FASANO, Italy (CN) — For Ernesto Palatrasio, a holdover from Italy's student-protest movements in the 1970s, there was never any doubt: The rise of Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party means fascism has returned to Italy.
Sporting a scraggly white beard and sandals, the 77-year-old Palatrasio and a handful of communist comrades protested in a mostly empty square in Fasano in June. They'd come to this southern Italian town as Meloni was feted here while hosting the annual G7 (Group of Seven) summit.
The communists protested in the blistering sun — but hardly anyone was listening. Across town, many shrugged off their fears about democratic backsliding as delusional.
“It's a democratic right-wing,” Mimmo Galeota, a 76-year-old cosmetics store owner, said of Meloni and her allies. “We Italians really do have an understanding of democracy. I don't think there can be a return to fascism.”
A pair of plain-clothed police officers stood before Palatrasio, recording the group with a video camera.
Palatrasio eyed the heavy police presence. Besides the communists, they were basically the only ones here. “This too is born from this kind of government,” he said. “You solve problems over dissent with more police, more security laws, more restrictions on democratic freedoms.”
It was a scene that clearly illustrated the fall of left-wing politics in Italy — a country whose modern republic rose from the ashes of Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.
The names of communists and antifascists — Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, Giacomo Matteotti — commonly pop up on place signs everywhere in Italy. But as Palatrasio wiped sweat from his brow, he offered a grim prognosis of the current political climate.
Italy's old Communist Party — once the largest in Western Europe — had morphed with the mainstream and abandoned the working classes, he said. The defeat of the “Hot Autumn” leftist student protests in 1969 and 1970 dealt the final blow.
“The cultural and social fabric that was inherited by the Resistance was destroyed,” he said. “In this desert, the old ideas bit by bit came back to life.” Under Meloni, he was deeply worried about the country’s future. He warned her neo-fascist party would seek to impose its fringe ideas on every facet of Italian life, from public television to schools.
Fast forward two months from that feeble protest in Fasano, and it's no longer just old communists like Palatrasio who are talking this way.
Since the G7 summit, where Meloni was hailed as Europe's new powerbroker, the Italian prime minister has come under increasing scrutiny not only for her domestic policies but for cozying up to other European radical-right parties in an effort to advance a revanchist and nativist agenda in Brussels.
After winning elections in 2022, Meloni won praise from other Western leaders by casting herself as a moderate. Comforted by her pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO and pro-EU posture, some world leaders have looked beyond her far-right past and her anti-gay and anti-immigrant policies.
At G7, “Meloni was on her best behavior,” Nathalie Tocci, director of the Italian think tank Istituto Affari Internazionali, cautioned in a recent opinion piece in Politico. “Now, her mask is starting to slip.”
In Rome, Meloni's government is pushing ahead with a radical constitutional reform. The proposal would overhaul Italy's complicated electoral system, replacing it with one where the prime minister is directly elected by voters. Known as the premierato, the plan guarantees the prime minister’s coalition would receive 55% of seats in parliament.
Meloni calls this “the mother of all reforms.” She says it will bring stability to Italy's notoriously rocky politics, where there have been 68 separate governments since the end of World War II.
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