Commentary
The horror show that won’t go away
Why is Meloni defending Salvini, charged with kidnapping and facing six years in prison? It’s not because of loyalty. Her interests are propaganda and power.
It’s not human solidarity or coalition loyalty that lies behind Meloni's raucous defense of Salvini, who has been charged with a very serious crime, carried out and freely admitted right before our eyes back when the head of the Lega had an office at the Palazzo Chigi and the current Prime Minister was in the opposition. The truth is that the two are rivals fighting each other in a perennial election campaign, every day and on every possible occasion, whether appointments or important political choices, to claw more support to themselves from the same pool of voters.
There are other reasons why the Prime Minister is once again casting away that “institutionalist” disguise, ill-fitting from the start. First, there is the fundamental principle she shares with him: that migrants are to be understood first and foremost as propaganda fodder, a threat that doesn’t exist on the plane of reality but which works very well, and always did, for campaigning purposes. Then, they also share another key tenet: the contempt for anything that might even hint at the separation of powers.
At a time when the Prime Minister is designing an institutional architecture centered on the absolute power of one figure elected by the people, it is entirely consistent for her to reiterate that no limits in the form of legality checks can ever be tolerated. And finally, there is the insistence on the only “policy” that this right wing is able to imagine in the face of a phenomenon such as migration, that an ever-increasing list of decrees, less and less constitutional, cannot seriously address.
It’s the “policy” of fear, which works for her voters at home so it must also apply to those who set out on a journey to survive: you’d better not try.
The Prime Minister who just a few years ago was suggesting shooting at migrant boats from the air, whose Interior Minister had no qualms about blaming the deaths of migrants in sea crossings on the dead themselves, clearly sees Salvini’s brutality – who during the first Conte government left migrants in conditions of prolonged suffering – as the reasonable forerunner to her own idea of deportations to Albania. You’d better not try.
It’s cruel, and it’s also ineffective. Just like putting out a video completely out of line with institutional responsibilities and in an unhinged tone doesn’t do anything to ward off the risk of a conviction for the vice-prime minister. That is a real possibility and would be an additional problem for the government. Here, however, we must take a wider perspective. Because Salvini is only the latest on the long list of names that paint a picture of the failures of the right in power.
Sangiuliano, Lollobrigida, Delmastro, Toti, Santanchè – they’re all on it, to name just a few. None of them are victims of a plot by the opposition to get the other side in trouble. The right is shooting itself in the foot, often simply by being itself. Another reason this is the case is because the center-left won’t get into the game, still in the process of defining itself after the electoral suicide that was no less than two years ago. They seem so stuck in the past that, after Draghi's reappearance onto the stage, some of them won’t abandon the hope of a new palace coup that would install a very not-new protagonist.
Meanwhile, the opposition doesn’t do more than watch the disasters caused by others from the sidelines. It’s a horror show, but one that may get even worse and there’s no reason why it would be short-lived.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/lhorror-show-che-non-finisce-da-solo on 2024-09-15