in several Eastern European countries (Zulianello and Larsen, 2023).

In 1993/1994, the advent of a so-called ‘Second Republic’ was determined by several factors, starting from judicial investigations on corruption, a new (mostly majoritarian) electoral law, as well as the financial constraints introduced by the Maastricht Treaty. This brought about a massive party system change. When Silvio Berlusconi became the leader of the centre-right coalition, in 1994, the country became also a laboratory of populism. From 1993 to 2022, Italy has experienced periods of alternation between centre-right and centre-left coalitions and others marked by technocratic governments, the most recent one – the fourth in three decades, in a trend, again unparalleled in all Europe (Emanuele et al., 2023; Piattoni and Valbruzzi, 2022) – led by former European Central Bank (ECB) President, Mario Draghi (2021–2022). Italian anomalies, even if not all authors associate them with political factors (e.g. Sassoon, 2013), are still related to the party system.

In 2023, the main Italian anomaly in Western Europe is that it is the only country whose main party of government – the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI), led by Giorgia Meloni – is usually classified as a Populist Radical Right Party (PRRP). The party does not hide its roots, all embedded in the (post-)fascist tradition. ¹ Another worrying element is the party’s closeness to the illiberal governments of Hungary and Poland. Is fascism back in Italy? Or is FdI becoming a responsible actor of government? Finally, is Italy favouring a mainstreaming of authoritarianism? (Katsambekis, 2023)

In 2009, this journal hosted a review symposium on Cas Mudde’s (2007) PRRPs in Europe, which became a classic in the field. Several years before, beginning his work on what was then commonly defined the ‘extreme right’ party family (Ignazi, 2003), Mudde (1996) talked about a ‘war of words’. By now, ‘far right’ (Pirro, 2023) is the most-used umbrella concept, encompassing both the ‘radical’ and the ‘extreme’ variants. Although the debate is far from closed, the ongoing terminological dispute is not the main focus of analysis. Rather, I focus on how FdI has managed its transition from opposition to government. In doing so, I draw some implications on the challenges faced by similar parties across Western Europe, ² as they enter the coalition game, focusing first on ideological elements and the importance of memory. The difficult trade-offs between the cultivation of the identity (i.e. the memories of its extremist past) and pragmatism point to the dilemmas the party faces after many years in opposition. These dilemmas, I argue, can resonate beyond Italy by building on recent works on illiberalism.

Italy as a Harbinger of Far-Right Waves and the Main Challenges of the Fourth Wave

As the country where fascism first rose to power (1922), Italy has often been a harbinger of important developments on the right side of the political spectrum, across Western Europe. Since the beginning of the new millennium, we live in what has been called the ‘fourth wave’ of far-right party success. Several Italian peculiarities can be identified in each of these four waves. During the first two waves (1945–55; 1955–80), the MSI was the strongest neo-fascist party in Europe; inspiring also the creation (1972) of the French Front National, starting from its party symbol, the flame. During the third wave (roughly 1980–2000), Italy was at the forefront, with the Berlusconi-led alliance between his Forza Italia, the Northern League (Lega Nord) and the MSI, by then (slowly) transiting towards a more moderate and post-fascist ideology, under the brand ‘National Alliance’ (AN). In this wave, Italy became a laboratory of populism (Agnew and Shin, 2017).

In 2012, the birth of FdI was part of the fourth wave, a period in which PRRP parties spread also in countries that had hitherto been immune to them (e.g. Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Vox in Spain). A first trigger for FdI’s foundation was the fact that, in 2008, Berlusconi had merged Forza Italia and AN into the ‘People of Freedom’, thus further diluting the identity of the MSI/AN (as well as its organization and memories) into a truly ‘personal party’. ³ This was happening as the global recession was hitting particularly hard. Beginning in 2011, the political system was shaken by a blend of economic, cultural (i.e. immigration-driven) and political crises, which contributed to the success of populist and anti-establishment parties, the FSM and the re-named ‘Lega’, led by Matteo Salvini. After peaking in the 2018 general election, these two parties formed an ‘all-populist’ post-electoral coalition, which however only lasted 15 months (Baldini and Giglioli, 2020).

