Rebels, Gunslingers, and Italy’s Farage: Euroscepticism and Italian Fascism Reframed

BY CHARLIE JARVIS

It is telling that, in the same week, The Daily Express can publish both a gushy review proclaiming Churchill the ‘saviour of the Western world’ and an article lauding the Italian politician, Matteo Salvini, as a ‘FIREBRAND’ and ‘rebel’. This celebration of both the symptom of contemporary fascism’s entry into the Italian mainstream and the supposed vanquisher of this political movement’s ancestor is hardly surprising. One suspects that The Express would express its sympathy for anything right-wing and vaguely Eurosceptic.

The paper’s obsession with Europe has led to its hero-worship of this man it calls ‘Italy’s Farage’, Salvini, whose Euroscepticism is largely auxiliary to his cultivation of a rampant racist nationalism.

This comparison conveys a number of wacky distortions — that our dear Nigel is some messianic rebel single-handedly battling an evil bureaucracy — but it also betrays an underlying impulse to whitewash more problematic international concerns with the language of specifically British preoccupations.

While he has given several expletive-ridden anti-EU interviews, Euroscepticism is neither Salvini’s, his party’s nor his coalition’s priority; it is rather the corollary of their desire to close…