RACISM DOES NOT EQUAL FASCISM:

It is precisely because Meloni is not a fascist outcast that her actions offer a blueprint for, if not the world, then Europe. Gone may be the days when the victory of far-right populists and extremists appeared unthinkable or untenable. We may instead be in a new degenerated, rightwing normality: where that honourable and necessary space in a democracy - the space occupied by Jacques Chirac, Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel - becomes perverted and consistently occupied by Trumps and Melonis. Meloni may succeed in mutating the far right from the status of outsider in European politics to tenacious insider.

Such degeneration has been spearheaded in the US by the Republican party, as remade by its collusion with Donald Trump, which the FT columnist Edward Luce rightly described recently as a "nihilistic, dangerous and contemptible" political force. One half of the traditional political spectrum in the US has broken away, taking with it the health of American democracy. That same process - rather than the sensational emergence of a fascist, but ultimately short-lived government in Italy - may be what is taking hold in Europe.

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