In February 2021, in the midst of the global pandemic crisis, Draghi became the Prime Minister, thanks to a wide and anomalous parliamentary coalition. FdI was the only parliamentary party in opposition. This element, together with the decline of the leaderships of Berlusconi and Salvini, helps to understand the result of the 2022 election (when FdI skyrocketed to 26%, from 4% obtained in 2018). There was no rightward shift (Itanes, 2023; See Baldini and Ventura 2024), and the party obtained the bulk of its votes from voters of other parties of the coalition (as well as of the FSM). One year later, we can identify four main challenges for the party system, for the party and for scholars studying radical parties in government.

The first is a systemic challenge, and it regards the restoration of a bipolar pattern of competition, after a decade marked by technocratic governments and anomalous patterns of coalition. This task takes also a different meaning after the death of Berlusconi (June 2023). More generally, it regards also the capacity of the opposition parties to overcome their ideological differences and coalesce into an alternative pole, an element which goes beyond the scopes of this article. The other three challenges regard both the party and our understanding of its mutating nature.

First, concerning ideology, most current analyses (e.g. Donà, 2022; Puleo and Piccolino, 2022) consider FdI a PRRP. According to Mudde (2007), the latter share three ideological traits: They are nativist, authoritarian and populist. Yet, the centrality of fascism and post/fascism (Broder, 2023) in the previous waves and the fact that the party’s dominant coalition comes, with few exceptions, from the MSI/AN (Baldini et al., 2022) make the long shadow of fascism an essential starting point.

Second, how consistent has FdI been with regards to the electoral manifesto? While time and space constraints limit my capacity to elaborate on this point, it is interesting to reflect on how to assess this key transition, after 10 years all spent in opposition.

Third, and final, for several years, Meloni has built close links with parties governing in Poland and Hungary, the two European countries mostly marked by de-democratization processes since 2010. This allows to broaden the scope of the analysis by comparing FdI to similar parties across Europe (Vampa, 2023). Given FdI’s roots, the international dimension is important both for consolidating the legitimacy of the new government and for Meloni’s ambitions to be a federator of the right-wing parties across Europe, first through her role of Chairman of the ‘European Conservative and Reformist’ (ECR) group (since 2020), then, once in government, approaching the leadership of the European People’s Party (EPP) to shift the political equilibria in the European Parliament (EP) to the right.

While I cannot analyze all these aspects in detail here, I engage with the crucial insight of Plattner (2020), according to whom the vulnerability of liberal democracy will be decisively tested by ‘illiberal democracy and the struggle on the right’.

Memory Politics, Polarization and the Eternal Return of Fascism

Across the globe, the success of PRRP has been fueled by battles over memory, particularly salient in Europe. While in the East, especially in Hungary and Poland, this has brought about ‘narratives that treat history as a series of disasters imposed by external powers’ (Verovsek, 2021: 847); in the West, several ‘memory laws’ have been approved (Soroka and Krawatzek, 2019). Given its past, in Italy, this confrontation has been particularly polarized between those – especially among some left-wing intellectuals – who tend to be alarmist on the eternal return of fascism and ‘Illiberal democrats’ (in Italy, mainly Lega and FdI) who ‘pursue a two-fold strategy towards remembrance (based) on ‘mnemonic negationism by rejecting the liberal impulse towards national self-critique (and) of mnemonic affirmation by seeking to “normalize” the past’ (Rosenfeld, 2023: 823).

