Italy on the front line of African migrant ‘invasion’

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has warned EU leaders of an ever-worsening immigration crisis amid an ‘invasion’ from North Africa.

Meloni (who entered politics as a young activist in the neo-fascist party MSI and now heads a coalition of conservative and semi-nationalist parties) is derided by the liberal left as Europe’s most ‘far right’ leader since the Second World War. Her election victory last September was partly due to her promise to deal with Italy’s immigration crisis, but for reasons mainly beyond her control these problems have worsened rather than improved during her premiership.

Part of the crisis is due to dysfunctional governments in Tunisia and Libya. The collapse of Colonel Gadafy’s dictatorship in 2011 has led to a decade of chaos in Libya, where various warlords and factions battle for influence but have no interest in blocking the flow of illegal migrants (often crossing Libya from other parts of Africa). Meanwhile Tunisia’s own dictatorship is on the brink of collapse, and despite Meloni’s urging, the European Union and IMF are reluctant to send aid or loans that might encourage the Tunisians to cooperate in effective anti-immigration measures.

The numbers involved in this Mediterranean migrant trade dwarf the problems of ‘small boats’ crossing the English Channel. Many H&D readers have justifiable doubts about Meloni, but she is surely correct to argue that the problem can only be addressed by concerted European action, not by any individual government.

As Sir Oswald Mosley suggested decades ago, and as Meloni is now arguing, the most credible approach would have to combine resolute action against ‘people traffickers’ (whom Meloni proposes to jail for up to 16 years) with aid to African governments that will be strictly conditional on these governments turning off the immigration tap.

The problem is that African governments might seek to take advantage of the situation by blackmailing Europe: an example of shameless surrender to such blackmail is the Spanish government’s deal with Morocco, which inter alia led to the prosecution of H&D correspondent Isabel Peralta.

Fundamentally the answer to this migrant crisis is for Europeans to rediscover their confidence, get off their knees, and cease apologising for the ruthless methods necessary to secure our borders.

100 years ago today: how Mussolini’s March on Rome saved Italy

Those Italians and fellow Europeans who dare to defy the liberal-left’s tyrannical rewriting of history are today celebrating the centenary of the March on Rome, when Benito Mussolini and his Fascisti saved Italy from communism and chaos.

In 2022 even a former fascist such as new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni feels obliged to denounce the Duce. But H&D thought our readers might be interested to learn what British journalists who knew Italy well were writing about the March on Rome and Mussolini’s seizure of power back in 1922 – before postwar brainwashing made it impossible for the mainstream press to write anything truthful about fascism or national socialism.

The Daily Telegraph wrote:
“In spite of the late disquieting rumours about Italy, there is no more pleasant country to stay in! After visiting the distressed states of Central Europe, it is a real and vivid joy to come to the smiling land of olive and cypress tree! Within her kingdom one is struck by her prosperity, her insouciance, her comfort, and, at least, the outward security of the country…
“Italy has troubles of her own, but, thanks to the Fascisti, who have restored law and order, there is peace. How much this state of affairs is due to the Fascisti is perhaps not fully realised; nor is their strength, their effective organisation, and the extent of their influence possibly appreciated or understood. In the opinion of most enlightened Italians they have not only been instrumental in repressing Socialist risings, but have saved the country from complete chaos, if not ruin!
“…Under the leadership of Count Mussolini, the admirable organisation known as the ‘Fascisti’ became a greater power than the powerful Socialists themselves. The strength of the Fascisti lies in their enthusiasm, their quiet determination, and the youthful backing of the country. There is scarcely a young man between the ages of 18 and 25 who is not a Fascist. Their policy is one of secrecy, of promptness: they are always on the spot and ready to spring when necessary.”

Similarly the Daily Mail reported:
“All the world has heard of the Fascisti – yet few people outside Italy have any precise knowledge of the mighty organisation which, created only a little more than two years ago, has reconquered Italy for the Italians, in a new Risorgimento which in a sense is a pendant and completion of the movement of the 1860s.
“There are more than a million declared and organised Fascisti in Italy today – and few of them are over 30. …700,000 of these Fascisti are workmen who have seceded from the virulently anti-patriotic Communist-controlled trade unions – for, as the revolutionaries have been unpleasantly reminded, even workmen prefer to be allowed to love, and be proud of, their native country.
“…At the elections in 1919 Fascismo was scarcely born. Now it is master of the country, and yet it is unrepresented in Parliament. The Fascisti said: ‘Give us the new elections which will return us to power – or like Caesar and his legionaries, we will cross the Rubicon and march on Rome.’
“The glory of ancient Rome is indeed their dream, and their army is modelled on the ancient legions. It is a fighting force of something like 300,000, apart from the 700,000 workmen enrolled in the Fascisti trade unions.”

