Built on the margins of Republican Italy, the formerly ultra-minority political world of Giorgia Meloni is comfortably installed in power eight months after a clear electoral victory. The right-wing coalition dominated by his party, Fratelli d’Italia, is firmly held. The base of the president of the council in the opinion does not weaken and the opposition continues to be divided. However, for the leader of the national-conservative right and heiress of the post-fascist political tradition, the victory would not yet be complete. One of the places of power would still resist. “I want to free Italian culture from a system in which you could only work by declaring yourself from a certain political camp”, thus declared the president of the council during a political meeting in Catania, on May 26, referring to a cultural world which would still be the last citadel of the left.
The narrative calling for the emergence of a new ruling class “meritocratic and pluralistic”facing a left-wing elite “intolerant”, is a classic feature of the cultural discourses of the Melonian right. But the promises of release made by Mme Meloni took on a particular resonance at the end of May. After a series of controversy over the Turin book fair, then the announcement of right-wing changes at the head of public broadcasting and the departure of emblematic presenters, the atmosphere was thickened by the relaunch of the debate on “cultural hegemony” claimed around the executive.
Borrowed from the Italian communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), this concept is at the heart of the approach of the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano. Holding cultural hegemony theoretically amounts to mastering the forces of persuasion to obtain the consent of a society to political change. In the various families of the Italian but also French radical right, the construction of a cultural hegemony, the content of which may vary, is conceived as a political imperative inseparable from the conquest of power.
In the case of Italy in the Meloni era, Minister Sangiuliano called for the development of a “New Italian Imagination” combining the defense of a certain moral conservatism, presented as consensual but attacked by minorities, and the rehabilitation of a national feeling that recent history would have stifled. Such an approach, regularly stated but still devoid of concrete translation, would imply the idea of a resolutely conservative cultural policy aimed at encouraging the creation of works in resonance with the orientations of the power emerging from the ballot box. Building cultural hegemony would therefore amount to putting ideas before content, doctrine before creation.
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