TV, information and culture: How Giorgia Meloni is changing the country’s narrative (to stay in power)

When Giorgia Meloni gathered her supporters to begin the campaign that would crown her as the most right-wing Prime Minister since Mussolini, they were greeted by a corridor of cardboard cut-outs. It was late April 2022 and, at the entrance of the Milan convention hall, the leader placed a list of faces she wanted to claim. These faces included philosopher Hannah Arendt, intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pope John Paul II, writers J.R.R. Tolkien, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This was followed by a list of women labelled as “patriots”: from Anita Garibaldi (the wife of Risorgimento hero Giuseppe) to the educator Maria Montessori. A veritable pantheon that Meloni chose to inspire her journey towards the ranks of the Italian government. “It is not only the left that has culture,” she has always claimed. And she repeated this before winning the election: “They claim to have a cultural hegemony, but they only have a system of power that they want to defend. We have a different project.” Meloni has a plan: in wartimes, she follows her predecessors’ former foreign policy positions, and when it comes to economic policy, she has limited freedom of action. The only battle she can carry on undisturbed is the cultural one. In other words, the fight to take control of public discourse and change the narrative, starting with public TV and moving on to museums and theatres. All the way to rewriting the founding pages of Italian history itself.

The Comeback

From the beginning, Meloni has always presented herself as the underdog. The far-right leader is now the fourth highest-ranking official in the state, but continues to describe herself as “underestimated”. She, like her supporters, are allegedly marginalised for their political ideas. They are the last heirs of the fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, which for almost half a century remained outside the constitutional arc, i.e. always in opposition. For years, they say, “they had to hide,” whereas now they can express themselves. Redemption is the recurring theme: if the Right has so far been excluded from the world of culture, they argue, it is only because of a lack of meritocracy. This communicative strategy not only works, but has also allowed her to broaden her audience. Her extrapolated and toned-down speeches on comeback, have even become famous among the younger generation. The audio of one of her rallies is circulating on TikTok: “You will never find us with our heads bowed.” It sounds like a battle cry and has gone viral like the now famous identity speech at the square in Rome in 2019 (“I am Giorgia. I am a mother”): detractors have remixed it to mock her, but it turned into a catchphrase that made her a household name. A boomerang. Meloni herself boasts of this in her autobiography, as she explains that she opposes the “cultural hegemony that progressive ideology has been able to impose since the post-war period.” She wants to be a barrier against that phantom domination.

Television

The first battleground was RAI, the public broadcaster. Here, the governance of the company is controlled by politics. The CEO is appointed by the Ministry of the Treasury and the board is elected by Parliament, the government, and the employees’ assembly. It was the law of former centre-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi that crystallised the spoils system. So, immediately after coming to power, Meloni started pushing her most trusted people into positions of authority. The first was Giampaolo Rossi, the new director-general, who has come under fire in the past for his anti-Vax and pro-Putin remarks. The Prime Minister then renewed all (or almost all) news directorates, proceeding with the traditional distribution. So Tg1, the main news programme, was entrusted to a Meloni-friendly outsider (Gian Paolo Chiocci). It is precisely the first network’s news services that have triggered protests from opposition members, who now provocatively speak of “TeleMeloni”. There are numerous examples: an overly enthusiastic advertisement to launch the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party; the title of an in-depth report linking the arrival of an economic bonus and the European elections; and a celebratory report on Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Meloni’s party. In addition to this, there are the new executives’ public appearances. Like Paolo Corsini, director of the RAI’s Approfondimento division, who from the stage at the last party convention announced his political affiliation (“We (people) of FdI”) and attacked Democratic Party (PD) leader Elly Schlein. The transformation has also been drastic in terms of programming. One after the other, historical presenters, who have always been associated with the centre-left, have quit. This is the case of Fabio Fazio’s programme, a highly successful Sunday show on Rai3. It has moved to Nove channel along with its lucrative advertising contracts and now competes with the state-owned company with record viewership shares. Among those who have not been retained, there is intellectual Corrado Augias, who has repeatedly clashed with the right, and journalist Lucia Annunziata (now a candidate in the European elections for the PD). And Bianca Berlinguer, daughter of the historic Communist Party leader, who took her programme to Mediaset, the Berlusconi family network. If many have left, just as many have /arrived. The arrival of actor Pino Insegno, who never misses an opportunity to recall his friendship with Meloni, caused a stir. His programme went so badly that they had to move him to other projects. Marcello Foa, the former RAI president defined as a sovereigntist (on his blog he wrote “the sovereigntists are right”[1]) made a comeback. He hosts a programme on Radio1, which started amidst controversy with the hosting of an anti-Vax doctor which the same network had previously distanced itself from. Finally, entertainment: a drama on the fall of Mussolini in 1943, another on the fascist inventor Guglielmo Marconi, and a special episode on the poet dear to the right, Gabriele D’Annunzio, have aired. In short, if Meloni wanted to take over RAI, she is behaving just like those who came before her. It happens all the time, is in fact her defence. “We have a public service that has been rebalanced after years during which I, as part of the opposition, had to suffer the consequences” the prime minister justified herself, recalling how, during the Draghi government, her party was not on the board of RAI. In the meantime, there is no shortage of episodes reminiscent of the interference seen from Silvio Berlusconi’s time: various pressures against investigative programmes, or the intervention of the Minister of Culture for the mimicking of an orchestra conductor close to FdI. And not only that: for the first time, a right-wing employees’ union has been created to oppose the historic Usigrai trade union[2], one of the few bodies calling for the company’s independence from politics. These are all signs of an occupation, so much so that it was the Undersecretary for Culture Gianmarco Mazzi who admitted as early as February 2023: “It is right to change the country’s narrative”[3].

