As Italy Election Dust Settles, Looking at the State of European Conservatism Today

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The apparent victory of the Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini, and Silvio Berlusconi coalition in Italy’s election may mark a new high point for the broader right in Europe, which has been in a back and forth battle with the left-liberal establishment across the continent since 2016.

Meloni, of the national conservative Brothers of Italy (FdI), secured less than five per cent of the vote in 2018, but now leads the largest party in her country and appears set to become its first female prime minister, backed by Matteo Salvini’s League (Lega) and elder statesman Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

An unabashed anti-mass migration social conservative who owes at least some of her surge in popularity to a refusal to back the previous technocratic government like most every other major party in the country, branding its imposition of punishing restrictions and mandates on the unvaccinated “state blackmail”, Meloni’s election could truly overturn the established order in the European Union — more perhaps than even Brexit in 2016.

Conservatism in Britain

The British people voted to Leave the European Union in 2016 — against the strongly stated insistence of every major political party in Great Britain, the establishment press, the European Union, Barrack Obama, and many others. This deprived the bloc of one of its biggest budget contributors, yet the British government had never posed much opposition to the bloc’s real agenda from the inside while it could.

The Conservative (Tory) Party, which has been in office since 2010, has often noisily opposed the EU’s steady erosion of national sovereignty, but always ultimately accepted power-grabbing European treaties such as Lisbon, and was evidently untroubled by the fact that in 72 attempts at voting against EU-level measures at the European Council over a 20-year period, British governments were defeated 72 times.

Indeed, even with Boris Johnson having delivered a half-Brexit, leaving Brussels with a great deal of control over Northern Ireland and continued access to Britain’s fisheries, among other concessions, the “hard right” post-Brexit governments decried by the leftist press has failed to challenge the established order internationally and continued to follow the net-zero, mass migration, social justice playbook at home.

Ironically, more resistance to the EU and more domestic change has been achieved by the post-communist EU member-states of Central Europe, which arguably owe the bloc more than anyone.

Central Europe

While the European Union has done much to lift the Central European states out of post-Soviet depression, there is no doubt this support has come at a huge political cost: the ever-closer union and eventual federalisation that saw Britain decide to call it a day back in 2016. Hungary and Poland’s recent history as satellites of a massive political empire — the very same Soviet Union — has made countries like them more sensitive than most to Brussels’ rule from the centre approach.

While their governments often court controversy abroad for enacting policies that may be deeply unfashionable in Brussels or Washington, they do at least seem to deliver on election-time campaign promises, a rare enough thing in democracies anywhere. This has seen these national-conservative parties — and pay attention, right-wing leaders everywhere — re-elected time and time again, and often with great majorities.

While the nations they lead may be relatively small, or not in the first flush of global prominence, in terms of effective conservative leadership and electoral success there can’t be many better examples. In contrast to the United States or the United Kingdom, for instance, which flounder persistently on border control and how to enact it, Poland realised it needed a border wall last year and then built one. And it was just that simple.

It isn’t like this was a novel idea: Hungary went through the same process back in 2015 as the Europe migrant crisis was kicking into gear: a brief process of identifying an emerging problem, deploying an immediate and effective solution — slashing illegal immigration by 99 per cent at a stroke — and then enjoying a polling bump from voters satisfied the government is capable of doing what it says.

Another area in which Central European conservatives absolutely lead the world is family policy: understanding that the family is the basic unit of a healthy and functioning society and that giving families the space to grow is an alternative to mass migration if population growth is a goal. Both Poland and Hungary have enacted considerably family support: giving couples the freedom to have as many children as they want to have.

Among these support packages in Poland are generous government monthly child care payments, a special boosted state pension for mothers who elect to raise a family rather than work, and even making subtle changes in the law to help families spend more time together. It’s happening in Hungary too, with higher rates of child support for larger families, subsidies for larger family-carrying cars for those who need them, and enhanced housing benefit.

One of the most radical programmes in Hungary is the family loan: a considerable pay-out ($35,000) made to women under 40 marrying for the first time, with one-third of the opening balance written off by the government for every child born.

These measures have already been seen to be having an impact on birth rates.

But there are problems too. While Hungary has been radical in reforming tax, with a low, flat rate of 16 per cent introduced in 2012, Poland has lagged in this area, charging double that on incomes over $17,000.

There are also questionable engagements on the world stage. While Hungary’s energy policy — that it doesn’t matter where it comes from, as long as it’s cheap — is absolutely no different to the one pursued by Germany for decades, it sticking with low-cost, bountiful, but politically tainted Russian gas in the Ukraine war era is questionable. Similar concerns are shared by conservatives abroad over Hungary’s willingness to take money from China, a state of affairs doubtless accelerated by other more natural sources of funding like Brussels and Washington being reticent.

Rightly cautious of Beijing, the controversy over the 2021 Budapest university money controversy has left many on the right feeling wary about what direction Hungary is going in.

The Rest in the West

In 2017, upstart national conservative and national populist parties looked poised to break through in a number of Western European countries facing social disintegration in the face of mass migration and multiculturalism.

However, Marine Le Pen in France, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, all appeared to stall out — indeed, in Germany to conservative-in-name-only Angela Merkel-led government has now been replaced by an openly left-liberal coalition — appearing to either hit a ceiling or making only minimal gains since the halcyon days of Brexit and Trump.

It is true that the Sweden Democrats, at least, managed to make gains in the recent Swedish elections — but they have done so by making significant concessions, particularly on the EU and national sovereignty, and will be in hock to so-called “centre-right” parties unlikely to allow them real influence if they form part of any new right-leaning coalition in that troubled country.

One country does look like it may be on the cusp of an Italy-style conservative revolution, however, with the VOX party of Santiago Abascal having surged from less than 1 per cent of the vote in 2016 to polling as the second most popular party in the country and influence or participation in a number of regional governments — a Meloni-like rise.

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
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