Populism vs Reality

The radical right in power

Giorgia Meloni and Rishi Sunak share a joke at the July NATO summit (Photo by Paul Ellis - Getty Images)

A few weeks ago, tribune of the people Professor Matthew Goodwin wrote a post proposing a new radical right populist party to replace the Conservatives. There is no chance of this happening before the election. The only person on the right with the necessary name recognition to take 10% or more of the Conservative vote is Nigel Farage, and if he was going to try he’d do it via Reform which, while struggling, is at least an existing entity.

But it is true that the Conservatives are deeply split, as per my article on their post-election future, between the radical right “National Conservativism” of MPs like Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger, and Lee Anderson, and the more conventional centre-right. The Cates/Kruger platform is the same as Goodwin’s: big reductions in “legal” migration as well as further crackdowns on asylum seekers; a vague anti-elitist sentiment; and moral panics, with sex education in schools a current favourite.

If we had a different electoral system then the Tories would already be split into radical right and centre-right parties, as is the case across Europe. Depending on what happens next year it’s not impossible we end up with that happening anyway.

In his post Goodwin cites Giorgia Meloni’s “Brothers of Italy” party as an example of how his approach can win elections. Her triumph last year as head of a coalition including Matteo Salvini’s “Lega” party and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” was indeed spectacular. And her agenda during the campaign was similar to Goodwin’s. On immigration she even proposed a naval blockade to stop any migrants reaching Italy. She attacked “wokeness” in all its forms, with a heavy focus on restoring the traditional family. And, like every populist in history, attacked elites at home and globally, with particular venom directed at Brussels.

But Goodwin, and his fellow travellers in the UK, have chosen to ignore what she’s actually done in government, presumably because it raises some major questions about their worldview. This is not only because in practice she has been far less radical than promised, but also because her approach highlights Anglo-populism’s biggest lacuna -  its complete lack of an economic policy.   

Meloni’s “Technocratic Nationalism”

Immigration is the perfect example of how Meloni has switched since her campaign. She did not launch a naval blockade, as that would have been obviously illegal, as well as unethical. The limited measures she has taken have been entirely ineffectual – more than 100,000 asylum seekers have already landed on Italian shores this year, over double last year’s numbers (a figure that puts the 19,000 who’ve arrived in Britain over the same period into perspective).

Rather like Rishi Sunak admitting that the channel crossing problem is more complex than his “stop the boats” slogan implies, the Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi recently had to acknowledge: "there are no miraculous solutions to resolve the migration phenomenon".

Meloni has played a major role in brokering an immensely complex EU deal on migration, which has made the cross-European approach tougher but also required compromise. For instance, countries will be able to deport asylum seekers to “safe” third party countries but, in contrast to the UK’s Rwanda policy, only if they have some kind of connection to that country (refugee charities still worry Italy, and others, will seek to bend this rule as far as possible).

It also involves a redistribution mechanism so that countries not on the border will either take some asylum seekers from those who are, like Italy, or pay €20k per migrant into a central EU pot. And it allows border countries to use more rapid procedures to assess claims. But none of this will stop the boats coming. The rightist governments in both Hungary and Poland have spoken out against the deal.

At the same time Meloni has dramatically increased the number of work visas on offer to economic migrants, by 425k between now and 2025, and widened the range of jobs they will be allowed to do. Construction workers, electricians and plumbers are amongst the roles added to the list. By 2025 Italy will be giving out similar numbers of work visas to the UK. Goodwin castigates the Tories for not acknowledging public concern on the issue but either doesn’t know or doesn’t mention that his prime example of a successful populist is doing the same thing.

Meloni has ended up in the same position as Sunak: needing to push immigration up to sustain an ailing economy and making a lot of aggressive noises about small boats while not being able to stop them.

Boosting number of builders and tradespeople is particularly critical for Italy right now because it is struggling to spend just under €200 billion of EU funds allocated for post-pandemic recovery. Labour shortages are one major reason, along with weak local administration and historic problems with bureaucracy, why the government has found insufficient projects on which to spend all the cash, despite the need to boost the economy.

Despite her tough rhetoric on the EU before getting elected Meloni knows full well she needs this money. As one Italian official told the Politico website: “no Italian prime minister can afford to waste a lottery ticket.” She has taken personal control of the negotiations and is trying to get the EU to give her more latitude in how the money is spent.

While taking this pragmatic approach on critical policy issues, she has been able to keep her poll ratings solid with her base via the strategic use of small but potently symbolic socially conservative policies. Perhaps the most contentious have been attacks on the rights of lesbian and gay people. For instance, the Interior Ministry demanded that Milan stop registering births to gay parents.

There have been a spate of culture wars – literally – with rows over requiring more museums and galleries to appoint Italian Directors and put on more patriotic exhibitions, as well as over interference in the state broadcaster RAI. A new general director was put in place who is a known supporter of “Brothers of Italy” and several left-leaning stars have not had their contracts continued at the channel.

Meloni has even sued Placebo frontman Brian Molko for calling her a “racist fascist” on stage. She has that instinctive ability to create the kind of small scale but emotive news that the media can’t get enough of (because people click on it). Last week she paid the bill of an Italian couple who’d run off without paying from an Albanian restaurant, and made sure it got widespread coverage.

