Category: Elections

No, Giorgia Meloni Is Not a Fascist

Mike CotéLeave a comment

This past weekend, Italy held snap parliamentary elections to replace its unpopular government. Although results are still being finalized, it looks as though the big winner of the day was the right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party. Brothers of Italy received the greatest share of the vote, twenty-six percent, and together with Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, they seem poised to build a government with popular backing.

If you’ve heard anything about the results of this democratic process from the mainstream media, however, it has likely been descriptions of Brothers of Italy and particularly Meloni herself as “hard right,” “far-right,” or even “fascist.” She has been labeled “a danger to Italy and the rest of Europe” by The Guardian, and the New York Times called her “the first far-right nationalist to govern Italy since Mussolini.” Reading those pieces, you might expect Meloni’s views to echo Il Duce’s famous fascist dictum: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” In reality, this media framing relies purely on conjecture, guilt by association, bad history, and bias.

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The Buck Stops There

Mike Coté1 Comment

President Biden has a bad habit of deflecting blame and shifting responsibility, something which may come back to haunt his party in November.

“The buck stops here.” This adage, meant to claim ultimate responsibility and declaim ‘passing the buck’, was a fixture of the Harry Truman White House. The President had it emblazoned on a desk sign, putting himself squarely on the top of the decision-making hierarchy and thus taking credit – and blame – for the state of nation at home and abroad. This attitude has been a model for the office ever since, for good and ill. It has (less often than I would like) led to Presidents taking responsibility for the bad choices of their administrations, but it has also helped along a massive expansion of the power of the President to make decrees from the Oval Office. When the two sides of the coin – making executive decisions and claiming responsibility for them – are both present, things can be balanced. When that coin is weighted heavily in the direction of making choices but denying responsibility for them, political disaster tends to ensue. In bad times for the country, that faulty balance becomes even more noticeable, as rhetoric and reality clash. In the current administration, this issue is not just noticeable, but is a siren blaring at full volume.

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A Brief Note on Iran’s “Election”

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As you may have read, Iran held its “election” for president last Friday; it was won by a notorious human rights abuser who detests the United States and Israel and is currently under American sanctions – Ebrahim Raisi. I put “election” in quotes for the simple reason that Iranian elections are no elections at all. They are as rigged as they come, from the government-approved candidate list, to the deliberate suppression of all opposition groups, to the likelihood of a falsified vote count. You may have issues with American elections – whether they are voter suppression or voter fraud – but it is clear that what passes for an “election” in Iran is nothing of the sort; it is merely a rubber-stamping exercise meant to ratify the choice of the theocratic fascist regime of Ayatollah Khamenei.

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