Through the colonial lens: the Italian populist radical right and foreign policy relations with Italy’s former colonies

This paper draws attention to the role of colonial memory in the Italian populist radical right’s views on Italy’s foreign policy with its former colonies across the Mediterranean (i.e. Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia). While recent academic scholarship has studied the influence of colonial memory on anti-immigrant sentiment, the role of colonial memory in contemporary parties’ appraisal of Italian foreign policy towards its former colonial territories remains understudied. This paper aims to fill this gap, by investigating how colonial memory shapes the populist radical right’s views of Italy’s foreign policy towards its former colonies. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of interviewsFootnote1 with Italian populist radical right representatives from the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), complemented by relevant public speeches delivered by FdI’s leader Meloni, this paper highlights Italy’s selective colonial memory cleansed of the most controversial aspects of the colonial past and associated with a subtle postcolonial nostalgia. This nostalgia manifests as scepticism towards colonial apologies, indifference to the enduring hardships of former colonies and friendly relations with dictatorial rulers. Alongside it, a sense of national pride underwrites a paternalistic outlook, visible in the more recent Mattei Plan for development and cooperation in Africa.