When Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano resigned over a sex scandal on Sept. 6, Alessandro Giuli was appointed in his place. Giuli had very little experience in politics, but like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in his youth, he was a member of a neofascist party called the Italian Social Movement. Soon after her election, Meloni appointed him as the director of MAXXI, an important museum in Rome.
In a way, Giuli was part of Meloni’s vision years before she appointed him as a minister. She has long considered him one of the most suitable candidates to carry out a project that she cares about: building right-wing cultural hegemony.
Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to explain why the worker’s revolution that Karl Marx predicted had not yet happened. He theorized that it was because the ruling class controlled social institutions—from schools to the media—and used them to spread its ideologies, shaping the population’s belief system and, thus, its actions. In other words, controlling culture meant controlling political and social outcomes.
Meloni is not a communist, but she is convinced that the Italian left has succeeded, since the end of World War II, in dominating cultural institutions, such as the arts and academia, creating a situation which she has described as “power hegemony” against the right. Now that she’s in power, she’s determined to reverse that imbalance.
Giuli couldn’t agree more—and he’s turning to Gramsci for a road map. In a book that he published in May, aptly titled “Gramsci è vivo” (Gramsci Lives), he outlined his vision: “Today, especially on the right, there’s the mother of all battles: shifting from a mentality of exclusion toward a mentality of System, which means perceiving oneself as a ruling class with a vision, a perspective of society.”
What he was trying to argue in the book is that the right, which until recently was excluded by polite society in general—and more specifically, in the realm of culture—must embrace Gramsci’s vision of cultural hegemony. In other words, to become a true ruling class, you cannot rely on political power alone; you need to establish a dominant narrative to maintain consensus through a system of shared values and take hold of cultural institutions, something that the left has traditionally been better at.
Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli (front, third from left) attends the awards ceremony of the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 7. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
The Italian right’s fascination with Gramsci is not an isolated case: Other European right-wing groups have taken inspiration from the communist philosopher as well. Martin Sellner, an Austrian who is a prominent figure among the German-speaking far right, cited Gramsci in his book Regime Change from the Right: A Strategic Sketch. Among the right-wing admirers of Gramsci outside of Europe, there are former White House strategist Steve Bannon and Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian conservative ideologue who died in 2022.
But what sets Meloni apart is that she has both the vision and the power to make it happen.
The first right-wing thinker to appropriate the communist philosopher was the French philosopher Alain de Benoist, who did so in the mid-1970s. According to Francesco Germinario, a historian at the Luigi Micheletti Foundation who specializes in researching the far right, de Benoist decontextualized Gramsci and stripped him of his Marxism, focusing solely on the idea of cultural hegemony and the importance of winning battles on the cultural front to gain power.
This reinterpretation is particularly successful in postwar Italy, where the right—still licking its wounds—found itself marginalized and embraced a defensive, victim mentality: “Since the postwar period, the right has mainly tried to defend itself,” Germinario said.
Then, when Italy’s left underwent an identity crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, the right found itself in the position to counterattack, but it hadn’t developed the intellectual ammunition. And so, “Lacking its own points of references, the right looked for cultural inspiration from the left,” Germinario added.
To be fair, the perception that the left ever exercised total cultural hegemony in Italy is mostly false. The Christian Democrats, the centrist but socially conservative Catholic party that ruled the country between 1948 and 1992, did hold a strong grip on some cultural institutions, especially schools and television. And the Communist Party maintained a strong influence on book publishing and cinema.
Yet at the same time, right-wing politician Silvio Berlusconi, who ruled as prime minister on and off between 1994 and 2011, notoriously enjoyed a quasi-monopoly over television. Even so, he did not exercise his power on other cultural realms, despite the fact that he owned two major book publishing houses (one of which, Einaudi, leans strongly to the left).
Berlusconi wasn’t interested in high-brow culture and never made a secret of it: “He had an utilitarian conception of culture—he understood ahead of his times the crisis of newspapers and of a world of intellectuals linked to newspapers,” said Giorgio Caravale, professor of modern history at Roma Tre University and the author of the book Senza Intellettuali (Without Intellectuals). “To Berlusconi, it was all about TV,” Caravale added. “He cared more about what showmen were saying in front of the camera than about hundreds of op-eds in newspapers.”
In Italy, television has a central role. After World War II, it contributed to the country’s literacy and spreading Italian (as opposed to regional dialects) as a shared language. Italy has an older population that mostly relies on TV as its main source of information and entertainment. Newspaper and book readership is low, compared to other highly developed nations.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni tastes cheeses during her visit to the craft fair at Fiera Milano Rho in Milan on Dec. 7, 2023.Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images
Meloni’s right has a different approach. “When she came to power, she thought: We must do what Berlusconi has not done in 20 years: Invest in culture and take it back from the left,” Caravale said. When she became prime minister in 2022, she allocated most of the cultural positions to trusted people, many of whom had a past in the Italian Social Movement (MSI).
