Indeed, the real question is who will lead Italy once the Right presumably recaptures power: Matteo Salvini’s League (formerly the Northern League), a local autonomist party that has adopted nationalism, or Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, which gathers former fascists, nationalists, clericalists, small-business owners, and rentiers. Both Meloni and Salvini compete for the approval of figures like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and other neo-nationalist Europeans. Both are sympathetic to anti-vaxxers and have long stoked fears over immigration, Islam, and European elites. But Meloni is a more disciplined politician than Salvini, and would be Italy’s first female national leader if victorious. She cultivates the sympathies of Italian clericalists, but without Salvini’s crass displays of devotion (crucifixes, rosaries, and a well-publicized trip to Fatima in May 2021); she is also less coarse than Salvini in her criticism of Pope Francis’s position on immigration. Meloni’s platform can be summed up as “God, fatherland, family”: Italians-first nationalism and culture-war Catholicism, aligned not just with Orbán, but also with the anti-liberal parties in Poland and other European countries, the Likud in Israel, and Trumpism in the United States. She is better equipped than Salvini to bring Italy into the global neo-nationalist community.
What all Italians seem to agree on is that the country needs to rethink its economy and address a host of pressing financial challenges, including a staggering national debt and the future of social security. It can no longer be so dependent on tourism—the pandemic proved that—and it must make wiser use of EU grants and subsidies. Far less clear is what the country should do in terms of foreign policy. In seeking to distance Italy from the EU, the Conte government made haphazard overtures to Russia and China, but its actual strategy (to the extent there was one) was never clear. Draghi has returned Italy to alignment with the EU and alliance with the United States but the uncertainty of traditional American hegemony and questions over NATO’s mission have still left Italy somewhat at sea.
“Italy was one of the founders of the European Union ‘club,’ and this, in addition to an international situation different from the current one, guaranteed us respect that was greater than our economic, political, and military weight,” Mario Ricciardi, editor-in-chief of the political journal Il Mulino told me. “Today things have changed a lot, there are so many new members who no longer have any awe of older members, and this doesn’t always work to our advantage.”
At the same time, the Catholic Church in Italy continues to face uncertainty about its role in the nation’s political and everyday life. More than a year since the worst of the pandemic, its influence is questionable, the bishops’ conference has sunk further into irrelevance, and many Italians feel free to criticize it in ways that might have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The Vatican itself seems less able to exert the kind of political influence on national politics than it once did.
Under Francis, the Vatican has been more transparent on a number of issues, including its own finances. But this has also opened an ugly chapter in the history of the “temporal” justice administered in the name of the pope, who is the absolute sovereign of Vatican City State. On July 27, the Vatican trial of ten people involved in a money-losing investment in a controversial London real-estate deal began. Among those being tried is Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who is the first cardinal ever to be indicted by Vatican criminal prosecutors, and whom Francis stripped of the rights and duties of the cardinalate in September 2020. Becciu was not just the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Saints, but also, as the sostituto (or No. 2) to the Secretariat of State between 2011 and 2018, a key figure in navigating relations between the Vatican and Italy. It is hard to say what the consequences of his trial will be for the Vatican and for the Italian Church.