This winter Saturday, in Rome, in the moats of Castel Sant'Angelo, the pope's fortress built on the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian, science fiction met fantasy. On December 16, 2023, Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet and entrepreneur eager to colonize others, was the precious star guest of Atreju, the annual party of the nationalist council president Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli of Italy. The demonstration that, young activist, Mme Meloni was launched in 1998, owes its name to a character in The Neverending Storyfantasy novel by German author Michael Ende, published in 1979.
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The political family of Giorgia Meloni, long relegated to the margins of Italian public life, counts, in fact, in its heterogeneous heritage an immoderate taste for the epic stories offered by this literary genre, crossed by Manichean struggles and reviewed through a prism traditionalist. Curiously, the event whose name refers to a certain nostalgic revolt against modernity welcomed with a bang a transhumanist billionaire with pioneering companies on the various fronts of innovation, from space to neural implants, including electric vehicles.
No matter, Giorgia Meloni and Elon Musk had already discovered many points in common. The president of the council was in the front row facing the stage where the billionaire presented his views during a laborious interview with the journalist Nicola Porro, deputy director of the right-wing daily The newspaper. Waving his raised fist and carried by an excited audience, Mr. Musk denounced, after a development on interplanetary exploration and to the greatest satisfaction of far-right activists, the « virus woke »the environmentalists responsible for a “loss of hope” in the future, illegal immigration, the tyranny of political correctness and an overly bureaucratic and normative Europe.
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The president of the council therefore had reason to rejoice: one of the most powerful men in the world came to declare in his capital that he had the same enemies as her. Too bad if some of Mr. Musk's children were conceived through surrogacy, which the majority in power in Rome have since done “a universal crime”. The billionaire's pronatalist obsessions are indeed welcome in a country with inevitable demographic decline. But, above all, the privileged relationship that Mme Meloni was building with him to provide the chairwoman in search of international influence with an additional, and not least, gateway to the political world of former United States President Donald Trump, from whom she hopes return to the White House.
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