The Government of Italy has collapsed.
They need a new leader to replace Draghi. Should we send them Boris?
Chaos in Italy
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Fox3WheresMyBanana
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Re: Chaos in Italy
I would question whether the Government of Italy has been anything other than collapsed since the days of Marcus Aurelius.
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larsssnowpharter
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Re: Chaos in Italy
"Chaos in Italy".
Situation normal.
Situation normal.
Re: Chaos in Italy
First Elected Prime Minister in 8 Years Winning Power in Italy Boo! Fascist! Moo!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/0 ... far-right/
Comment
It is absurd to call Giorgia Meloni 'far right'
Her critics have had a very tough time finding evidence to support their claim. Frankly, they are scraping the barrel
Nicholas Farrell
27 September 2022 • 1:15pm
The world's media – whether right or left wing – invariably call Giorgia Meloni, Italy's new prime minister, "far right". It's the modern way of saying "fascist" (without actually saying it). She and her party, Brothers of Italy, keep telling us, are "the heirs to Mussolini".
It is incredible how herd mentality builds up, like herd immunity: you get to a point where if enough people are saying something then it must be true. Yet to describe Meloni who identifies as conservative as far right is dishonest. There is nothing in her political programme that is remotely fascist.
A famous left-wing Italian historian of fascism Emilio Gentile once drew up a 10 point list to check whether someone is, or is not a fascist. While Vladimir Putin would unquestionably be regarded as a fascist on nearly all of the 10 points, Meloni and her party unquestionably fail on every single one.
They include: the use of terror to destroy parliamentary democracy; a totalitarian state that fuses the individual and the masses in the nation and persecutes those considered outsiders; a police force that represses opposition by force; a political system commanded by a leader invested with sacred charisma; a corporate economy controlled, not owned, by the state; and a foreign policy inspired by the myth of the nation whose goal is imperial expansion.
Yes, as a teenager in the early 1990s Meloni, now 45, was a member of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, Italy's long defunct neo-fascist party, and its successor, Alleanza Nazionale, likewise now disbanded, whose leader said that fascism is "il male assoluto" (absolute evil) – a sentiment with which Meloni once again said she agreed during this election campaign.
In 2011, she co-founded Brothers of Italy as a centre-right party and identifies as a conservative who is inspired, not by Benito Mussolini, the revolutionary socialist who founded fascism, but especially by English conservatives such as Sir Roger Scruton and JRR Tolkien.
When I interviewed her in Rome last month she told me: "If I were British I would be a Tory."
Whether or not Italians can be Tories is an interesting matter for debate given the absence of a Anglo-Saxon conservative tradition in Italy. But she is determined to give it a go. She is also president of the European Conservative and Reform Group in Brussels which was co-founded by David Cameron's Tory MEPs.
Her critics have a tough time indeed finding evidence to support their definition of her as "far right". Frankly, they are scraping the barrel.
Their so-called evidence includes her calls for a naval blockade of Libya to stop migrants crossing to Italy (750,000 have done since 2015). Yet the Libyan coastguard already operates such a blockade, equipped and trained by successive Italian governments in which the left was a major partner.
They say that she wants to install a dictatorship because to sort out Italy's sclerotic parliamentary system, dogged by short-lived impotent governments, she has talked about introducing a French-style presidency to replace the current situation in which the president's powers are largely ceremonial. It would mean the president would be elected by the people and not by parliament – yet that's apparently the road to dictatorship. It cannot happen anyway without a two thirds majority in parliament, or a referendum.
They say that she wants to restrict abortion rights. This is not true. She has not said she will attempt to change Italy’s abortion laws. She has simply proposed pro-life and family policies to encourage motherhood, including free child-care services.
Regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she is an unequivocal supporter of sending arms to Ukraine and much more committed to doing so than either Emanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz.
The only charge that is remotely convincing in my view is that she refuses to banish the fiamma tricolore (tricolour flame) from her party logo. Critics say that this proves that she cannot bring herself to abandon fascism because the flame was the logo of the neo-fascist MSI and the post-fascist AN. But she says – and she repeated it to me – the flame is not a fascist symbol but the symbol of the Italian right which existed before fascism and has "got nothing to do with fascism".
In fact, Meloni's victory is a triumph for democracy. She will be Italy's first elected prime minister since Berlusconi in 2008. None of the six prime ministers since 2011 when Berlusconi was forced to resign during the euro crisis was the leader of a party or coalition that won the most votes in a general election. Four were not even elected parliamentarians.
Her use of the slogan "God, Fatherland, Family" as a rallying call encapsulates precisely why she is like a red rag to a bull as far as the liberal left is concerned, most of whom do not believe in God because they are atheists, the fatherland because they are globalists, and the family because they are woke.
That Italy is on the verge of getting its first democratically elected government for 14 years ought to be seen as a welcome sign that democracy is at last returning to what is often called "the beating heart of Europe".
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/0 ... far-right/
Comment
It is absurd to call Giorgia Meloni 'far right'
Her critics have had a very tough time finding evidence to support their claim. Frankly, they are scraping the barrel
Nicholas Farrell
27 September 2022 • 1:15pm
The world's media – whether right or left wing – invariably call Giorgia Meloni, Italy's new prime minister, "far right". It's the modern way of saying "fascist" (without actually saying it). She and her party, Brothers of Italy, keep telling us, are "the heirs to Mussolini".
