Italy is, notoriously, not a nation of readers, with Italians spending on average far less time reading books than many other Europeans. Yet, lately, a book has monopolized the nation’s political conversation. The author, Roberto Vannacci, is an army general whose political thoughts lean reactionary, to say the least. In the past year, he has become one of Italy’s most prominent right-wing figures. Indeed, he has come close to eclipsing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in domestic media coverage.
Italy is, notoriously, not a nation of readers, with Italians spending on average far less time reading books than many other Europeans. Yet, lately, a book has monopolized the nation’s political conversation. The author, Roberto Vannacci, is an army general whose political thoughts lean reactionary, to say the least. In the past year, he has become one of Italy’s most prominent right-wing figures. Indeed, he has come close to eclipsing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in domestic media coverage.
Vannacci, 55, also happens to be the star candidate of the anti-immigration party the League in the upcoming European Parliament elections. He was picked as a candidate by party leader Matteo Salvini—despite the opposition of some League officials, who viewed the general as inexperienced—in an attempt to regain the visibility that the League has lost since its main ally and rival, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, usurped Salvini’s support base and rose to power.
Only a year ago, Vannacci was completely unknown to the wider public. Throughout the first half of 2024, one could hardly turn on the TV or open a newspaper without bumping into his name. It seems almost as if every week the general is at the epicenter of a new media storm: the most recent one about an interview he did with La Stampa in April, where Vannacci declared that “Italians are white, statistics say so,” and accused gay people of “showing off as exhibitionists.”
As soon as his candidacy was announced in late April, the progressive Democratic Party rushed to issue an (inadvertently counterproductive) statement urging Italians to ignore him.
Born into a military family (both his father and grandfather were professional soldiers), Vannacci served in Italy’s special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, then led the army’s prestigious Folgore battalion, took part in the nation’s anti-Islamic State task force in 2017 and 2018, and served as a military attaché to the Italian Embassy in Moscow in 2020-2022. Yet fame came, unexpectedly, last August, when Vannacci was holding the not-so-glamourous position of head of the Military Geographic Institute in Florence.
In his free time during his service at the institute, Vannacci had written and self-published a book titled Il mondo al contrario (“The World Upside Down”). “I wrote the book for personal satisfaction. I thought it would be spread among my friends and would sell 300-400 copies,” Vannacci said in a phone conversation with Foreign Policy. But, to its author’s own surprise, the book became a huge success—the fifth-bestselling title in Italy in 2023—making Vannacci a better-selling author than Ken Follett and an instant celebrity. Despite being self-published, The World Upside Down had sold 200,000 copies by early 2024. (Italy’s publishing industry is small. By comparison, Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, which was the country’s top seller, sold just over 300,000.)
The views of the book were so extreme that even Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto—who co-founded the Brothers of Italy with Meloni—had to reprimand him: Vannacci was first replaced as head of the Military Geographic Institute and then suspended from the military for 11 months.
Organized into chapters, each dedicated to a specific theme, from environmentalism to multicultural society up to LGBT-related issues and animal rights, the book is a compendium of ultra-conservative personal philosophy, in which Vannacci sees the West threatened by feminism, environmentalism, the LGBT community, and animal rights.
His tirade rests on what he frames as buonsenso (“common sense”), the belief that all these modern ideas are insane, with little need for explanation: “Normality is heterosexuality. If everything seems normal to you, however, it is the fault of the plots of the international gay lobby.” Same-sex marriage or adoption? Come on, it’s just nuts—it’s common sense that a family is husband plus wife. Women want to work outside the house? Nonsense, “even if they work, they don’t feel fulfilled.”
Vannacci presented himself as the voice of the silent majority, which is hostage to some noisy minorities—and he was in some ways proved right. The message resonated with many Italians, who found in his book a manifesto for their own thoughts.
In an interview, Vannacci described himself as a “patriot.” He added that he views his literary endeavor as a defense of “our culture, our traditions, our roots, if only for the respect of our ancestors, our fathers, of our grandparents.”
In his book, the general exalts Italy’s greatest historical figures—going back to Aeneas, Julius Caesar, Dante, Galileo, and Garibaldi—and takes pride in having, supposedly, their glorious ancient blood in his veins, a staple of Italian nationalistic nostalgia.
Political scientist Mattia Diletti, who teaches at Rome’s Sapienza University, notes that his nostalgic discourse echoes Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric.
The success of The World Upside Down lies in the portrayal of a world that, being “upside down,” one must “overthrow this morally, socially, politically corrupt elite. We must return to the ancient values that are within Italian society,” Vannacci writes.
This type of rhetoric resonated with Italian conservative voters, especially since Meloni, the head of a party that has its roots in postfascism, ended up being more moderate than her fanbase expected. For instance, she sided with the United States and European powers in supporting Ukraine, despite pro-Russian and anti-European Union sentiment enjoying some popularity on the right. On LGBT rights and abortion, Meloni’s reactionary rhetoric was never followed by major action: LGBT rights (or the lack of thereof) have remained unchanged since the pre-Meloni era, and the country’s abortion law has remained unchanged.
“Vannacci is a sort of rebellion against the thinking of the current times,” said Francesco Borgonovo, the deputy director of the conservative newspaper La Verità. The cultural battles waged by the suspended general, Borgonovo noted, are precisely the same cultural battles that right-wing parties had waged during the electoral campaigns but then did not deliver after they came to power.
“He puts together ideas in a somewhat bar-room way,” appealing to “right-wing people, who now feel betrayed by the parties that are now governing Italy, which they helped to elect,” Borgonovo said.
Diletti of Sapienza points out that part of Vannacci’s success is precisely that of presenting himself as an outsider who tells things as they are. In a country where the political class is widely discredited, Vannacci succeeds by presenting himself as “the non-politician who speaks the truth to politicians.”
Today, Vannacci is at the epicenter of Italy’s political debate, not only due to his EU candidacy. After his first book’s success, he recently published an autobiography.
Paradoxically, being elected to the European Parliament could dim his star: As an MEP, Vannacci’s image could be downgraded from “firebrand general” to mere “politician,” a term many Italians have come to loathe.
Although Vannacci’s fame might be transitory, his message will likely last: According to Diletti, “He put his name and face on them, but the ideas he expressed are part of Italian society.”
The post How an Obscure General Became the Star of Italy’s Far Right appeared first on Foreign Policy.