The date 28 October 2022 marked the centennial of the March on Rome, when Benito Mussolini conquered power in Italy with his Fascist party. In a 1996 video, Meloni – then 19 years old and leader of AN’s student organization – stated that Mussolini had been ‘a good politician, who had worked in the interest of the Italians’. Is fascism back in Italy? In the September 2022 edition of the ‘The Atlantic’ magazine, a renowned scholar of fascism did indeed write about ‘The return of fascism in Italy’. ⁴ Like Agnew (2023) and Berezin (2023), I would argue that fascism (or Neo-fascism) is not back in Italy, and nor is it the right concept to understand what is going on in the country. To appreciate this, one should distinguish between the memories of the regime (still present) and the actual will to restore a similar regime (fortunately, nowhere in sight). Admittedly, around Europe, neo-fascism is still alive (Copsey, 2020). Overall, however, political parties gaining political representation that openly support or tolerate violence, often in combination with manifestation of support of neo-fascist/ neo-Nazi propaganda, can be counted on one hand. ⁵

We often hear the idea that (neo)fascism has traded jackboots for suits, which means that those who see a fascist revival do not expect it to happen under the same forms as in its original manifestation. And yet, as argued by the doyen of the Italian historians of fascism (Gentile, 2019), this feeds the myth of the ‘eternal nature’ of fascism (Eco, 1995), built on the idea that the latter lacks any ideological core. Ultimately, this implies that every politician adopting one of the many features associated to fascism (of which Eco listed fourteen ⁶ ) can easily be defined a fascist (as happened to many of them, also from Christian Democracy or leftist politicians considered ‘too moderate’), by just being associated to one or more of these traits. By further stretching the concept, a ‘fascistometer’ (Murgia, 2018) ends up trivializing the issue, as apparent in the fact that one finds ‘patriot’ as the most radical category of this instrument. More generally, while somehow exaggerating their case, Bar-On and Bale (2022) have remarked how much of the recurrent fears are part of a ‘brown scare’ that has been largely over-rated or, to use Griffin’s words, a ‘drumbeat of alarmism (that) never ceases’ (Griffin, 2022). In truth, studies on autocratization processes show that blatant violations such as military coups or election frauds have long been replaced by more gradual patterns of executive aggrandizement (Bermeo, 2016). At the same time, one should not expect that a harsh rhetoric in opposition will automatically turn into autocratic government.

Hence, while Broder (2023) is certainly right in stressing that the current dominant coalition of FdI is made of ‘Mussolini’s grandchildren’, how important is this element in understanding how they are currently governing Italy? As noted by Berezin (2023), not much. To be sure, leading members of FdI have frequently made use of several of the 10 tactics of ‘illiberal memory’ identified by Rosenfeld (2023: 823–828). Broder (2023) delves into the links, which the FdI have built with the neo-fascist galaxy (both Casapound and Forza Nuova, though less so than the Lega). He aptly focuses on the memory of fascism and the attempts by several important members of the party to spread self-indulgent narratives of the old regime. However, the book is almost silent on the socio-cultural background in which the current dominant coalition of the party was formed, around 30 years ago. Most of the current ‘Fratelli di Giorgia’ (Vassallo and Vignati, 2023) were socialized into politics in a very polarized climate. In the early 1990s, the memories of the clashes between extra-parliamentary violent groups and terrorists during the 1970s (the so-called ‘years of lead’, when the number of politically motivated homicides could only be compared with those of the ethnic conflicts in the Basque countries and in Northern Ireland; Foot, 2023) played a decisive role in the birth and the evolution of the ideological profile of the ‘third party of the flame’ (Vassallo and Vignati, 2023: 26). But how likely is that politicians that proudly claim to finally emerge from a life spent as ‘underdog’ – a term used by Meloni in her investiture speech – will turn authoritarian in government?

The Politics of Illiberalism

Three recent works are particularly useful in order to see if and how these elements of identity are then translated into action. First, as Kauth and King (2020: 367) state:

illiberalism represents either an opposition to procedural democratic norms – as disruptive illiberalism – or constitutes part of an ideological struggle – termed ideological illiberalism. Disruptive illiberalism can be found in the disguised anti-democratic attacks of autocrats in the making. On the other hand, ideological illiberalism, in the form of unequal allocation of rights and duties, is a part of ideological clashes within outwardly ‘liberal’ democracies.

