1. The victory of the parties of the right in the Italian elections means that for the first time since the fall of the dictatorships in the 1970s a fascist party will head a European government. In October 2022, a hundred years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, a fascist will once again be prime minister of Italy.

Giorgia Meloni is a skilful politician but she is no mere ‘conservative’, as the media endlessly describe her. She helped to create the Fratelli d’Italia as a rejection of the old fascist MSI’s evolution towards integration into mainstream bourgeois parliamentary politics. Her speeches are full of classical fascist rhetoric and coded antisemitism – in defence of family and nation against ‘cosmopolitan’ financial speculators.

Responsibility for this frightening development lies firmly at the door of the mainstream parties – notably the centre-left Partito Democratico and the supposedly ‘anti-establishment’ Movimento Cinque Stelle – that ...