Is “melonization” exportable to the French RN?

The neologism appears more and more often in the mouths of columnists who analyze the rise of a National Rally that has become the leading political force in the country. Could this party, its leader Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, who is expected to be the eventual Prime Minister, become “Mélonized” by coming to power? Some hope so, but many do not believe it, both because of the institutional differences between the two countries and the very divergent paths of these two leaders of the European far right, despite their common points.

The former kid from Garbatella, a red suburb of Rome, who defiantly became a neo-fascist activist at the age of 15, never really appreciated the Le Pen heiress who made her political career in her father’s wake. Politically, too, the gap was and remains deep. This is evidenced by the lukewarm congratulatory telegram from the Italian leader, who has always considered the leader of the RN to be far too identitarian, Eurosceptic and pro-Russian.

The “melonization”, according to the narrative put forward by Giorgia’s thurifers, is the story of the leader of a far-right party with roots in fascism who, once in power, pragmatically transforms herself into a convinced pro-European and Atlanticist head of government who is unanimous among her peers. Her consecration was the G7 summit, near Bari in Puglia, where, with some 29% of the votes obtained in the European elections of June 9, she looked down with contempt on Emmanuel Macron, who was being thrashed at the ballot box.

All the leaders present from the most powerful democracies in the world are in a very bad political position at home, whether Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak or Olaf Scholz. Giorgia Meloni is now by default one of the protagonists of the European Union. In reality, Giorgia Meloni’s policy is very ambiguous and her transfiguration much less obvious than one might imagine outside the peninsula.

Like the Roman god Janus, the dashing leader of Fratelli d’Italia has two faces. There was the populist activist who attacked the European project and Brussels’ laxity, particularly with regard to immigration. Since her victory in last year’s legislative elections, the woman who insists on being called “Madam President of the Council” has led a coalition ranging from the centre to the extreme right that scrupulously respects Italy’s European commitments, particularly in the economic sphere. She supports Ukraine, which has been attacked by Russia, and presents herself as a good student of NATO. This appeals to both Brussels and Washington, where she has the best of relations with both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

This does not prevent it from leading a very tough societal conservative policy internally with a takeover of all the cultural institutions of the country in order to put an end to more than 80 years of intellectual hegemony of the left. It is also trying to impose an ambitious institutional reform in order to strengthen the powers of the executive with a direct election by universal suffrage of the Prime Minister. Originally it even wanted to draw inspiration directly from the French model of the Fifth Republic.^e republic that had always fascinated the transalpine neo-fascist extreme right, starting with its historical leader Giorgio Almirante.

The “melonization” might seem to be just another avatar of “transformism”, an old constant of Italian politics, since the fall of fascism but even already at the beginning of the 20th century.^e century, where a party, even a radical opponent of the system, always ends up fitting into the mold once it comes to power. “Power only wears out those who don’t have it,” liked to recall Giulio Andreotti, the stainless great baron of a Christian democracy who reigned over half a century of Italian political life before being swept away by the investigations ” clean hands » (clean hands) from the early 1990s.

The proportional system and the list vote in force since the liberation, even if they were supplemented by various reforms by majority bonuses, were designed expressly to avoid a new strongman and any absolute power of a party by making the formation of coalitions essential. But if governments rarely lasted more than a year, they were most often reborn with the same parties and the same men. It is a system that digests everything and forces one to compromise.

Due to its institutional system and the majority vote by constituency which amplifies the movements of the electorate, France could be the first country in Europe where a populist extreme right could govern alone.

The two far-right female politicians, the French and the Italian, also have very different long histories. There were certainly long-standing links between the two far-right movements. The tricolour flame, the emblem of the MSI (Italian Social Movement) supposed to recall the permanence of Mussolini’s memory was taken up by the FN from its creation. But unlike a French extreme right composed of former collaborators, Waffen SS or former members of the OAS, its transalpine counterpart, although infiltrated by bomb-planting neo-Nazis and conspirators, claimed the statist heritage of fascism.

Long before the FN began its de-demonization, Giorgio Almirante had decided to normalize the party and transform it into a national right-wing force, appointing as his successor a thirty-year-old Gianfranco Fini who, with the new post-fascist party National Alliance, joined Silvio Berlusconi’s first government coalition in 1994. Thus, a few years later, Giorgia Meloni became, still in a Berlusconi cabinet, one of the youngest ministers in Italian history. She was then vice-president of the Chamber.

The state machine, the “Giorgia” as the Italians call it, therefore knows her from the inside, which is not the case for Le Pen and the other senior RN officials. But she is one of the only ones in this situation within a party where the lack of well-trained officials is glaring. Her close guard at the Palazzo Chigi, the Italian Matignon, is made up of members of her family and former comrades in activism.

For the rest, she has managed to recover many of the senior civil servants and technocrats from the coalition government of her predecessor Mario Draghi, the former finance minister at the head of the European Central Bank who became her mentor, particularly for the management of the economy and first and foremost for the control of a public debt that has reached 144% of GDP. On work, she displays very liberal views: “Do not disturb those who want to do, do not disturb those who create wealth, do not disturb those who produce work”. While it has strengthened measures and agreements to combat illegal immigration, it has also granted more than 450,000 legal work visas to meet the needs of entrepreneurs.

This pragmatism risks disappointing some voters, particularly the hard core of his party. Hence his cultural policy, which is as conservative as it is controversial. “The word anti-fascism is not in the Constitution,” Ignazio La Russa, one of the leading figures in his party, is often quoted as saying, having been appointed president of the Senate and an avowed collector of Mussolini busts. RAI, the public television, thus censored at the last minute the speech that the writer Antonio Scurati, author of a masterful account of the life of the Duce, was to make on April 25, the Liberation Day.

“Melonization” is not an ideology but above all an art of execution. It is a balancing act made possible by the specificities of a system that has often made Italy a very fertile political laboratory over the past century. Giorgia Meloni does not hide her ambition to also act at the European level by breaking down the historical boundaries between the right and bringing together all of their components. There is no guarantee that “melonization” will be a product that can be exported beyond the Alps.