Second, analysing Hungary and Poland, Pirro and Stanley (2022) articulate the illiberal playbook along three main types of actions, in increasing order of danger for the dismantling of the liberal order: forging, bending, and breaking. Forging involves the reduction of liberal rights for certain categories of citizens that are not given unambiguous protection by the law or the constitution, for instance, acts restricting abortion rights or preventing same-sex marriage. Thus, forging means implementing policies that advance a traditional vision of society (and especially gender relations), without violating either the letter or the spirit of the law. At the opposite end, the act of breaking implies an open rupture of democratic procedures, for instance, ignoring tribunal rulings, or allowing the illegal detention of asylum-seekers in spite of constitutional guarantees or international treaties. In between the two, bending means going against the spirit of the law while formally respecting its letter. In Poland, but especially in Hungary, we find many examples of all three types of illiberal changes.

Third, these elements speak to the problematic (yet crucial) distinction between illiberal and authoritarian practices. While the first ‘infringe on the autonomy and dignity of the person, and they are a human rights problem (. . .), authoritarian practices sabotage accountability and thereby threaten democratic processes’ (Glasius, 2021: 342). Although both practices can be dangerous for liberal democracy, the latter are more specifically meant to ‘shield powerholders from accountability’ (Glasius, 2021), while the former – as the examples of mass digital surveillance and non-governmental organization (NGO) restrictions made by Glasius confirm – can be rather frequent also in countries whose liberal-democratic credentials are solid.

In a nutshell (but see Angelucci et al., 2025), so far in Meloni’s government, ideological illiberalism has prevailed over disruptive illiberalism, forging over some tendencies of bending (and no breaking has taken place), illiberal practices over authoritarian practices. In the first year in government, elements of illiberalism can be detected in three critical areas, all highly significant for FdI’s programmatic profile, namely immigration and security, law and order and gender. However, in all of them determining whether, and to what extent, specific practices are illiberal remains difficult, at least in the short term. As the country of first destination of immigration from Africa, Italy adds a key geographical element to the already uneasy confrontation between politics and the judiciary, on issues pertaining civil rights, personal insecurity and inter-country solidarity principles. Similar considerations could also be made for gender and family issues. For instance, a Summer 2023 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights upheld the position of the Italian government in terms of surrogacy, an illegal practice in Italy, but also in several other European democracies. While other examples could be made, they would all have to be contextualized within a structure of political opportunities which, combining entrenched domestic cultural elements of pluralism to international institutional constraints, point to the resilience of Italian democracy (Levitsky and Way, 2023).

From Opposition to Government: Identity, Pragmatism and the Mainstreaming Effect

Traditionally, to classify party ideology and party families, researchers focus on party manifestos and expert surveys. This is the road chosen also by Vampa (2023), who compares FdI with parties such as the Rassemblement National (RN), Vox and AfD (as well as Lega in Italy) making extensive use of the two most authoritative sources used in this type of analysis (the Manifesto Project and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey). Mudde’s ‘triangle’ of the key elements associated with the PRR (authoritarianism, nativism populism) becomes a diamond in Vampa’s analysis, with the addition of sovereignism. Much like the RN, FdI has softened its Euroscepticism in the eve of the 2022 election. No matter how close these parties can be in programmatic terms (a key focus of the book), FdI – together with Vox (and PiS ⁷ ) – belongs to the ECR group, whereas Lega, AfD and RN are part of another group, an element which damages the influence of these parties. Once in government, pragmatism has converted into a further softening of FdI’s position towards the EU (Bressanelli and De Candia 2023), instrumental both for the party’s attempt to strengthen its influence in the EU and for the smooth management of the NextGenerationEU funds.

