Giorgia Meloni’s first 100 days have proved her critics wrong

Macho Italy’s first woman prime minister Giorgia Meloni has now governed for 100 days and I cannot help but notice the enormous elephant in the room: the failure of the global media even to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, how wrong they were to warn the world that Italy was on the verge of a far-right, ergo fascist, take-over.  

During the election campaign and immediate aftermath the crème de la crème of the world’s media were chock-a-block with warnings that Meloni and her party – Brothers of Italy – were the equivalent of a Biblical plague of locusts in jackboots about to engulf Italy and from there Europe.  

These awful people were the heirs to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, we were relentlessly told. They were authoritarians, ergo dictators, who threaten democracy – it was insisted – and nationalists, ergo deplorables, itching to destroy the noble serenity of the supranational EU.  

A much discussed piece in the New York Times entitled ‘The Future is Italy – and It’s Bleak’ claimed that Meloni’s programme is ‘nakedly reactionary’.