When Giorgia Meloni of the conservative Brothers of Italy was elected head of Italy’s coalition government, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual Eurolefty sorts and their media cheering corner about how radical, populist, etc. etc. she was. Plus the usual accusations of fascism, due Brothers of Italy having a bit of that DNA from one of the party’s it joined with being the successor party to the successor party of Il Duce. (It’s Italy. You can’t really tell all the twists and turns of party lineage without a dense color-coded flow chart.)
Wait, you can’t tell it with one, either.
But Meloni has generally governed as a fairly stand-issue slightly rightist leader by European standards. But recently she’s been saying and doing things that show she has a bit more starch than the usual Euroweenie leader.
First up: She announced that Italy’s pulling out of China’s debt-trap Belt-And-Road circus.
Italy will pull out of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the government has confirmed.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration notified Beijing that it would cease participating in the BRI ahead of a deadline at the year’s end.
Italy was the only major Western nation to sign up to the BRI, one of China’s most ambitious trade and infrastructure projects, in 2019.
The move was heavily criticised by the US and others at the time.
Launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the BRI aims to invest an estimated $1tn (£794bn; €925bn) across Asia and Europe. Projects including new and upgraded railways and ports aim to connect China with Europe and other parts of Asia.
Snip.
Only a fraction of the up to €20bn worth of investment in Italy promised by Mr Xi in 2019 has materialised.
Italian exports to China were worth €16.4bn last year, compared to €13bn in 2019.
By contrast, Chinese exports to Italy rose to €57.5bn from €31.7bn over the same period.
The bill benefited China a lot more than Italy. Indeed, Chinese investment in Italy actually dropped after signing the Belt and Road agreement, from $650 million in 2019 to just $33 million in 2021. (I suspect Flu Manchu had a lot to do with that, but, well, that was China’s fault too.)
Now Meloni has come out and stated that Islam is incompatible with Italy’s values.
Giorgia Meloni said, “In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!”
Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni scoffed at Islamic culture and said that there is no place for it in Europe. “I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization,” she said.
The premier added, “The Islamic cultural centers in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!
The comments come after the Italian prime minister hosted a political festival organised by her far-right party- the Brothers of Italy- in Rome which was attended by British prime minister Rishi Sunak. In his speech, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system while warning that the threat of growing number of refugees could “overwhelm” parts of Europe.
A whole lot of people in Europe are thinking the same thing, but few have stated it as bluntly as Meloni, and virtually none among EU country Prime Ministers. (Though Hungary’s Viktor Orban has come closest.)
Despite the Russo-Ukrainian War and the growing recession, unlimited Islamic immigration into traditionally Christian European countries is the hot-button topic European elites have been desperate to avoid talking about, and the one in which governing elite groupthink seems farthest away from the actual will of the people.
Expect it to continue to be a hot topic as long as European leaders continue to ignore the consensus among citizens of EU nations that they don’t want Muslim illegal aliens coming to their country.
Tags: Brothers of Italy, China, EU, Foreign Policy, Giorgia Meloni, Illegal Aliens, immigration, Islam, Italy, Jihad
The “Brothers of Italy” party is always quoted as “far right” with absolutely no evidence presented of what “far right” policies they actually propose or support.
I guess that’s how sneaky secretly far right parties sneak around everything the ever vigilant far left europeeen media can do, by not actually saying or doing anything far right.
But the far left europeeen media can tell, because they oppose the far left candidates the media supports, and worse yet, defeat them by sneakily gaining popular support through supporting measures the voting public want.
This is what you get when white liberal guilt runs unchecked. Even the slightest deviation from their neurotic fantasies gets you tarred as far right. Which is in fact permission for violence.
“Of course, this could never happen here in the US”, say the deluded leftist morons.
It has already happened. Just check out Minneapolis, MN, where the Somali “immigrants” have staked out a huge chunk of turf in the SE portion of the city known as “Little Mogadishu”. It is a de facto no-go zone for the police, and the area is ruled by several small warlords using Sharia law as their guide. This is also true in several smaller MN cities where the federal and state governments have colluded with various and sundry church groups (!) to import floods of Somali’s.
For any box-wine soaked liberal woman with severe daddy issues who completely deny that any of this is true I suggest a stroll down some of the streets that are strictly Somali-controlled without a chador or burkha and see what happens.
It’s my understanding, despite the well-publicized rhetoric, that Meloni has done little to nothing to actually stem immigration into Italy. There are some genuine excuses: EU interference, obstinacy by the permanent bureaucracy, and Italy has all that coastline so close to Africa.
Whatever her reasons, it’s hard to cheer for her rhetoric when it’s seemingly disconnected from her goverment’s action.
The left always tends to forget about the very same linguistic drift thing that they themselves exploit. Once upon a time, the terms “idiot”, “imbecile”, and “cretin” were technical terms of art, meant to be neutral terms without the sting of things like “halfwit” and “dummy”.
Within a generation or two of that, the innocent technical terms came to be pejorative, just like “retarded” and all their other successors.
Ever stop to think about why that happens?
It’s because of the sad fact that it’s the underlying object, not the label, that makes the meaning. You could call an idiot or an imbecile anything, and it wouldn’t be very long at all before those terms became insults. Why? Because, my friends, that’s how this works: The object is the important thing, not the label.
You can call people like Reagan or Trump “far-right Nazis” all you like, but the only thing you’re doing is turning “far-right Nazi” into something that means “Someone with common sense who loves America”.
The symbol inevitably takes on the underlying nature of the object it is used to label. This is something the left cannot grasp, because if they did, they’d be a hell of a lot more careful with the way they do these things. Look at how unloaded the word “racist” has become, in many circles. When everyone’s a “racist”…? Nobody is.
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