Euroean Movement Italy: Antidote Needed as a Response to Nationalist Degeneration

28 January 2025 | Members' Corner

‘We are not an accident of History, but the children and grandchildren of those who managed to find the antidote to the nationalist degeneration that has poisoned our History. If we are Europeans, it is also because we are in love with our countries. But nationalism that becomes ideology and idolatry produces viruses that stimulate instincts of superiority and produce destructive conflicts.’ David Maria Sassoli

According to the European narrative, the still eventual Austrian government led by the Freedom Party of Austria (FPOE) – a party founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, who was awarded the gold badge of Nazism by Adolf Hitler in 1933 – would represent the arrival in power for the first time in an EU country of an extreme right-wing party.

It is worth mentioning that Herbert Kickl, the current leader of the Freedom Party of Austria, had his parliamentary immunity lifted by the Austrian parliament on 12 December in connection with proceedings initiated by the Austrian public prosecutor’s office in a trial for perjury.

Herbert Kickl’s path to the chancellery after his appointment as ‘chancellor in charge’ is, however, strewn with obstacles because President Alexander Van der Bellen has for the time being appointed Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg as ‘interim chancellor’ and because within the Austrian People’s Party (FPOE) – which should guarantee the necessary parliamentary majority for the new government in the Austrian parliament – some leaders are opposed to an alliance with the heirs of Anton Reinthaller and Jorg Haider, such as the resigning chancellor Karl Nehammer.

On 13 January, Herbert Kickl and the new People’s Party secretary Christian Stocker reached an agreement on the federal budget to avoid a European excessive deficit procedure with a path for the next seven years.

However, Christian Stocker has drawn the boundaries for an agreement with the FPOE, namely: membership of the European Union, the Rule of law, freedom of the press, sanctions against Vladimir Putin and support for Ukraine, knowing that part of his party’s base would be ready to lift the cordon sanitaire for fear of losing support in new early general elections to the extreme right.

A majority of the Austrian population in the big cities sees the risk to national security in Herbert Kickl coming to power with disquiet, as was demonstrated by the demonstration in Vienna on 9 January of over fifty thousand people under the slogan ‘Ganz Wien hasst FPOE’ and similar demonstrations in Salzburg, Graz and Innsbruck.

Herbert Kickl’s election victory was characterised by an unscrupulous use of social media and in particular Elon Musk’s X platform with a strong propensity for fake news.

It is also due to the systematic refusal of its information tools to any confrontation with the press and independent media, as is now the case in States with sovereignist-driven governments in the neighbouring Hungary of Viktor Orban and Slovakia of the pseudo-socialist Robert Fico, or as is the case in the Poland of Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Mateusz Morawiecki where the solidity of the democratic system is still at risk due to the metastases spread by the PiS and where a President will be elected on 11 May, or as is the case in Prague of the Czech Andrej Babis of the Party of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO), the one and the other associates of Giorgia Meloni applying the methods of the European sovereignists in Italy.

It is worth asking why fake news spreads more than real news and whether we can protect parliamentary elections from manipulation attempts on the web. American researcher Sinan Aral took us on a journey through these and other questions, drawing on extensive empirical evidence (‘The Hype Machine: how social media disrupts our elections, our economy and our health and how we must adapt’, 15 September 2020).

In order to grasp the potential of digital technologies and avoid their risks, he delves into the mechanism that governs the ‘Hype Machine’, the integrated system of social media that stimulates us to always keep active online, while exposing us to the conditioning of big brands or hackers, in a frenetic market of persuasion and emotional excitement.

In this hyper-socialised universe, Sinan Aral nevertheless highlights how, by acting on four specific ‘levers of command’ (business models, computer code, social norms and laws), it is still possible to direct the technologies that are revolutionising the digitalised infosphere towards the common good.

Let us return to the European narrative according to which the possible arrival of Herbert Kickl at the chancellery in Vienna would represent the first time of the conquest of power by a far-right movement of sovereignist and fascist inspiration.

The examples we cited of Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Mateusz Morawieki’s Poland, but also of Robert Fico’s Slovakia and Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, together with the role of the integrated media system (Sinan Aran’s Hype Machine) demonstrate the serious risks of a violation of at least one of the founding values of the European Union and respect for the Rule of law, namely a risk under Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union.

Added to this is the decisive influence of the so-called Swedish Democrats (SD) in the government in Stockholm, of the True Finns (PS) in the government in Helsinki, of 5 out of 15 ministers of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV far-right) in the Netherlands, the breaking of the cordon sanitaire in Spain with the alliances in five Autonomous Communities between the People’s Party and Vox (only recently annulled on Vox’s initiative) but confirmed in many large cities such as Valencia and Toledo together with the re-election of the Eurosceptic Zoran Milanovic, as President of Croatia, who holds strong political authority and is the supreme military commander, and the uncertainty weighing on the political situation in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Romania, which will soon return to the polls and will be preceded by federal elections in Germany on 23 February.

