How Giorgia Meloni Became a “Globalist Elite” Herself

During the turbulent 2010s, the steadfast advocates of neoliberal reforms, globalization, and open markets wasted no opportunities to lampoon the rising nationalist danger. Not just Donald Trump, but also figures like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and Britain’s Nigel Farage were presented as an existential threat to the liberal order and a blemish on Western civilization’s time-honored values.

In 2016, the Economist ran a famous cover on the “new nationalism” featuring Vladimir Putin alongside Farage and Trump. In the Atlantic, neoliberal zealots such as Yascha Mounk had no ink to spare in their condemnation of dangerous illiberal “populists” — not only Orbán and Trump, but also the likes of Spain’s Podemos, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. We were told that contemporary politics was less about Left and Right than the fundamental fault line between populism and liberal democracy, nationalists and globalists. Any perceptive and civilized person must instinctively know what side to take.

But now times have changed. We have moved from the populist 2010s to the geopolitical chaos of the 2020s. The same neoliberal ideologues who used to preach about nationalist authoritarians seem to have warmed to the political opportunity offered by such figures, as useful thugs able to carry out undesirable tasks. Worried about the multiple wars from Ukraine to the Middle East and pervaded by the sense of a fundamental decline of Western civilization, the liberal mainstream has radically changed its approach to the far right. The message now: don’t keep them out of the cocktail party, but invite them in.

For their part, the old “nationalists” — or at least many of them…