This mixture of typical EU compromise politics on the big issues while keeping supporters happy with ideological distractions has been christened “techno-sovereignism” by Le Monde, though “technocratic nationalism” is probably a better translation. It’s a description that could easily be applied to Sunak’s Conservatives – who, when they do anything useful, do so as a result of engagement with international institutions and through compromise (e.g. the Windsor Framework or AUKUS) but try to keep their right-wing happy by sticking asylum seekers on barges or pretending they’re going to send shoplifters to prison. It works better for Meloni, for now at least, because she’s new, and can attack the status quo without having to acknowledge any responsibility for its creation. Plus she has a more authentic populist persona than Sunak.

Populist Economics

The biggest policy difference between the UK government and Meloni’s is economic. While Sunak had stuck closely to standard liberal economics, the Italian PM has been much more interventionist. Most notably her government announced a 40% windfall tax on bank profits, out of the blue, earlier this month in response to anger over higher interest rates not being passed on to savers. They had to reverse quickly, softening the policy, after a stock market run on Italian banks, but they still intend to take a version of the tax forward in the upcoming budget, to help pay for promised family tax cuts.

Meloni has also taken a 20% stake for the government in Telecom Italia, and appointed a number of new bosses to Italian state run companies. She has passed a decree allowing her to block technology transfers outside of the EU; banned lab grown meat; and even started a fight with Ryanair and other carriers over an attempt to fix prices for internal flights in a move the budget airline called “Soviet”.

All this led an exasperated Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph’s World Economy Editor, to accuse her of doing a “passably good imitation of a neo-Marxist Corbynista” (while, somewhat confusingly, also comparing her to Liz Truss). All of which highlights the critical difference between Anglo and Euro populism. The Telegraph, and the Tory membership, are quite happy with attacks on wokeness and immigrants, but not with any challenge to the principles of liberal market economics.

Anglo-populism is all cultural. It’s the same in the States. Trump is a master of culture wars and has created an extraordinary personality cult, but he’s absolutely not about to start taxing banks should he win again. It’s a major reason why Euro-populism has so much more appeal to the young while Anglo-populism does better amongst boomers. I noted in a post about Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid in France last year that she had proposed to scrap income tax for under 30s. Can you imagine the Conservative party doing that?

Goodwin, to be fair to him, does argue for a more populist approach to economics in the UK:

“Masses of voters, put simply, are sick and tired of big global corporates, the 1%, and High Net Worths taking the p*ss when it comes to tax avoidance, evasion, dominating and corrupting the property market, and viewing Britain as a private playground rather than a national community to which they have a sense of responsibility and obligation.”

True enough, and certainly a source of frustration largely untapped by the current parties. But he – like all the speakers at the UK National Conservatism conference – recoils from the logical next step. He’s clear that his approach would not include more redistribution, but at the same time slams the Tories for not having “a serious levelling up strategy”. I’d love to read Goodwins’s proposals for boosting regional economies that avoided any additional redistribution.

To some degree Meloni is caught in the same bind. She talks about helping families but not through “welfarism” – which is, I guess, what Goodwin means by redistribution. Yet it’s not viable to regenerate poorer areas without at least some use of the welfare system to transfer cash from the wealthiest to those who need it most – whether that’s Blackpool or Sicily.

Her (rather cackhanded) attempts to take on corporate interests have led to internal criticism from her coalition which includes the more economically liberal Forza Italia. Some of their ministers openly questioned the Bank tax. Moreover, as the quick U-turn on that tax showed she cannot buck the markets any more than Truss could, nor can she drift too far from the EU consensus. As with her stances on immigration, there are real limits to dirigiste populism in an interconnected world.  

But she does at least have a narrative around standing up for the interests of the people against those of the large corporations. The Tories do not and cannot because they represent those interests. A new party could, in theory, but in reality are dependent on a funding and media eco-system which would oppose that approach. GB News is owned by a billionaire hedge funder, Paul Marshall, who is currently looking to buy the Telegraph. The Sun and Talk TV are owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and the Mail by billionaire Lord Rothermere. The National Conservatism conference was organised by a group including big fundraisers for US Republican candidates. The right in the UK and US is just too tied to liberal economics to allow for any deviation. UKIP, the one briefly successful attempt at a radical right insurgency here, was (most of the time) fairly conventionally Thatcherite on economics, and Farage is, of course, a stockbroker by trade.

Reality always wins

For now Meloni has retained her poll ratings and is the dominant figure in Italian politics. With Berlusconi dead and Salvini regularly making a fool of himself, neither of the other parties in her coalition can risk an election. The centre-left Democratic Party has recovered a little from it’s post-election slump but have an unproven new leader, Elly Schlein. As a half-Jewish, bisexual, upper middle class, former left-wing activist, she is already the victim of conspiracy theories and vicious invective from the right.

But ultimately Meloni will not be able to fulfil any of her promises. The boats won’t stop. The traditional family will not be restored. The modern world will continue to exist in a form her supporters wish it did not. If she is unable to improve the struggling Italian economy she will, soon enough, end up the victim of voter anger, and inevitable betrayal narratives from within her own ranks. The Brothers of Italy are not the first radical right party to win a share of power in Western Europe, and they won’t be the last, but the path tends to be the same.

Meanwhile in the UK the barriers to a successful populist party remain high. Our electoral system has neither the flexibility of PR nor the rigidity of the US majoritarian model which allowed for the wholesale takeover of the Republicans. The right-wing media ecosystem is quite happy to support cultural populism but not the economic kind that would threaten their interests, even though it would broaden the potential supporter base of any party. For now, at least, Professor Goodwin’s fantasy will remain just that.