Right-wing politics, left-wing aesthetic

Finally, the character of these far-right groups is worth noting. Organizations like Bratstvo are national-anarchist, combining the aesthetics of the left with an essentially right-wing politics. They utilize public spectacles and trumpet anti-imperialist language reminiscent of the anti-globalization era. Groups like Svoboda, though beginning as run-of-the-mill European far-right organizations, have since undergone a massive PR makeover, crafting an image of “respectability” in an attempt to gain greater appeal.

Svoboda grew out of the Social-National Party of Ukraine, which emphasized its ethnic restrictions and branded itself with runic imagery similar to that used by neo-Nazi groups in Western Europe. Today, the Nazi-style aesthetics are gone, replaced with an Guy Fawkes masks and an Anarchist-looking red-and-black flag representing “blood and soil.” Similarly, in 2004 the party adopted a new political program, disaffiliated from their paramilitary organization (effectively re-composing it as a separate organization), and retooled their nationalism from a narrow ethnocentrism (such as imposing tiers of citizenship based on ethnicity) to a broader anti-immigrant platform that tended to poll better. All of this, combined with the power vacuum created by the break-up of the ‘Orange’ social-democratic political faction, has led to a situation in which such parties are becoming less and less marginal.

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When we look more closely at Italy, we find many of the same features noted in Ukraine. The far-right forces, like CasaPound, Tricolour Flame, and Forza Nuova have all undergone PR transformations in the last decade, abandoning 20th-century Fascist aesthetics in favor of a softer nationalist imagery that actively mixes in vital elements of the anti-globalization era, the Movement of the Squares and Occupy. M5S commonly uses the Guy Fawkes mask and other V for Vendetta symbolism in its campaigns, the exact same symbols favored by the right-populist segments of Occupy. Similarly, CasaPound began in a squatted building, one of many right-wing social centers that mimics the infoshops and squatter encampments common to the anarchist left.

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In terms of political content, we again see a similar merger of left and right—or, more accurately, the use of left-wing aesthetics, slogans and postures as a superficial veil obscuring an essentially right-wing politics. TriColour Flame, for example, is third positionist, upholding a revolutionary nationalism opposed to both communism and capitalism that frames itself as “beyond left and right” while drawing inspiration from Italian Fascist history. M5S mixes conspiracy theory, anti-globalization rhetoric, anti-immigrant diatribes, condemnations of political corruption and populist appeals to the Italian People into a seamless mush of substanceless, right-wing vitriol.

Such groups have been marginally successful at forging coalitions with Italian student groups, NGOs, football ultras, farmers’ organizations and protesting truckers, though they’ve failed to cohere the general movement around their initiative as thoroughly as the right-wing groups in Ukraine. At the same time, they’ve been the ones leading blockades of Italy’s major logistics centers and attempting to escalate the movements’ tactics, essentially gaining a monopoly on the Italian anti-austerity movement without any significant challenge posed by Italy’s left.