Nicholas Farrell

Like drowning men clutching at straws, Giorgia Meloni’s opponents are trying ever more hopelessly to justify their claim that she is a far-right threat to democracy. It’s not that Meloni has stopped being far right since she became Italy’s first female prime minister 18 months ago. It is just that – despite all the apocalyptic warnings about her – she wasn’t far right to begin with. The new law is not an assault on the 1978 law that made abortion legal in Italy. Meloni as a premier has proved to be much more like a Mediterranean version of Margaret Thatcher than the heir to Benito Mussolini – which many of her opponents still call her. As a result, she and her party, Fratelli d’Italia, which tops the polls by a large margin, remain very popular.

Ravenna You’re not supposed to mock the afflicted, I know, but I laughed when I read the news that the left-wing citadel of Bologna has introduced a 30 kph (19 mph) speed limit. Forcing the Italians – a nation of famously crazy drivers who make fabulous sports cars – to drive no faster than cyclists is to deprive them of an essential element of what it means to be Italian. Poor Italians. Is nothing sacred? Not even speed? Probably, thank God, not even globalisation can change the Italian psyche I’ve lived for so many years cheek by jowl with the Italians and their ins and outs that I must confess I find anything that pulls their tails funny.

In Italy if you are not careful, you are condemned to measure out your life in religious festivals. There are so many of them. Perhaps that’s why I find La Befana a bit of a pain coming as it does so hard on the heels of so many others. Or maybe it’s because it is essentially a pagan festival and our civilisation has lost all contact with that world. But then again, maybe it’s just that I have become a miserable old git. The Festa della Befana takes place throughout Italy, but especially in the north, on 5 January, the night before Epiphany. It contains elements that are also found in Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night, Christmas and New Year.

Some of Pope Francis’s closest allies in the Catholic Church are alleged to have secretly given more than €2 million to an Italian migrant rescue charity whose senior staff are charged with people smuggling. They include Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, who is among other things the papal peace envoy to Ukraine, and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg. These senior figures in the Church organised payment of the money, it is claimed, at the bequest of the Pope who had established a special rapport with the far-left founder of the charity. The payments were kept secret for fear of adverse publicity.

This weekend, demonstrations took place in major Italian cities to mark the UN’s international day for the elimination of violence against women. Many on the Italian left used the opportunity to suggest Giorgia Meloni is aiding and abetting the murder of Italian women – even though she is Italy’s first female Prime Minister.    The largest protest was in Rome where demonstrators, mainly women – 500,000 according to the organisers – brandished placards saying ‘The Patriarchy Kills’, ‘We Support Female Fury Against The Fascist Meloni Government’ and ‘Meloni Fascist Zionist Collaborator’.

Italy has become the first European Union country to bite the bullet and set up a scheme to off-shore migrant asylum seekers to a country outside the bloc. Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni says she hopes the scheme, signed off in Rome last week with Albania’s left-wing prime minister, Edi Rama, will become a model copied across the EU.  It is similar to the Tory government’s troubled Rwanda scheme, but more practical and less vulnerable to legal challenge. Italy will process asylum requests in Albania where it plans to send tens of thousands of migrants a year. Britain, meanwhile, plans to hand the task of deciding who gets asylum to Rwanda and to send only a few hundred a year.

Giorgia Meloni has just marked her first year as Italy’s prime minister. When elected, she was described as a far-right leader, the most right-wing that Italy has had since Mussolini. So after a year in office, were these labels justified? What kind of leader has she been? And has she done anything to justify the ‘far-right’ label still lazily applied to her? While running for office, Meloni asked to be judged by her words and policies, not by the fact that as a teenager she had joined Italy’s long disbanded post-fascist party. ‘Usually, Italian politics are somewhat comical,’ Giovanni Orsina of Luiss University in Rome recently admitted. ‘But by Italian standards, we're in a moment of unusual stability.’ So not, as breathlessly warned, a descent into far-right chaos.

A butcher who has killed the most famous wild bear in Italy is now unable to leave his house for fear of being killed himself. The tragedy calls into question, once again, the wisdom of the ever more fashionable quest by people in cities to rewild the countryside with dangerous animals such as bears and wolves. There are no two ways about it: these animals wreak havoc. If those in the city whose closest encounter with a wild animal is a feral pigeon, sewer rat, or urban fox, want such animals back in the countryside then they must accept that those who actually live in the countryside have the right to kill them, if necessary. But as this tragedy shows, city people will lift heaven and earth to deny country people such a right.

Few can deny that the arrival of 100,000 illegal migrants to Britain from France by small boat since 2018 is nothing short of a catastrophe.   So what word would best describe the arrival in Italy by sea from North Africa of 100,000 illegal migrants already this year?  So Meloni’s main focus is not on dealing with the migrants once they are in Italy but on stopping them getting to Italy That is well over double the number of migrant sea arrivals in Italy during the same period in 2022. It means this year’s total will almost certainly break the record set in 2016 of 181,436. This weekend alone more than 4,000 migrants arrived by boat on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa half way between Tunisia and Italy.

Italy is under maritime siege by a foreign invader known as the granchio blu (blue crab). Like some terrifying alien that lies undetected for decades in a hideous secret lair, untold millions of the crustaceans (whose shells can grow up to nine inches wide) have suddenly emerged and are causing havoc in the country’s delicately balanced marine environment.  The blue crab arrived in Italy from America in the late 1940s in the -ballast tanks of merchant ships, but no one talked about it much until the past couple of years, during which its numbers have exploded. Some blame global warming, but the blue crab is not especially bothered by water temperature one way or the other. It lives in a whole range of climates, from Nova Scotia all the way down to Argentina.

Cerberus, the record-breaking heatwave that struck the Mediterranean, was followed this week by another one called Charon – after the mythical boatman who ferried the dead across the Styx to Hades. Meanwhile illegal migrants continue to be ferried across the Mediterranean in record numbers to Italy – thus to Europe – by people traffickers. Relatives placed a single obol, it is said, in the mouths of the dead to pay Charon for the voyage. The living pay the traffickers €3,000 to €10,000, it is said, for theirs. In April, Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency.

The British Conservative party may be hopelessly behind in the polls, yet all over Europe the right is surging ahead. Everywhere you look, the left is losing – in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary and now, following an election victory for the New Democracy party on Sunday, Greece. In France, the Rassemblement National (the renamed Front National) keeps rising in the polls and now vies for top slot as the country’s most popular party, as does the Freedom party in Austria. And in Germany this week, the radical and increasingly popular right-wing Alternative für Deutschland won a district election for the first time.