Italy Now Has Conspiracy Theory as National Policy

Nearly 65 percent of Italians believe a cabal of multinational corporations control the world and are “responsible for everything that happens to us,” according to a survey conducted in 2021. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni may not be among those surveyed, but she has proved similarly susceptible to conspiracy theories. 

Meloni is the first Western European leader to espouse the great relacement theory, which claims that, instead of an organic movement driven by poverty and war, immigration to the West has been engineered. It seems to suggest that the world’s political and business elite are meeting somewhere in secret to increase the flow of immigrants, and not just to avail the benefits of cheap labor but rather to replace the white race with brown and Black people. This set of ideas was coined in 2011 by Renaud Camus, a French writer, but has been adopted by white supremacists in several European nations and in the United States.

Matthew Feldman, a writer and specialist on right-wing extremism, said the great replacement theory is flexible enough to be used by conservatives in a watered-down form and dangerous enough to provide motive for terrorist attackers, which “we have seen in too many cases in the last five years,” he told Foreign Policy over the phone from London.

Amongst the theory’s supporters are extremists behind some of the most racist attacks in the recent past. The perpetrator of the Christchurch attack against Muslims in New Zealand in 2019, in which 51 people were killed, had titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement.” Last year, the man who shot dead 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, had posted a 180-page racist diatribe with repeated endorsements of the idea. Former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson has brought it up hundreds of times and alluded to a political angle, suggesting that members of the U.S. Democratic Party are behind immigration to replace the electorate with voters from developing nations, since they tend to vote Democrat. 

The association with extremists has forced Meloni to tweak the language and refer to it as “a plan for ethnic substitution,” of European citizens, “desired by big capital.” Feldman said that “ethnic substitution” was merely “a synonym for great replacement.”

He said that even Meloni can’t use that exact wording, “because her political opponents would immediately say, ‘wait a minute, are you using the same phrase as terrorists?’” 

Meloni has “on at least 15-20 occasions” publicly referenced the idea of a “plan for ethnic substitution,” said David Broder, who teaches history at Syracuse University in Florence and has most recently written a book called Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy.

Broder said that members of Meloni’s party—Fratelli d’Italia, or Brothers of Italy—positively cite literature such as Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, “a kind of precursor to the ‘racist’ great replacement theory.” 

The theory assumes “that a purportedly homogeneous Italian ‘ethnicity’ risks being eclipsed by Muslim and African newcomers,” Broder said. He pointed out that Meloni has spoken in favor of immigration of white Christians of Italian ancestry from Venezuela. 

In addition to religious intolerance, the Italian prime minister’s penchant for unsubstantiated conspiracies was also on display when she attacked billionaire philanthropist George Soros, long a bogeyman for the far right, as “the financier” of mass immigration. She has accused the Italian left of encouraging “an invasion” of immigrants and gifting them with citizenship through ius soli—a principle that grants citizenship to anyone born in a country but in Italy is applied only in special circumstances to the children of immigrants.

Since the election campaign last year and becoming prime minister, however, Meloni has had to weigh her words more carefully, if only to appear less controversial to Brussels. Italy needs billions of euros of COVID-19 recovery funds from Europe in financial assistance, which may be stalled if she appears to be opposing the bloc’s more progressive values. 

Since 2022, “Meloni has tended to break the theory down into several distinct slogans,” added Broder, “focusing on the threat of low birthrates, or the defense of national identity.” 

José Pedro Zúquete, a professor of social sciences at the University of Lisbon and the author of The Identitarians, said, “Even if she has stopped talking about ‘ethnic replacement,’ it is not far-fetched to think that … this fear is a driving force of her policies, both in regard to immigration and natality.” 

A declining birthrate in Italy has become the fig leaf with which Meloni now disguises her anti-immigrant and racist ideology, observers say. (Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe and recorded the steepest decline last year. For the first time, it fell below the 400,000 mark to 393,000, recording a fertility rate of 1.24 children per woman, far below the 2.1 replacement level at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next.) 

Italian political experts believe that while Meloni herself has had to rein in her racist and conspiratorial insinuations, she has given a free hand to her party members, a reflection of her policy aims behind closed doors. 

Late last month, as the Italian Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida said that Italians risked “ethnic replacement” by immigrants as the birthrate in Italy declines and declared that was “not the way forward,” Italian opposition retorted that his comments smacked of white supremacy and reminded them of the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Lollobrigida happens to be a member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party—and her brother-in-law.

The Italian government has decided to improve social welfare for Italian mothers to encourage them to have more babies in what would be seen as an innocuous national policy if not for Meloni and her party’s racist underpinnings. On one hand, Meloni backs a pro-natalist agenda and wants to reduce value added tax on baby products, such as nappies and milk bottles, and make child care affordable. On the other, she effectively opposes citizenship for babies born in immigrant families. On one hand, she advocates for Italian mothers to enter the workforce; on the other, she only insists Italian women take up jobs so immigrants don’t.

Italy urgently needs nearly 200,000 farmworkers, as well as hotel staff and baristas for coffee shops in espresso country. Meloni says that Italian women, not immigrants, should fill these vacancies. “The way to resolve this is not migrants,” she said, “but that great, unused reserve which is the female workforce.” 

Pedro Zúquete said that Meloni is pushing for a new immigration law that will be “much harsher” on irregular immigration. 

She has threatened a naval blockade to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean Sea in the guise of protecting them from drownings, and signed a pact with Libya, despite the treatment meted out to immigrants in the war-torn country. Dunja Mijatović,  high commissioner of the Council of Europe, has condemned Italy’s memorandum of understanding with Libya, which “plays a central role in facilitating the interceptions of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants at sea, and their subsequent return to Libya.”

At the European Council meeting on migration in February, Meloni said that “redistribution [of migrants] has never been my priority,” and that the EU’s Voluntary Solidarity Mechanism has not worked. 

The mechanism was established to reduce the pressure of refugee arrivals in coastal states such as Italy, Greece, and Malta and relocate them to other European countries on a voluntary basis. As of January 2023, only 207 people have benefited from the scheme, mainly owing to the reluctance of other EU states to accept immigrants. 

According to Frontex—the EU border and coast guard agency—since 2016, the EU witnessed the biggest rise in irregular immigration last year. Around 330,000 crossings were detected, a 64 percent increase from the previous year. 

In absence of a fair division of immigrants across Europe and further guided by the conspiracy theory of the great replacement, Meloni was full of praise for the British conservatives’ policy to deport asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel on small boats to their country of origin or Rwanda, a “safe” third nation. 

Whilst visiting the United Kingdom about a week ago, Meloni said the British government was handling “traffickers and illegal migration” very well. “I’m following your work and I absolutely agree with your work and I think there are many things that we can do together,” she said to Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister. 

Italy, unlike the U.K., is a part of the EU. Unless power in the continent shifts more to the far-right, Meloni will have to operate within limits. 

Pedro Zúquete, however, felt that as European societies become more multicultural and multiethnic, “we can assume that the ‘great replacement’ frame of analysis will become more prevalent in mainstream conservative narratives.” 

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has its roots in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), created by Mussolini’s supporters. She speaks of being a woman, a mother, and a Christian, committed to defend God, country, and family. But her support for racist theories implies that she means only her family and those who look like her, excluding those who practice a different faith or simply look darker, even if they feel equally Italian or contribute equally to Italian society.