Museums and theatres

The other battleground where the yearning for change has manifested itself is that of cultural institutions. At the beginning of 2024, appointments to some of the most important museums (from the Uffizi in Florence to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan) were officially announced, and not without controversy. If the last selection had resulted in seven all-foreign guides, the picture today is reversed. The procedure instituted by the new Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, a journalist who went from the leadership of Tg2 newscast directly to a government post, had a novelty: the candidate had to have a minimum level of Italian (B2). Furthermore, the selection committee consisted of only one art historian and, out of five, two members were ministry officials (thus considered to be manoeuvrable). As a result, the appointments have arrived and there is no trace of foreigners, to the delight of the government. Another cause for debate was the choice of theatre managers. At the Teatro di Roma, for example, the newly elected right-wing board members tried to impose their own director with a “coup” and the situation was only resolved by the creation of a new position role to also accommodate those excluded[4].  Meloni accused the left of “cronyism”: “The times when you need a party membership to get somewhere are over.” The words might seem to announce a revolution, but in reality, it is a game of musical chairs, and not without its problems. The San Carlo Theatre in Naples is a case in point. In order to free up the post, promised by the government to former RAI CEO Carlo Fuortes, a decree was issued to set the retirement age for opera foundation superintendents at 70 years. Unfortunately, the only case was that of the Frenchman Stéphane Lissner, then in charge at the San Carlo. He appealed against the ad personam law and the court mandated his reinstatement[5]. This was hardly a setback for the ministry, which after a few months found Fuortes a position at the helm of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

The fight against the hegemony of others does not end with replacing names. Minister of Culture Sangiuliano is trying all avenues to spread a new culture. In November 2023, an exhibition on J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Lord of the Rings” and one of the prime minister’s favourite writers, opened in Rome. Indeed, she found the time to go visit the exhibition in person. According to the far right, in his works, Tolkien depicts the opposition between the “old world and the new world,” exalting “the human”. That is why he is in the pantheon and Sangiuliano wanted to dedicate the initiative in the capital, financed by his department, to him. The minister maintains that his goal is to “liberate culture” and not to pit left and right against each other. Yet, in January, he went so far as to claim that Dante Alighieri is “the founder of right-wing thought in Italy.” He earned a lot of mockery and then preferred not to talk about it anymore. “The right has culture,” he said, “it just needs to affirm it.”

History

Then there is another battleground of the cultural control operation, no less visible, but more difficult to grasp. That is, the far right’s attempt to question historical values and truths. When the President of the Council, on the day of the commemoration of the Bologna Massacre[6], remembers the dead without ever acknowledging the neo-fascist responsibility for it (established by the trials), she is trying to change the narrative of historical facts that have now been established. And she does so, likewise, when on April 25^th - the commemoration of Italy’s liberation from Nazi-fascism - she limits herself to denying “fascist nostalgia” and calls for the celebration of “national harmony,” without ever declaring herself anti-fascist. Another little attempt to change the common national feeling, by partly revising the country’s history.

Another example is the fight against the Mafia. Meloni has always said that she started to get involved in politics after the Via d’Amelio Massacre, in which Judge Paolo Borsellino was killed. A well-known Social Movement voter, Borsellino was assassinated on 19 July 1992, 57 days after the assassination of Giovanni Falcone, his colleague and friend. Both are symbols of the fight against the Mafia and the photo of them is a manifesto for the whole country fighting for the rule of law. Yet, Meloni and her loyalists often prefer to remember Borsellino and almost never Falcone, who was far from the political positions of the right. After thirty years of the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi, whose right-hand man Marcello Dell’Utri was convicted of external conspiracy in Mafia association[7], claiming the fight against the Mafia on the right is still a novelty. But that is not enough. The proclamations were criticised by family members of clan victims such as Salvatore Borsellino, Paolo’s brother: “Meloni is destroying the legislation that gave the judiciary the weapons to fight organised crime,” he said. The Prime Minister is not only targeting laws. In fact, it is significant who she has chosen for the chair of the important Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission. It is Chiara Colosimo, accused of being close to Luigi Ciavardini, a former terrorist of the neo-fascist-inspired subversive group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari and already sentenced to 30 years in prison for the Bologna Massacre. It is an “at the very least inappropriate” move, according to the opposition. For Meloni, it is all about putting her own people in key positions and radically changing the narrative, even in the fight against criminal organisations.

Rights

Speaking of public narrative, the President of the Council never misses an opportunity to stress that she is a woman and a mother – thus setting herself up as a champion of the traditional family. For instance, she is pushing for a law to make surrogacy a universal crime. It is already illegal in Italy and it is not possible to create a transnational crime, but this discourse is for propaganda. It is precisely on the battles for rights that Meloni has found herself in trouble. While last November, immediately after the killing of 18-year-old Giulia Cecchettin[8] by her boyfriend, thousands of women demonstrated to demand a revolution, yet the Prime Minister failed to interpret those voices. On the contrary, she was overshadowed by the victim’s sister [9] who spoke out condemning patriarchy – a word that had hardly never before been uttered on TV in Italy to condemn male violence against women. A word that the government (the Minister for Equal Opportunities in particular) finds very hard to use. All while Meloni, the first female Prime Minister in the history of the Republic, still claims on be called in the masculine form: [male] “il” “President of the Council,” and not [female] “la”. Because for her it is not just a grammatical issue, but another piece in the plan to impose a different narrative. And because Meloni knows that, in order to hold on to power for as long as possible, the secret is also to win the cultural battle.

This article was first published here: fr.boell.org

The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.