I have offered a comment on an essay on the Meloni Government published at Consortium News. This was my comment, with a little tidying:
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My insights are from living in Italy fifty years ago, following the news, visiting Italy three times for a total of five months in the last decade, away from tourismcentral, talking to Italians in Italian, subscribing now to an Italian daily paper.
Italy has been poisoned by Berlusconi's TV dominance. In one casual conversation a few years ago someone said "Can we send you Berlusconi [to Australia]?" I said ok, we'll send you Murdoch, to which the reply, oh, no you can't, we already have Murdoch with Sky. So to a large extent the poisoning of human existence in Italy is much as by the White Man's Media in the English speaking world.
The Centre-Left in Italy, for which many had great hopes, with former communists included from the 1990s, simply failed to deliver and faction dominated. To hear intelligent Italians in spontaneous conversation speak damningly of this was tragic.
First the non-party Five Star Movement [M5S] sprang from Genoa to rescue but has been unsuccessful. In Genoa in 2018 a small shopkeeper woman said no, not them, La Lega, the right wing League led by Matteo Salvini, that was where she put her hopes. Her children were a mirror of the economic situation, two employed, one unemployed (over 30% of adults under 30 unemployed), the latter bouncing between employers getting short term wage subsidies. Another female shopkeeper in a more glamorous situation in Rome offered us a tirade on the theme of work for young people only being available if you have family who can offer work. An elderly woman (almost my age) in a village in 2018, as we waited for a bus, spoke of how her home town was beautiful but being ruined by the arrival of globalizzazione.
While Meloni has expressed fealty to Biden and the EU on Ukraine, she has slapped back at attempts by von der Leyen and Macron to sneer at Italy one way or another. As also she has reprimanded both her coalition partners, Berlusconi and Salvini, for their demands and rudeness in the weeks of forming the government. She's tough. The jobs are tough.
Hitherto Italy has been bullied by France and Germany on Eurozone matters. Now the strong northern countries are feeling the pinch. Italy has perhaps a little more room to manoeuvre and as a Mediterranean power for millennia may head in new directions. This recent essay by Romano Prodi demonstrates capacity to think in non-military directions.
We need to be thinking in fresh ways about the world, over a longer time frame. I invite you to read just the first paragraph of this writing by historian Giuseppe Felloni, to put the world now in historical perspective.
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