On the contrary, in the first year of the Meloni government (not covered by Vampa, as the book was published just a few weeks after its debut), the Lega has repeatedly – especially on migration policy and identity issues more in general – challenged FdI from more radical positions. As a party already used to be ‘di lotta e di governo’ (Albertazzi et al., 2011), this should not surprise. Ultimately, having a noisy (and more radical) ally on its right can help to consolidate the mainstreaming of the party. A general moderation of FdI emerges when confronting its positions in government with the times of the Draghi government, when being the only party in opposition ‘allowed FdI to systematically challenge the government’s actions and to depict itself as the only party acting in the people’s interest, opposing the elite’ (Zanotti and Meléndez, 2022: 93). During this transition, the populist tones of its communication were also toned down (assessed analysing the daily press releases on the party’s website, Angelucci et al., 2025). While, in economic policy (and especially foreign policy), continuity with the Draghi government has prevailed over some discontinuities, ⁸ the two main proposals for constitutional reforms currently being discussed – on the introduction of the direct election of the Prime Minister and on ‘differentiated regional autonomy’ – are still in their initial stage.

In the analysis of party ideology, Vassallo and Vignati criticize Mudde (2007) for his transposition of ‘authoritarianism’ as a socio-psychological element (as derived from Adorno’s classic work) to a collective organization, such as a party. Similarly, they also express doubts on the criteria chosen to distinguish between ‘nativism’ and ‘liberal nationalism’. Taken together, these elements point to the need of a focus on the dynamism of the parties, whose rhetoric can quickly change (as the M5 S did in government, Vassallo and Vignati, 2007: 253–257). Accordingly, Vassallo and Vignati define FdI as the party of the ‘national-conservative’ right, rejecting the radical right tag. While defining the party ‘a-fascist’ (Vassallo and Vignati, 2007: 37) raises more than a doubt, this criticism has some merit, challenging the static nature of some researches and underlining the key point of scholars’ objectivity, especially when classifying strongly opposed parties.

Recently, Katsambekis (2023) has talked about a process of ‘mainstreaming of authoritarianism’. To make his argument, the author also cites the different treatment that EU institution reserved to the Austrian FPÖ’s arrival in government in 2000 (which triggered sanctions) and Meloni’s victory in 2022 (on which she received congratulations). But the comparison between the two situations, rather than a mainstreaming of authoritarianism, can probably be better understood in the context of a very different political scenario. While populist parties in general have indeed mainstreamed, in Western Europe, this has meant that all PRRP – with the notable exception of the Swiss Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), operating in a very peculiar institutional system – have moderated in government (Capaul and Ewert, 2021).

Conclusion

Analyzing the emergence of illiberalism, Plattner (2020: 44) was rightly concerned by ‘the threat that mainstream centre-right parties will be captured by tendencies that are indifferent or even hostile to liberal democracy’. Focusing on Italy, we have seen how the mainstreaming trajectory of a party whose roots belong to the illiberal post-fascist camp is at least just as important. Three broad considerations can be made.

First, methodologically, scholars should pay due attention not to follow victims of two traps, namely the tendency to indulge in too ‘static’ analyses, unrelated to the changing structure of political opportunities in which political parties operate and the tendency to rely on personal values in the classification of party ideology. If populist parties are like chameleons, they can also shelve their populist skin, thus revealing that the pragmatism necessary in government takes precedence over identity. Back in opposition, the populist skin can always be resumed at full speed.

Second, empirically, Italy today appears to be an anomaly in Western Europe more for the presence of a PRRP now possibly mutating in government towards a form of national-conservatism than for the return of fascism under different guises. Time and careful comparative research will tell whether the current government is an anomaly at all.

Third, conceptually, studies on illiberalism provide the most fruitful tools for the comparative research on the vulnerability of liberal democracy in Europe today that can be applied to similar radical right-wing parties across Europe, as they enter government coalitions. Ultimately, so far, FdI has indulged in some illiberal practices, without activating an authoritarian dynamic. However, as signalled by the project on constitutional reform on the direct election of the Prime Minister, initiated in late 2023, it is still possible that Meloni will take Italy down the road of democratic backsliding, by altering the delicate balance of inter-institutional accountability. If, on the other hand, the party manages to juggle between pragmatism and identity, Italy might become a laboratory for the moderation and the mainstreaming of radical right parties, a crucial challenge for the survival of liberal democracy.