Stretching from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, peaking in the 1970s, this uneasy and violent interval is not merely commemorated by the prime minister’s governing coalition but administered.
Italy is a place where the past is not past in the ordinary political sense. In public speech, parliamentary debate, police law, and institutional reform, the Years of Lead (Anni di piombo) have become less a memory than a governing instrument.
To an outsider, this can seem puzzling. Italy’s crisis years occurred half a century ago. Yet they are invoked with a peculiar immediacy, as though political violence lurked just behind the next student occupation or transport strike.
The point is not that the Italian prime minister literally expects a return of urban guerrilla warfare. Rather, the period functions as a political grammar. The story she tells about the Years of Lead, particularly the 1970s, establishes what political conflict is allowed to mean in Italy today.
The Years of Lead were indeed traumatic.
During those two decades, Italy experienced a level of internal violence rare in Western Europe after 1945: bombings in public squares, assassinated judges, kidnapped industrialists, murdered journalists.
The killing of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 still occupies a place in Italian memory similar to the one that John F. Kennedy’s assassination holds in the American imagination. Except that it unfolded over weeks, with communiqués, negotiations, and the eerie spectacle of a modern state unable to rescue its own former prime minister.
What Italians remember most is not simply terrorism but a sensation of institutional impotence. The republic appeared unable to govern itself.
Historically, the violence had multiple sources. Far-left armed groups operated alongside neo-fascist terrorists; clandestine networks within the security services conducted manipulative intelligence operations; the so-called “strategy of tension” blurred the boundaries between subversion and counter-subversion.
It was an era in which state authority, revolutionary ambition, and paranoid anti-communism interlocked. A historian might call it a systemic crisis. A political entrepreneur calls it a lesson.
Giorgia Meloni’s interpretation of that lesson is remarkably consistent. The problem, in her telling, was not the complexity of the conflict but the weakness of the state. The republic, dominated by fragile parliamentary coalitions and a cultural environment tolerant of radical ideologies, hesitated to assert authority.
Radicalism flourished in universities and unions. And violence followed. The causal chain is elegant, morally clear, and politically useful: permissiveness leads to disorder, disorder to terror, terror to democratic breakdown.
The conclusion writes itself. The state must act early and firmly. Doing so is not authoritarian; it is the best way to preserve democracy.
By interpreting the historical record in this way, Meloni also performs a quiet rehabilitation.
The political tradition that produced her descends from Italy’s postwar right, long marginalised within a republic whose founding legitimacy rested on antifascism. For decades, the Italian right argued that it had been excluded from cultural and political respectability while Marxist currents enjoyed institutional influence.
In this retelling of what happened during the Years of Lead, the republic’s problem was not an excess of authoritarian residue but an excess of indulgence toward ideological radicalism. And the period is recast, not as a warning about extremism in general, but about the consequences of delegitimising national authority.
The selective emphasis here stands out. Left-wing violence appears as the central danger while right-wing violence recedes into the contextual background. While the historical record is complicated, political memory is not obliged to be.
In Meloni’s rhetoric, contemporary protest movements—climate blockades, militant labour actions, antifascist mobilisations—are on a continuum with the unrest of the peak Years of Lead. They may not be terrorists—not yet anyway—but are worrying symptoms of a future crisis that must be treated now, lest it worsen into a national calamity later, the way a doctor might prescribe a prophylactic course of antibiotics to head off potential infection.
The function of this analogy is not to predict insurgency but to define dissent as incipient instability. And the effect on governance has been concrete.
Legal changes have expanded penalties for infrastructure disruption and certain forms of protest. Police powers at demonstrations have widened. Public order legislation has been framed in preventive rather than reactive terms.
The language accompanying these measures is notable. The justification is not repression but stabilisation. The republic, we are told, must avoid repeating its mistakes.
At this point, observers outside Italy often misinterpret the situation. They search for classical authoritarian signals: suspended elections, outlawed opposition parties, overt constitutional rupture. But they are missing.
Despite her past ties to those seeking to rehabilitate Benito Mussolini’s legacy, Meloni does not reject democratic procedure. Instead, she redefines what democratic defence requires.
In this account, the foundation of democracy is not participatory contestation, but the reliable functioning of the state that makes that contestation possible. Order precedes politics. Without authority, pluralism becomes a prelude to violence.
This logic extends beyond policing. Meloni’s advocacy of constitutional reform aimed at strengthening the prime minister—often compressed to “premierato”—follows the same reasoning. Italy’s postwar system produced short-lived governments and fragmented party coalitions. The lesson drawn from that instability is that parliamentary mediation, left to itself, inevitably dissolves into paralysis.
Paralysis invites radicalisation. As a consequence, a stronger executive would not signal a departure from democracy but a safeguard against its self-destruction. The republic must be capable of deciding.
