When I first moved to Rome, I spent my time living in the past.
At the turn of the century, I drifted through a vintage postcard of postwar Italy: old women sitting around tables they had dragged into the street, old men playing cards in caps, cats arching their backs on the hoods of snub-nosed Fiats.
As newspapers filled with talk of Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul with ambitions and appetites worthy of a Roman emperor, my meanderings inevitably took me toward Tiber Island, a sliver of land in the middle of the river that divides Rome.
An ancient bridge on the island’s left bank had a strange statue of weather-beaten faces positioned back-to-back as if they couldn’t stand one another. The heads rose out of the shared torso of a square pillar and represented Janus, Rome’s god of the past and future, the deity of transitions and change.
Back then, I didn’t see the change around me, but now, more than a quarter-century later, after spending decades reporting on Italian politics and changes across Europe, I have come to understand that I was living in the future.
In the time since, I have seen an Italianization of politics all around the continent, with coalitions of small parties resulting in instability, with fed-up voters desperate for new saviors. But more than anything, I have seen — in Britain, France, Germany — countries following the Italian model by allowing the far right into the political mainstream.
Spain, where I’m now The New York Times’s bureau chief, will hold elections this month. Polls show the far-right party Vox — which largely feeds on anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-E.U. sentiment — is likely to join the mainstream conservative party in a new government. The current left-wing government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a beacon for Europe’s liberals, is trying to mobilize supporters by warning against the regressive politics Vox represents. Some of his officials invoke the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
But I keep thinking back to Mr. Berlusconi.
The Italian Laboratory
Soon before I arrived in Italy as a student in the late 1990s, Mr. Berlusconi, who many see as creating the mold for President Trump, first brought in “the fascists,” as he called the far right, to help govern with him. Berlusconi’s calculus was purely political. He needed the votes to form a winning coalition in 1994 and to gain power, not least to protect his vast business interests from prosecutors.
His decision broke a major postwar taboo. Mr. Berlusconi eventually claimed credit for upending the political establishment that had governed Italy since the end of World War II. Those mainstream politicians had made something of a backroom deal to keep the fascist forces descended from Mussolini, the dictator who had nearly destroyed the country, away from power. Mr. Berlusconi clearly understood he had violated that pact. “We let them into the government in ’94 and we legitimized them,” he said.
In Mr. Berlusconi’s eyes, he was neutering, not normalizing, the “fascists.” Their alliance was an act of what Italian politicians taught me was “Romanization,” the age-old process by which any “barbarian,” no matter how ferocious and dangerous, could be tamed by the transactional nature, and irresistible gravity, of the Roman swamp. “In Italy, you can never have a revolution, because we all know each other,” went one famous phrase.
Plus, this particular swamp came with powerful guardrails created after World War II to prevent another strongman like Mussolini and, as time went on, added restrictions imposed by the European Union.
Those limits, and Italy’s deeply embedded conservatism and resistance to radicalism that could threaten the jealously guarded wealth — and real estate — of its people, produced a paradox: Italians were apt to let a party try out newfangled ideas — because nobody really expected anything to change.
It’s not for nothing that the national motto often seemed to be an observation from the great novel “The Leopard” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same,” a prince famously puts it, or, in another translation, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Italy’s insulation from change was exactly what made it a safe space as a political laboratory. Over the years, I had seen no shortage of experiments — megalomaniacal mogul turned face of the nation, a government run by proudly unprepared Internet-native populists, save-the-day technocrats. Whenever it seemed things were going off the rails, the flexible Italian system would call time on the experiment — and new elections were held. The infamous Italian instability was actually a way to preserve stability.
But one experiment seemed more significant, and sticky, than the others, and that was Mr. Berlusconi’s decision, out of political necessity or — in his telling — civic duty, to bring the far right into power.
Forward or Backward?
In the decades after Mr. Berlusconi’s short-lived 1994 government, the neo-fascist leaders who had joined it inched away from the margins and their taboos.
They distanced themselves from Mussolini and decried the Holocaust. Eventually, Giorgia Meloni, a teenager reared in the victimization culture of neo-Fascism, became a party leader, government minister and, during my time as the Rome bureau chief for The Times, the country’s most popular politician.
I had watched her political rise over decades, and when we sipped spritzes together in a Sardinian courtyard shortly before her election as prime minister in 2022, she insisted she led a mainstream conservative party.
I asked her whether she agreed with what she had simply called “the historical judgment” that Mussolini was bad for Italy — even if one subtracted the usual neo-fascist caveats that he had erred in allying with Hitler, in enacting racial laws and in almost destroying Italy and Europe by getting involved in World War II. With some prodding she even uttered a quiet “yeah.”
Ms. Meloni’s election seemed the culmination of something. I wasn’t sure then if, like Janus, I was looking forward or backward. I wasn’t sure if Mr. Berlusconi’s “Romanization” bet had succeeded in sapping neo-fascist forces or if it had backfired spectacularly and breathed them new life, bringing the world back a century.
But it mattered, I thought. Even if Italy seemed inoculated against the risks of its own political experiments, I wasn’t convinced that a lab leak to a world with fewer antibodies would not be a dangerous thing.
Since then, Ms. Meloni has become the Italian Republic’s longest-serving prime minister, likely to serve out her five-year term ahead of elections next year. Her fiscal and foreign policies are essentially those of a mainstream conservative. She has not wavered in her support for Ukraine. An initial effort to become Europe’s bridge to Mr. Trump failed. She has clearly taken the side of the European Union, on which Italy depends for financial aid, another illustration of the continent’s guardrails against rogue nationalism.
The establishment has gone from fearing Ms. Meloni to embracing her. The European Union values her as a partner and has moved closer to her positions on immigration.
After Ms. Meloni gave remarks to a gala held by Italy’s Foreign Press Association in 2025, during which she called the evening “an occasion to know one another,” she sat for more than an hour on a couch in the corner as reporters from around the world took turns talking to her, but mostly taking selfies.
At the end, I watched with disbelief from the back of the room as they gave her a bouquet of flowers, and Ms. Meloni danced with some of the reporters to “Billie Jean.” It was a raging success for Ms. Meloni, whose international normalization campaign was going splendidly. On the way out, I caught her eye. She gave me a look as if to say she couldn’t believe how well it had gone either.
Ahead of Italy’s elections, critics are arguing that Ms. Meloni hasn’t done much in government. While some still worry that she might feel bolder about taking the country farther right if she wins next year, they cannot, in any credible way, accuse her of governing Italy as a fascist or authoritarian.
As important as how she has governed is the very fact that she’s governed at all. She’s shown Europe’s hard-right forces — similarly inspired by neo-Fascism, but in countries without Italy’s kind of restraints — that they can win. It’s hard not to see that leaders of parties once seen as extremist — Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, Santiago Abascal in Spain — owe her a debt.
She had made any lingering neo-fascist odor much less offensive.
“For us it would happen the same,” Carlos Flores, a member of the Spanish Parliament and a prominent voice in the nationalist party Vox, told me soon after I arrived in Spain. He looked to Ms. Meloni as a model, envisioning a Spain that protected its culture and traditions, embraced nationalism and closed its doors to immigrants.
“We will carry out a portion of our program,” he said, and like he hoped Ms. Meloni would do, “We will wait until people give us the sufficient mandate to carry out the rest.”
As he envisioned that new, or maybe old, Spain over coffee in Valencia, I thought back to the Janus statues on the Tiber Island in Rome and to what my life in Italy had taught me. The land of the past often pointed toward our future.