Giuli’s predecessor, Sangiuliano, also came from the MSI. In an interview with the New York Review of Books, he also expressed his intention to overturn what he perceived as a cultural hegemony of the left, saying, “The radical-chic spirit of certain Roman salons tried to transform culture in Italy into something that spoke only to a small circle.” Sangiuliano added that he hoped to give “the national cultural panorama a wider horizon.”
Sangiuliano made a point of weaponizing literature. He has tried to reinterpret Dante Alighieri as an icon of the Italian right and produced a much publicized exhibit in Rome dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, an author particularly beloved by the post-fascist right in Italy. (Between the 1970s and 1990s, the MSI hosted youth camps called “Campo Hobbit”). He also relished announcing the planned creation of new museums, such as a museum of the Italian language, a museum of the Italian culture, and a “museum of the foibe,” to remember the war crimes of Yugoslav partisans during World War II. None of the museums has actually been built.
Meloni has also appointed another former MSI member, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, to be the president of the Biennale di Venezia—the influential institution that oversees Venice’s glamorous film festival as well as the city’s renowned architecture and art festivals. Buttafuoco is a famous journalist and novelist who is well known for his ultraconservative views.
Meloni’s government has been particularly active in shaping the culture of Italy’s state TV network, or RAI, to the point that in the past few years, it has been dubbed by critics as “Tele-Meloni.” The effort is more aggressive than in Berlusconi’s era and, despite her success, Meloni seems scared that someone might speak badly of her. As a result, the bad news is often censored and the good news celebrated—even if it’s only a pro-Meloni headline in a foreign newspaper.
RAI’s general director, Giampaolo Rossi, is also a former MSI activist, hailing from the same party chapter where Meloni started her political career as a teenager in the Roman neighborhood of Colle Oppio. Under Rossi’s leadership, RAI has produced and aired many historical miniseries, including one glorifying the occupation of the Croatian city of Rijeka by Italian nationalists and another about the last weeks of the fascist regime in 1943.
The moment where Meloni’s grip on RAI became most apparent can be pinpointed. In April, Antonio Scurati, a renowned progressive author best known for writing M,—the monumental, and highly critical, fictionalized biography of Mussolini that has inspired the Sky TV series of the same name—was scheduled to perform a monologue on the anniversary of the country’s liberation from fascism, on April 25. But it was canceled at the last minute—for “editorial reasons,” according to an internal communication from RAI that was leaked to the press—possibly because Scurati’s speech included criticism of Meloni, whom the author accused of belittling the historical significance of anti-fascist resistance.
Graffiti by Italian artist Ozmo depicts Antonio Gramsci on a wall in Rome on March 31, 2014. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
Meloni’s efforts to establish cultural influence stem not only from ideology, but also out of necessity. As the head of government, Meloni finds herself in the unfortunate position of having to push policies that clash with the wishes of her voters in order to maintain good relations with Europe. In foreign policy, she had to side with Ukraine, despite her base being pro-Russian; on the economy, she had to cut spending on health care and local government funding, a highly unpopular move among her base.
This has put Meloni in a vulnerable position. Unlike Berlusconi, she does not own a media empire that would defend her image no matter what. In this situation, appointing loyalists in key media and cultural positions is necessary to ensure positive coverage.
The fact that Meloni has a clear vision on the need to establish cultural hegemony and is actively pursuing it doesn’t mean that she will succeed. Some critics argue that despite the eagerness, the right’s influence over culture is still thin: “Meloni and the Brothers of Italy (her political party) seem more interested in occupying positions of power than in creating a real cultural hegemony,” said Mario Ricciardi, a columnist for the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto.
Meloni’s policies have been often described as right-wing at home and moderate in the international arena. Domestically, she has passed a law that cracks down on protest and strikes, but her foreign policy has been friendly toward the United States and the EU.
When it comes to ideology, she’s hard to pin down: While she has voiced some fascination with nostalgic, identitarian ideas—such as clear gender roles and the Christian roots of European culture—she can hardly be described as a Russian President Vladimir Putin or a Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Ricciardi argued that Meloni has, for the moment, failed to build a coherent worldview: “She has a clear idea of who are the enemies—the left and the so-called radical chic; she is attached to the idea of a motherland; but besides this, it’s all too vague to even try to appeal to citizens.”
To push an ideology, Ricciardi said, you first need to build one: “Eventually, to have a consensus, you have to put down roots.”