That fighting force transformed Italy, and Mussolini’s two decades in power remain a golden age in his country’s history.

‘Post-fascist’ party wins Italian election

Liberal and leftist commentators around the world have been horrified this week by the victory of Fratelli d’Italia (‘Brothers of Italy’) in Italy’s parliamentary elections and the imminent elevation of Fratelli‘s leader Giorgia Meloni to become her country’s first female prime minister.

Fratelli polled 26% of the vote (up from 4.4% in 2018 – one of the most rapid electoral advances in European history), winning 119 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 65 in the Senate.

Meloni will now form a government at the head of a ‘right-wing’ coalition that includes Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigration party Lega (formerly the regionalist Lega Nord) who polled 8.8%; Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing conservative party Forza Italia who polled 8.1%; and the ‘Moderates’, an alliance of small conservative factions, who polled only 0.9% nationwide but won seven seats in constituencies.

This is more than simply a pendulum swing between ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ coalitions. The true significance of the result is the changing balance of forces within the ‘right’ and the fact that the most ‘extreme’ of its four components is now by far the largest. At the 2018 election Salvini overtook Berlusconi to become leader of the ‘right’, but now Meloni has overtaken Salvini.

Fratelli was founded in 2012 as part of the restructuring of ‘right-wing’ politics in Italy, but its origins are in the ‘neo-fascist’ Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI – Italian Social Movement), whose youth wing Meloni joined in 1992.

MSI in turn grew out of Mussolini’s fascist party and (as its name implied) out of the German-backed Italian Social Republic during the last days of the Second World War.

The extent to which Meloni’s politics still resembles racial nationalism, or is simply anti-immigration conservatism, is debatable. Undoubtedly she benefited from having distanced Fratelli from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin since his invasion of Ukraine. Salvini had been much closer to Putin and his credibility has been damaged by that association, to such an extent that his continued leadership of Lega is in question.

Some H&D readers will undoubtedly regard Meloni as a traitor to our cause for having trimmed in the direction of mainstream conservatism. However her own and her party’s ideological roots mean that Fratelli‘s victory is potentially more significant than other European populist successes of recent years.

This is not (yet) a victory for racial nationalism, but it is a giant step in the right direction, in the process of freeing European minds from their post-1945 paralysis.

Continuing progress for Italy’s ‘post-fascist’ right

Municipal election in Italy showed continuing progress for Italy’s ‘post-fascist’, anti-immigration right, including the election of Rachele Mussolini (granddaughter of the former Italian leader Benito Mussolini) to a second term as a Rome city councillor, with the highest vote of any candidate for the Roman council this year.

Our Italian-based correspondent Giovanni Toro reports – click here to read his analysis.

Italy heads for ‘post-fascist’ coalition

Matteo Salvini – the leading anti-immigration politician in Europe – is set to realign Italian politics with a new, ‘post-fascist’ coalition.

As interior minister and deputy prime minister in the present Italian government, Salvini has already pursued radical and highly popular policies to protect Italy from tides of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean.

However – as H&D has consistently argued – the coalition between his Lega party and the anti-establishment (but essentially liberal) Five Star Movement was always incoherent and unlikely to last.

Though it is obvious that Salvini is now deliberately looking for an excuse to break up the coalition, this should be seen not as an unscrupulous bid for personal power, but as an attempt to create a more ideologically stable coalition, probably with the Fratelli d’Italia (‘Brothers of Italy’) party, one of several movements that grew out of the postwar fascist party MSI.

Fratelli and their leader Giorgia Meloni have for several years been allied to the British Conservative Party in the European Parliament, an inconvenient fact that doesn’t get mentioned in the alarmist analysis published today in the Sunday Telegraph.

Nevertheless a Lega-Fratelli alliance would be a bold challenge to the postwar European consensus, and would probably succeed in winning a solid majority for an explicitly anti-immigration, pro-White government, whenever new Italian elections are held.

The biggest short-term problem is that Italy’s constitution allows all sorts of delays which might involve the President appointing a ‘centrist’ government that could hold power for many months without elections.