It is incredible how herd mentality builds up, like herd immunity: you get to a point where if enough people are saying something then it must be true. Yet to describe Meloni who identifies as conservative as far right is dishonest. There is nothing in her political programme that is remotely fascist.
A famous left-wing Italian historian of fascism Emilio Gentile once drew up a 10 point list to check whether someone is, or is not a fascist. While Vladimir Putin would unquestionably be regarded as a fascist on nearly all of the 10 points, Meloni and her party unquestionably fail on every single one.
They include: the use of terror to destroy parliamentary democracy; a totalitarian state that fuses the individual and the masses in the nation and persecutes those considered outsiders; a police force that represses opposition by force; a political system commanded by a leader invested with sacred charisma; a corporate economy controlled, not owned, by the state; and a foreign policy inspired by the myth of the nation whose goal is imperial expansion.
Yes, as a teenager in the early 1990s Meloni, now 45, was a member of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, Italy's long defunct neo-fascist party, and its successor, Alleanza Nazionale, likewise now disbanded, whose leader said that fascism is "il male assoluto" (absolute evil) – a sentiment with which Meloni once again said she agreed during this election campaign.
In 2011, she co-founded Brothers of Italy as a centre-right party and identifies as a conservative who is inspired, not by Benito Mussolini, the revolutionary socialist who founded fascism, but especially by English conservatives such as Sir Roger Scruton and JRR Tolkien.
When I interviewed her in Rome last month she told me: "If I were British I would be a Tory."
Whether or not Italians can be Tories is an interesting matter for debate given the absence of a Anglo-Saxon conservative tradition in Italy. But she is determined to give it a go. She is also president of the European Conservative and Reform Group in Brussels which was co-founded by David Cameron's Tory MEPs.
Her critics have a tough time indeed finding evidence to support their definition of her as "far right". Frankly, they are scraping the barrel.
Their so-called evidence includes her calls for a naval blockade of Libya to stop migrants crossing to Italy (750,000 have done since 2015). Yet the Libyan coastguard already operates such a blockade, equipped and trained by successive Italian governments in which the left was a major partner.
They say that she wants to install a dictatorship because to sort out Italy's sclerotic parliamentary system, dogged by short-lived impotent governments, she has talked about introducing a French-style presidency to replace the current situation in which the president's powers are largely ceremonial. It would mean the president would be elected by the people and not by parliament – yet that's apparently the road to dictatorship. It cannot happen anyway without a two thirds majority in parliament, or a referendum.
They say that she wants to restrict abortion rights. This is not true. She has not said she will attempt to change Italy’s abortion laws. She has simply proposed pro-life and family policies to encourage motherhood, including free child-care services.
Regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she is an unequivocal supporter of sending arms to Ukraine and much more committed to doing so than either Emanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz.
The only charge that is remotely convincing in my view is that she refuses to banish the fiamma tricolore (tricolour flame) from her party logo. Critics say that this proves that she cannot bring herself to abandon fascism because the flame was the logo of the neo-fascist MSI and the post-fascist AN. But she says – and she repeated it to me – the flame is not a fascist symbol but the symbol of the Italian right which existed before fascism and has "got nothing to do with fascism".
In fact, Meloni's victory is a triumph for democracy. She will be Italy's first elected prime minister since Berlusconi in 2008. None of the six prime ministers since 2011 when Berlusconi was forced to resign during the euro crisis was the leader of a party or coalition that won the most votes in a general election. Four were not even elected parliamentarians.
Her use of the slogan "God, Fatherland, Family" as a rallying call encapsulates precisely why she is like a red rag to a bull as far as the liberal left is concerned, most of whom do not believe in God because they are atheists, the fatherland because they are globalists, and the family because they are woke.
That Italy is on the verge of getting its first democratically elected government for 14 years ought to be seen as a welcome sign that democracy is at last returning to what is often called "the beating heart of Europe".
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TheGreenAnger
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Re: Chaos in Italy
I am not going to go as far as calling Ms Meloni (great name) a "fascist" but she has kept some strange bedfellows over the years.
Italian Social Movement
She is also on record as praising Mussolini's polices...
I assume that Farrell is this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Burgess_Farrell
Whatever the case he should avoid the lazy thinking that inspires sentences and tawdry stereotypes like this one...
Italian Social Movement
Brothers of ItalyThe MSI derived its name and ideals from the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a "violent, socialising, and revolutionary republican" variant of fascism established as a Nazi puppet state by Benito Mussolini in 1943 in the northern part of the Italian Peninsula behind Nazi German frontlines. The dominating party of the republic, Mussolini's Republican Fascist Party (PFR), inspired the creation of the MSI. The party was formed by former fascist leaders and veterans of the republic's fascist army, and it has been regarded as the successor to both the PFR as well as the original National Fascist Party (PNF). The MSI nevertheless tried to modernise and revise fascist doctrine into a more moderate and sophisticated direction. It also drew from elements of the anti-communist and anti-establishment stance of the short-lived postwar populist Common Man's Front protest party, and many of its original backers would find a home in the MSI after its dissolution in 1949.
She is also on record as praising Mussolini's polices...
I assume that Farrell is this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Burgess_Farrell
Whatever the case he should avoid the lazy thinking that inspires sentences and tawdry stereotypes like this one...
I am of course, an atheist and a globalist...liberal left is concerned, most of whom do not believe in God because they are atheists, the fatherland because they are globalists, and the family because they are woke.
My necessaries are embark'd: farewell. Adieu! I have too grieved a heart to take a tedious leave.