If you read much of the press coverage of the Italian elections, you may come to believe that Italy has just installed a new sovereign made up of the exhumed spare parts of the Duce himself. Jackbooted militants roam the streets; the trains are now running lethally on time. 

To wit, in the wake of an election that brought Giorgia Meloni to power, outlets as wide-ranging as The Atlantic and The Conversation have openly declared the “return of fascism” in Italy. Even the Italians are at it: one Calabrian criminologist remarked on Twitter that “Giorgia Meloni is fascist, Italy is still fascist, set to embrace fascism, 100 years later, fully, again.” 

It’s not an entirely mad conclusion to draw. When it comes to Italy’s new premier, Giorgia Meloni, all the ominous signs seem in evidence. Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia or Brothers of Italy, is the direct descendent of the Italian Social Movement, a now-defunct mass party founded in 1946 by wartime fascist generals who harboured rosy memories of the Mussolini years. In 2012, Meloni decided to launch Brothers of Italy as an explicit rejection of a later effort by that party to rebrand away from fascism, and she has fought hard to keep much of the old, more distinctly Mussolinian movement’s spirit alive. 

She relishes, for instance, that her victory last Sunday, forged in an alliance with Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, will allow her supporters to finally “speak what they have long been unable to say”, and her party has steadfastly maintained MSI’s old symbol of a tricolour flame. When asked about these links, the party offers a doublespeak of both denial and dismissal — the flame, for instance, is at once “in no way equated with any symbol of the fascist regime” and also a direct bearer of the party’s history, a “symbol of which we ought to be proud”. 

So it is not hyperbolic to reference “fascism” when discussing Meloni. The original, classical formulation of that ideology is in her party’s blood. 

Meloni is not after towering grey edifices of numbered padded cells

If you take the definition ventured by Italian writer Umberto Eco in 1995, Meloni again fits the bill. Eco described fascism as an ideology that draws inspiration from narratives of faded civilisational glory, often invoking the imagined subjugation of a formerly dominant ethnic majority. Meloni does much of this. Over the course of her career she has described Italy as a country beset by an insidious program of “ethnic substitution” — that is, the replacement of white Italians by migrants, invariably orchestrated by a conniving lobby of “international speculators”. She also appears to yearn for an agrarian past, invoking “traditional values” and the antediluvian fantasies of Tolkien. She would evidently prefer that history’s moral arc had an eventual gravitational terminus, shunning as she does progressive advances on abortion and gay rights. 

“If Brothers of Italy get called ‘fascists’ it’s their own damn fault!” harrumphed John Hooper, Rome correspondent for the Economist. “If I walked around wearing a red tie with a hammer and sickle on it and went, ‘Do you know, some bastard just called me a Commie,’ I don’t think people would have much sympathy for me! They’d say, ‘Well, why the hell do you walk around with that tie?’” Meloni’s argument that her party only holds onto all of this deeply ominous fascist iconography for some kind of sentimental value just doesn’t cut it, in Hooper’s estimation, given the extremely unsettling practical effects of doing so. “They’ve spent the whole campaign with symbols that scream neofascism to all Italians,” he said.

Hooper paused briefly in thought. “Having said all that,” he began, “the second thing I would say is that fascism has become a very pointless term to be using in the 2020s. Fascism is a creed from 100 years ago which grew up in a specific historical context and there is no question that Alleanza Nazionale, and Fratelli d’Italia have not much in common with fascism or any of its methodology. They don’t want to invade anybody else’s country, they don’t want totalitarianism, there’s a whole range of things that separate them from fascism.” At the Economist, he said, he has made an effort to highlight the fascist connections whilst contextualising them and presenting her platform honestly. “We use phrases like ‘trace their origins to’,” he said. “But we’re in a different world now, a new vocabulary has been invented that is far more useful — sovereignist, nativist, alt right — and all of these have applicability to Brothers of Italy.”

Indeed, the widely cited Eco definition perhaps only gets half the story. It is in some ways overly applicable, ignoring the specific economic underpinnings of both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Nothing in Meloni’s manifesto, for instance, calls for a return to the uneasy wartime alliance of industrialists and the state characterised by Mussolini’s regime, and she disdains political violence. She is, economically, a free-marketeering Thatcherite with designs on a smaller state. She’s not after towering grey edifices of numbered padded cells, flickering Telescreens and Mandatory Reproduction Sessions.

But are the other terms on offer any better? To some, it’s a matter of preventing far-right forces from controlling how they’re represented in the mass media. Jenna Vehviläinen, the Rome correspondent for YLE, the Finnish equivalent of the BBC, told me that she faced criticism for simply using the term “far right” in her coverage. Her critics were convinced by Meloni’s own line about being of the “centre-right”, which has been parroted by such illustrious scholars of Italian postwar political history as Piers Morgan. Using stronger terms seems to have occasionally borne fruit: the Italian satirical show “Propaganda Live” started using the term “extreme right” to reference Meloni after it observed the “international press” doing the same. 

Can’t we just let Meloni be awful in her own unique way?

David Broder is the author of the forthcoming book Mussolini’s Grandchildren and has been publishing endless bleak polemics about Sunday’s result in all the great papers of record. In his work, he told me, he tends to use a precise term to describe Meloni’s platform: “post-fascist”. This does a twofold job: capturing those genuinely fascist elements of Meloni’s platform whilst distinguishing it from the original. As he went on to explain, Meloni’s postwar ancestor, the Italian Social Movement, “declared its commitment to liberal democratic values but also maintained fascist ideas and reference points, not limited to Mussolini alone” during its reforming period in the 1990s. “This,” he said, “produced a hybridisation of different political ideas into which fascism is integrated as one of many currents of rightwing thought.” 

There is, nevertheless, a worry that deploying even nuanced terms like “post-fascist” or “far/hard right” cavalierly can ultimately exhaust their persuasive force and leave little lexical leeway for the next, inevitably worse right wing radical. “We used to debate about calling the League ‘far-right’,” one agency hack in Rome told me. “If we call the League ‘far right’, what the fuck do we call Meloni?” 

Can’t we just let her be awful in her own unique way? Not only are these terms likely to be taken in bad faith by the likes of Piers Morgan, but they also, arguably, serve the motives of the people they intend to tarnish. Benjamin Harnwell, a rather unlikely source who is the Rome-based producer of Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast — which now has a franchise focusing on Italian politics — told me that the rancorous debate over whether Meloni is a “fascist” actually helped his cause (Meloni did get elected). “People switched off, and the left squandered the limited resource of people’s attention that could have better been used to energising its own electorate,” he said. 

Whether Harnwell genuinely believes that is difficult to verify: he was, after all, the onetime putative dean of an attempted “gladiator school” in the central Italian mountains whose purpose was to teach would-be populists how to convey their views to the “leftist” press without being misrepresented. Evidently, the right is sensitive to how it is judged by the hated left. But were Meloni to now go mask-off and reveal herself as a true totalitarian menace, bringing white terror to the streets, rounding up the leftists and academics, rolling fat tanks down the Appian Way in the name of a return to Caesar’s bloody glory — would it have helped had we called her a “fascist” just that one more time?

Possibly.