How Does Italy's Far Right Meloni Government View Turkey?

Italy held elections on September 25th. The turnout was 64%. With 26% of the vote, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d'Italia (Fratelli d'Italia) party, is almost certain to lead her country as prime minister. She will be the country's first far-right prime minister since Benito Mussolini and the first woman prime minister. Meloni rejects any connection to fascism, but her party retains many symbols and values from Italy's fascist past. Meloni's rise to power has spooked markets. The outcome of the parliamentary elections will have dramatic implications for the country, the European Union and NATO.

In fact, Meloni has shed his old populist image. Instead, he has presented himself to the Italian public as a more traditional conservative. His policy preferences are generally in line with both the EU and NATO discourses. However, Meloni's coalition government partner, the Russia-friendly Lega Party and its leader Matteo Salvini, are making the Western world nervous.

Meloni has clear goals of increasing the power of the executive over parliament and consolidating his own position. His conservative nature and his agenda of constitutional reforms are expected to cause controversy in Italy and Europe. Initially, however, Meloni will bet on the stability of his country. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, some Italians found it difficult to accept the destruction that the ideology of fascism brought to their country. Rather, they tended to argue that Mussolini's collaboration with Nazi Germany was wrong. In the past, the far right in Italy, or what we might call the ex-Fascists, have always been represented in parliament but not in governments, even if they did not have significant vote shares. More precisely, no government, not even those formed by the Christian Democrats, was willing to make the far right a partner in government. The far right has always been isolated.

The isolation of the far right ended with the collapse of the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats after the end of the Cold War, creating a political vacuum that opened up space for a new kind of populism. Italian voters began to move towards the center. Billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi evolved into a mainstream center-right politician, driven by his rivalry with center-left leader Romano Prodi; Prodi and Berlusconi began to alternate prime ministerships. In this environment, the far right also moved closer to the center as part of the National Alliance. 

Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, struggled to maintain its credibility in the eyes of the public after the fall of Berlusconi's last government in 2011 due to the Eurozone crisis. Italy's established political parties failed to respond effectively to the crisis, disappointing voters. The new, smaller protest parties have benefited the most. Meloni, a youth minister in Berlusconi's last cabinet, founded the Brothers of Italy party in 2012 as part of a broader rebellion against Italy's traditional elites.

Meloni's right-wing politics failed to take off. Voters across Italy also began to flock to Salvini's right-wing, anti-EU, nationalist Lega party. It won more than 17 percent of the vote in national elections in 2018 and more than 34 percent in the European Parliament elections a year later. Meloni and his party, which has been excluded from all coalition governments formed in the last 10 years, has managed to maintain its place as the main voice of opposition in the country. Meloni preferred to stay outside the coalition that formed the technocrat government formed by Draghi, who was also the president of the European Central Bank for a period. Draghi's policies as Prime Minister were centrist and pro-EU. Draghi tried to get Europe's support to reform the judicial system, public services and other institutions to help Italy overcome its mounting external debt and the effects of the pandemic, but he failed to achieve his goals and the government fell. Thus, Meloni began to be seen as the new prime minister in the eyes of voters who were now looking for a new face. This expectation was reflected in the election results.

The long-term viability of the Meloni government depends on whether the markets accept his leadership. Therefore, the expectation that he will strive to position himself and his government as much as possible in the center and not on the "far right or fascist line" is shared by the political and economic world in Italy and Europe. For example, before the elections, he assured European allies that the government he would form if he won the elections would continue to support Ukraine. He also declared his firm support for Italy's membership of the Eurozone. Meloni's joint election manifesto, agreed with Salvini and Berlusconi, also reassured moderates in general: "respect for Italy's commitments as part of the Atlantic Alliance" and "full commitment to European integration".

In the end, Giorgia Meloni emerged as a nationalist right-wing politician who, as a young man, had been an admirer of Mussolini and advocated torture by the police, the sinking of migrants' ships, and making divorce and abortion more difficult. However, it was noteworthy that in his speech after winning the elections, he criticized France in response to Macron, who had previously criticized him, emphasizing that Europe does not have a migrant problem, but that Africa has an ongoing problem of European exploitation. 

Meloni's success story, from youth wing leader to prime minister, has been on the European agenda. The vacuum created by the inability of the center politics in Italy, worn out by coalition governments, to find solutions to everyday problems was filled by the extreme radical right under Meloni's leadership. The recent elections in Italy were a lesson in the sense that they showed that if the center parties failed to fulfill their responsibilities properly, extremists could be the choice of the voters and an extremist party could come to power.

Meloni's approach to Turkey differs from traditional Italian politics. Unlike Berlusconi, Meloni, as Erdoğan emphasized during his visit to Italy in 2018, does not favor Turkey's membership to the European Union and stands on an oppositional line. 

Meloni, who gathered his party at that time, organized a meeting on Turkey. In this meeting, he invited the European Union to "wake up" about Turkey! He summarized his party's view as follows: "The Party of the Brothers of Italy believes that Turkey is not part of Europe as we understand it in terms of history, geography and culture." At the same time, he did not hesitate to express two slogans.

"No to Turkey entering Europe!"

"No to the Islamization of Europe!"

Meloni, who is now expected to speak with the responsibility of power, will undoubtedly not repeat these views in his first contact with Erdoğan, but in the long run, if he is able to retain power, Meloni and his party will make Turkey's relations with Europe more difficult than easier.