The risks of serious violations relate to the freedom of expression and information enshrined in Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which incorporates Article 10 of the ECHR, in the substantive meaning of the freedom to hold opinions and to receive or impart information or ideas without interference by public authorities (or, we would add, external interference) regardless of frontiers and with respect for media freedom and pluralism with particular reference to public broadcasting systems in the Member States.

They also concern Article 36 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights concerning access to services of general interest, which recalls Article 86 of the Maastricht Treaty now taken over in Articles 14 and 106 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

They can be read in the framework of the added value of the European dimension relating to the infosphere that distinguishes the ‘fundamental rights driven’ of the European Union (in the perspective of a ‘big democracy’ based on simple and transparent rules) from the ‘market driven’ of the USA (the ‘big technology’ in which the oligopoly of private individuals prevails) and from the ‘State driven’ of China (the ‘big State’) as it was written on 1 March 2024 in the Green Paper ‘Let’s write the future of Europe together’ of the European Movement (www.movimentoeuropeo.it) and as argued by Anu Bradford in his ‘Digital Empire: the global battle to regulate technology’ (Oxford University Press 2023).

The growth of far-right parties across the European Union – which are inspired by the movements in power in Europe between the two world wars in Italy, Germany, Austria already before the Anschluss, Bulgaria, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Finland, the Baltic Republics and on the Iberian Peninsula until the mid-1970s – enters on a collision course with the Regulation on the Statute and Financing of European Parties that entered into force on 4 November 2003 updated by the Regulation of 22 October 2014.

These Regulations establish with binding force respect for the principles on which the European Union is founded, taken from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, with particular reference to freedom, democracy, human rights, fundamental freedoms and the Rule of law, which condition – or at least should condition – the financing of the European Foundations to which the parties refer.

Evidently, it was not enough to have established these principles to prevent the growth of extreme right-wing parties, nor was it enough to have enshrined in Article 191 of the Maastricht Treaty – reproduced in Article 10 of the Treaty on European Union – as a defining element of European citizenship that ‘political parties at European level contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of the citizens of the Union’.

Moreover, it is unthinkable that election results that reward or award extreme right-wing or sovereignist parties should be annulled, as happened recently in Romania, because it is very difficult to prove that these results are due to external interference unless there is obvious fraud or illicit manipulation of votes.

In this context, we are astonished that a dutiful and rigorous attention to the role of European parties and their national components – in the spirit of and in compliance with the aforementioned Regulations of 2003 and 2014 – together with the issue of the transparency of parliamentary work has not been included among the competences of the new European Parliamentary Committee on the ‘shield of democracy’ set up by the European Parliament on 13 December 2024 for a limited period of twelve months, thus ignoring the fact that the issue of the defence of democracy also concerns the system and function of political movements that are at the heart of representative democracy.

What is more important, however, is the response that must be given at local, regional and European level, also in relations with the political societies of the candidate countries, to the emotional, cultural and social reasons that are at the origin of the growth of the extreme right-wing parties and more generally of the sovereignist movements and that today are represented by more than two hundred and thirty MEPs – if we do not take into account the ‘euro-types’ that are among the EPP, S&D, Renew and Greens – that is almost a third of the Assembly.

The answer must be in European policies to be implemented not only as a reaction to emergencies but in terms of planning the future of the European Union where nation States are unable to react effectively and in terms of the functioning of the European Union’s system of government.

We know that the growth of far-right movements and sovereignist parties has been driven by sometimes emotional and not rational reactions, particularly linked:

  • To the control and management of migratory flows if they are not accompanied by policies of inclusion that provide for the strict respect by those coming to the European Union of our common values,
  • To the economic and social sustainability of the environmental transition that requires European investment to bear the costs of the transition,
  • To the increase in inequalities that require a renewed European policy of social and territorial cohesion,
  • To the fears linked to the loss of respect for individual security and privacy in the digital society that await the implementation of a European system of rights and freedom from private oligopolies,
  • To the lack of competitiveness of the European economy due to the strength of non-European production systems and technologies together with the excessive weight of European and national regulations that mainly affect small and medium-sized enterprises, thus implementing the suggestions contained in the Draghi report,
  • To the lack of strategic autonomy of the European Union, and thus of European defence, in a world subjugated to the new bipolar system of US and Chinese hegemony together with the rivalry of the so-called Global South represented by the extension of the BRICS and the potential of Africa with which the European Union has been unable to build an effective partnership,
  • To the derisory nature of the European budget that should instead guarantee European public goods with its own resources and ‘good’ debt
  • To the embryonic and inadequate nature of the governance of European democracy evolving towards a federal model that would guarantee the exercise of shared sovereignty.

It is therefore not enough to demand that we maintain and respect the cordon sanitaire towards the parties of the extreme right if the plan for our future and the future of the new generations does not contain adequate and ambitious answers to these eight problems that should be part of a strategic agenda of the European Parliament for the current legislature.