The Neofascist Boogie

Zorba dancing the Sirtaki

In this week's Camino a Ítaca we take a look at the concerning trend to the right across the old continent. Click over to read the original in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo)

Europe, land of traditional dances where ballet was born and from whence the waltz went global. Here in Spain, Flamenco may be better known outside the peninsula, but that doesn’t mean that the Jota is any less important. The Irish come to Santa Maria every year for the Caceres Irish Fleadh to dance the Jig and in Greece the Sirtaki became famous thanks to Zorba. We’ve seen Ukrainians jump in the air and spread out their legs between Russian missile strikes when dancing the Hopak and the chorus girls in France became famous the world over for dancing the Can-Can.

Over in Italy they have been renowned for the Tarantella for thousands of years, but this past weekend they started dancing a new dance, one that hadn’t been widely seen in the Via Apia since the thirties. A dance that is gaining acceptance and popularity across the world and has spread like a virus from country to country in Europe. Hungary, Poland, Sweden and now Italy have joined a growing number of countries that have willfully taken a hard goosestep to the right.

Major newspapers across the continent have been tepidly wringing their hands, doubting whether or not to call Meloni’s overwhelming electoral victory a win for the Far Right. Yet her party’s roots can clearly be traced back to the Italian Social Movement which was founded in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians who had played a significant role in the Republic of Salò, the pro-Nazi puppet regime that governed the northern half of Italy after the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943.

She is also no stranger to Spain either. She only just recently gave a speech at a Vox rally in Murcia that was shreikingly Wagnerian in tone, rolling out musty, old shibboleths and ticking off every box of Umberto Ecco’s fascism checklist. Her heremoteca is lengthy enough to know just what tune she dances to. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then… it probably is a duck.

But rather than a victory for the extreme right, this is yet another catastrophic loss for the increasingly woke-infatuated left. 25% of the less than 70% of the Italians who actually bothered to cast their vote, voted for someone that they know deep down has absolutely no interest in their wellbeing.

This wasn’t a vote for Il Duce apologists but rather a repudiation of a left that has given up fighting for its traditional causes. A left that ignores more than 30,000 signatures against the proposed mine in Caceres, a left that refuses to investigate the misdeeds of Iberdrola in Monfragüe and a left that siphons off patients to private clinics due to underfunded public healthcare services. This is an indictment against a left that has taken up marginal causes as their main platform and who still believe that Tony Blair’s Third Way will magically make multinational companies behave ethically.

If the left means to stop this slippery slide into the blackness of the thirties, they have to demand better, demand more, demand support for the middle and not only the fringes. If they don’t, what they end up demanding is less: less public services, less equality and less rights.