Old Wine in New Cleavages? Brothers of Italy’s Use of Religion

The cleavages thesis, proposed in the late 1960s by Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan to explain the emergence and persistence of the main European party families, is still one of the main tools to explain the genesis of political parties. While it originally included four main cleavages (center vs. periphery, city vs. country, labour vs. capital and church vs. state, it was subsequently updated to explain new types of parties such as the Greens and the radical right parties. This is also true for the role of religion: while it was originally linked to the church vs. state cleavage, this idea was put in question by the emergence of a new family of right-wing populist parties marked by an innovative use of religious symbols and rhetoric. New scholarly contributions have therefore explained this phenomenon as a consequence of a new cleavage, between supporters and opponents of globalization processes (as well as, according to some, between supporters of materialist and post-materialist values), in which religion becomes a matter of identity and belonging, rather than believing of behaving. This paper will discuss those points of view in relation to the Italian case. This latter, marked by the success of right-wing parties and politicians (particularly Silvio Berlusconi’s Go Italy and the League) since the 1990s, has witnessed in 2022 a sweeping victory of a new right-wing party with roots in the neo-fascist tradition, Brothers of Italy. The paper will analyse the history of the party (and its ancestors) and its current positions on sensitive issues related to religious and social pluralism and to morality politics, in order to discuss its peculiar use of cleavage politics.