Giorgia Meloni became Prime Minister of Italy on October 22, to the dismay of the Italian and European liberal media outlets, worried by the surge of a post-fascist party in one of the founding countries of the European Union, and 100 years after the infamous “March on Rome” that signaled the beginning of the Italian fascist regime. While the squadracce (fascist mob) has not marched on Rome (yet), it is undisputed that Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), considers itself the legitimate heir of the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI), which has been the herald of the fascist legacy since 1946.

Besides embodying the Italian version of the alt-right, since 2020, Meloni is the leader  of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR) in the European Parliament, representing the institutional face of the wave of social conservatism, nationalism, homophobia, and xenophobia currently crossing Europe. One of the first actions of the new government was the refusal to allow the Ocean Viking, a boat run by the French NGO SOS Mediterranee, to disembark, on Italian soil, its 234 passengers saved from the Libyan Sea in late October. The refusal was followed by a diplomatic crisis when Meloni declared on November 10 that France had agreed to allow the disembarkation of the survivors before any official declaration was issued by the French government. For this reason, it was not surprising that a 2019 TV interview, in which  Meloni attacked France’s monetary colonialism in Africa, resurged at the end of the following week.

A video of the interview went viral on Twitter after user @upholdreality added English subtitles to it, and Dutch conservative commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek retweeted it on November 19, getting 62,000 likes in one week. In the same period, the two tweets combined have been retweeted about 20,000 times.

In that same year, Italy’s then-Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio also accused France of manipulating and exploiting the economies of its former African colonies through the Franc CFA, thus allegedly fostering the migratory flows from Africa to Europe, and, in particular, those arriving on the coasts of Italy. It is worth noting that his statements came at a moment when the Italian government led by a coalition of the populist Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, M5S) and the xenophobic League (Lega) was actively working towards an agreement to control migrant flows and revamp the involvement of Italian companies in the Horn of Africa, in the wave of the peace deal that Ethiopia and Eritrea had signed in July 2018. Besides the cherry-picking and inaccuracy characterizing the statements of Italian politicians about the colonialism of others, what is striking is that these discourses are produced by the political representatives of a country that has not yet come to terms with its colonial past, let alone its own monetary colonialism …