The shift has a deeper cultural implication. Postwar Italian legitimacy was anchored in antifascism. To defend the republic was, implicitly, to oppose fascism. Meloni’s interpretation of the Years of Lead identifies this political reflex as a serious problem. Antifascism, she suggests, hardened into a partisan ideology that excused disruptive radicalism while delegitimising patriotic conservatism.
In other words, she relocates the defence of democracy from historical memory to institutional functionality. The republic is defended not by recalling 1945 but by preventing 1978.
The irony is delicate. A political movement historically suspected of authoritarian nostalgia now justifies its program through the language of democratic protection. Yet the transformation is genuine.
Meloni’s project is not to abolish liberal democracy but to narrow its meaning.
Political contestation is legitimate so long as it does not threaten governability; protest is permissible so long as it does not disrupt the infrastructural metabolism of the state. What emerges is a procedural democracy accompanied by a substantive suspicion of mass politics.
At this point, it becomes possible to discern an older argument resurfacing in contemporary form. Early twentieth-century European political theory was preoccupied with a problem: how a democratic state could retain authority amid ideological fragmentation.
One answer, associated with Carl Schmitt, held that parliamentary systems collapse when they cannot decisively resolve conflict. Endless discussion substitutes for decision; legitimacy drains away; politics reappears as emergency. The sovereign, in Schmitt’s famous formulation, is the one who decides the exception. The paradox is that democracy survives only if someone can act before the crisis becomes fatal.
Meloni does not cite Schmitt. She doesn’t need to. Her governing style embodies a softened version of that logic.
The Years of Lead supply the empirical case required to justify the political change she seeks. Italy once experienced paralysis and violence; therefore, the state must anticipate instability and preempt escalation. The aim is not dictatorship but prevention. One way to describe this approach is constitutionalised preemption, the normalisation of emergency reasoning within ordinary politics.
Yet there is another figure in this story, one who worried about a different danger. Max Weber feared that parliamentary weakness could produce a plebiscitary leader who claimed to embody the popular will directly, bypassing deliberative institutions.
Weber’s solution was not to eliminate leadership but to embed it within responsible government, an executive strong enough to act yet accountable to representative structures. The problem, as Weber saw it, was balancing decisiveness and legitimacy.
Here, the contemporary Italian situation becomes theoretically suggestive. Meloni’s politics promise authority without abandoning elections, order without suspending legality. They offer citizens a functioning state in place of participatory power.
In a society where politics often appear incapable of shaping economic life, this trade is attractive. People will tolerate bureaucracy, inequality, even slow reform; what they cannot tolerate indefinitely is a sense that nothing can be decided. Memories of the Years of Lead, whether firsthand or mediated by elders and media–Meloni herself was only a baby in 1978–amplify that impatience.
The Years of Lead thus perform a dual function. They simultaneously warn against radicalism and justify decisiveness. In the process, they also shift the meaning of democracy from collective self-rule to effective administration. The state, in this view, does not express popular sovereignty so much as guarantee social stability. Elections choose managers capable of maintaining and strengthening order.
This is why Meloni’s invocation of the period resonates far beyond Italy. Many contemporary democracies experience what might be called political exhaustion: parties promise change but deliver constraint, governments alternate, yet policy continuity persists.
In such an environment, the most persuasive political claim is not ideological transformation but operational competence. Authority becomes a democratic virtue.
Politically, the strategy works because it answers an immediate demand. Citizens want a state that acts. A government that decides feels more democratic than a parliament that debates.
Whether this approach can resolve the underlying problem is another matter. The trauma of the Years of Lead was real, but also the product of broader social conflicts: economic upheaval, ideological polarisation, and institutional rigidity. Preventive policing and a stronger executive may suppress symptoms without addressing the causes.
Giorgia Meloni occupies a curious position within the history of democratic thought. She does not reject the liberal constitutional order, nor does she fully embrace populist anti-institutionalism.
Instead, she attempts to solve Weber’s dilemma by approaching Schmitt’s conclusion with caution. The republic must be capable of decisive action, but that action must remain formally constitutional. Sovereignty does not reside in emergency dictatorship, but in administrative reliability.
The Years of Lead supply the narrative justification. Because the state nearly failed in those years, tied in knots by a chronic failure to make tough choices, it must never hesitate again. Half a century later, Italy governs in conversation with its own fear of incapacity. The lesson of the past is not that democracy is fragile but that indecision is fatal.
Meloni’s project is neither a return to fascism nor a conventional conservatism. It is an attempt to produce a democracy that functions by narrowing the range of permissible instability.
The citizen votes, the opposition speaks, protests occur, but all within a framework where the priority of authority is assumed rather than debated. The state comes first. Politics operates within the arena it makes possible.
Weber hoped for responsible leadership. Schmitt demanded decisive sovereignty. Contemporary Italy experiments with an electoral system that quietly combines the two.
The result is a democracy that promises protection from its own past: a constitutional order stabilised not by shared ideals but the memory of a period, the Years of Lead, when the state could not decide and nearly met its doom.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
