Giorgia Meloni and the reactionary axis that wasn’t
One is a blonde, photogenic woman who grew out of a youthful infatuation with Benito Mussolini to become the first female prime minister of Italy. The other is anything but photogenic, a grizzled veteran of more than three decades of political combat, who began his career as a student activist and became a respectable center-right statesman, only to reinvent himself as a populist firebrand. But if you were to judge Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by the frequency with which they appear together in media coverage, usually with adjectives like “far-right” and “extreme” attached, you might assume that the two conservative heads-of-state are basically indistinguishable. The European Union and its assorted sympathizers certainly seem to think so.
