Uhe victory of the right-wing coalition, led by Giorgia Meloni, the head of Fratelli d’Italia, in the general elections on September 25 would appear to be confirmation, after the historic score (20.5%) obtained by the Democrats of Sweden two weeks earlier, a party without which the conservative leader Ulf Kristersson will be unable to govern, it would underline the resilience of the European far right.
The roots of the two parties go back to the same nauseating past. The Swedish training was indeed built on the rubble of a neo-Nazi party, the Nordic Reich Party. As for Giorgia Meloni, she entered politics in the 1990s under the flame of the post-fascist National Alliance party, itself heir to the Italian Social Movement founded after the war by those nostalgic for Benito Mussolini. The years passed, but the flame remained.
They finally share the same exponential growth. That of Sweden weighed only 5.7% of the vote just over ten years ago. As for Fratelli d’Italia, he only won 4.4% of the vote in the last elections, in 2018, and could come out on top on the evening of September 25. This growth is much faster than that, in France, of the Rassemblement national, however present for the second time in a row in the second round of the presidential election, and which now has in the National Assembly the largest parliamentary group of its story.
The same strategy of demonization
These three parties, on the other hand, have one thing in common: their progress in their respective electorates has accompanied a strategy of de-demonization. In the Swedish case, the will to unite all the rights expressed by the most moderate forces has greatly contributed to this. This outstretched hand echoed that, in Italy, of Silvio Berlusconi towards the post-fascist right, from 1994.
In 2022, this calculation has paid off above all for the Democrats of Sweden, who have gone from the potential role of an auxiliary force to that of a central force in the coalition, ahead of the main conservative party. Fratelli d’Italia should also benefit from this absence of a sanitary cordon. In France and Italy, this declared desire to de-demonize was also facilitated by the outbidding of a competing movement: Reconquête!, the party launched by the former cathodic polemicist Eric Zemmour, and the Lega of the former Minister of Matteo Salvini interior.
These similarities mask nuances, even divergences, which prevent to this day that the different families of the European radical right are represented in the same group in the European Parliament. The elected members of the Lega and the National Rally sit on Identity and Democracy, alongside those of Alternative für Deutschland. Those of the Democrats of Sweden and Fratelli d’Italia are among the elected members of the European Conservatives and Reformists, dominated by the ultra-conservative Polish representatives of the ruling Law and Justice party. One of their main inspirations, the Fidesz of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, even sat among the elected representatives of the European People’s Party, which brings together the center right, until his departure in 2021.
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