Commentary
The new European right seeks to define its culture, starting from Italy
In the aftermath of the September 25 electoral affirmation of the right, Italy will host a three-day meeting under the title of “Italian conservatism” at the Hotel Nazionale di Roma starting Friday through Sunday.
There was a time when one might have used the phrase “black international.” Today, more prosaically, we’re dealing with a meeting of the new right, which in the intervening years is playing a game that may be decisive for global hegemony, a turn that should not be underestimated.
In the aftermath of the September 25 electoral affirmation of the right, Italy will host a three-day meeting under the title of “Italian conservatism” at the Hotel Nazionale di Roma starting Friday through Sunday. With dozens of foreign guests and many Italians, the summit will offer a review of reactionary thought across all latitudes, thus providing a first analysis of the ideas on which the Brothers of Italy strategy was defined. Their notions will inform the choices of Giorgia Meloni’s government.
Among the organizers of the event is Nazione Futura, a sort of think tank very close to the heirs of the tricolor flame. It was next to the president of Nazione Futura, Francesco Giubilei that on the eve of the vote Vittorio Sgarbi launched an appeal to the coalition of the right to challenge their opponents on the cultural front. But, in the absence of specific commitments during the elections — if we exclude the controversy over Peppa Pig — some considerations can be drawn from the Roman meeting.
Starting with the way in which the perimeter of the forces in the field must be understood. Or, to be clearer, which right are we really talking about? Because from a strictly political point of view, both European allies of FdI participate in the event, such as the parliamentarian of the Swedish Democrats, Mattias Karlsson, and exponents of the Spaniards of Vox, both belonging to the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, ERC.
However, André Ventura, president of the Portuguese Chega party, which in Europe is part of Identità e Democrazia, a group that also brings together Le Pen and Salvini, will intervene alongside them. Then there was a large Hungarian delegation from both the party of Prime Minister Orbán, Fidesz, and the Danube Institute, which carries out a work of political-cultural weaving with the European right on behalf of the government of Budapest.
This brings us to the second element of interest. Since 2017, at the top of the Danube Institute has been John O’Sullivan, a British journalist who was among Margaret Thatcher’s collaborators. A “hard and pure” conservative who is not afraid to support Orbán’s “illiberal democracy,” alongside Meloni’s post-post-fascists.
But there are also other figures who have aroused controversies in their countries, such as the group leader of the Vox delegation to the European Parliament Jorge Buxadé Villalba, who joined the party of Santiago Abascal after a militancy in the Falange Española de las Jons, those nostalgic for Franco. He also noted his esteem for José Antonio Primo de Rivera who had been the Falange founder.
The Portuguese political scientist Jaime Nogueira Pinto also seems to have lingered on the slippery terrain of nostalgia, adhering as a teenager to the neo-fascist Movement Jovem Portugal in the years of Salazar and Caetano and indicated as one of the reference points of the extreme right-wing Lusitanian after the country’s return to democracy.
Thus, if the former Tory MP Daniel Hannan was even a forerunner of the nationalist line that led Britain to Brexit, the Belgian historian David Engels, who has long taught in Poznan in Poland, is rather a scholar of Oswald Spengler, whose theories on the “decline of the West” apply to what he defines as “the irreversible crisis of the EU.” While the University of Dallas professor Gladen Pappin, “populist in economics and conservative on the social level” is one of the proponents of the “cultural laboratory” that has made Texas one of the strongholds of the American hard right.
Which ideological profile can therefore be drawn from the Roman conference? It is difficult to say with certainty, given the strident coherence with a traditional idea of ”conservatism” that emerges from their programs. After all, one simply has to smile thinking that among the participants there is also the MEP Vincenzo Sofo, who passed from Salvini to Meloni and who in Brussels is part of the “delegation for relations with Afghanistan,” after having been one of the founders of the Italian blog “The Taliban.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-nuova-destra-europea-cerca-la-sua-cultura-partendo-dallitalia on 2022-09-29