Earlier this month, the gardens of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo were filled with families enjoying some unseasonably warm sun by a pop-up ice rink. Teenage couples skated hand in hand, while the watching crowds sipped mulled wine and hot chocolate to a soundtrack of Nat King Cole. At first glance, it looked like a normal Christmas market. The stands, however, revealed a different reality. Among the nativity displays and kitsch decorations were adverts for nationalist newspapers and something called “patriot radio”. On a wall near the kids’ play area, a mural depicted an unlikely cast of characters, tracing a lineage from the fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio to the late American Maga influencer Charlie Kirk.
This was the setup I witnessed at this year’s Atreju, Italy’s biggest rightwing festival, which has been running since 1998 as an annual celebration of patriotism and nationalism. During the early editions, proud neo-fascists, including black-hooded thugs from street movements such as CasaPound and Forza Nuova, made up a visible portion of the attenders. At this year’s event, however, the Celtic crosses and odal rune tattoos were tucked under well-ironed shirts. The crowd was made up of nerdy students, gen-Z influencers, civil society campaigners and passersby who had been lured off the street by the glittery lights.
Atreju is not a party conference. It’s a community fair, an old-fashioned outdoor kermesse, or fair, that is as much about myth-building as it is about politics. Fantasy fans may clock this from its name: bizarrely, Atreju (Atreyu in English) is the main character in The Neverending Story. First published, in German, in 1979, it is a work that Giorgia Meloni and her circle obsessed over while attending neo-fascist “hobbit camps” in the 1990s, gatherings where fantasy literature was used to soften the edges of hard-right propaganda. Meloni herself had a direct role in organising the first edition of Atreju, and writes fondly in her autobiography about her love of fantasy as a genre: a world where heroic idealists embark on a quest against evil.
It’s worth noting that Michael Ende, the author of The Neverending Story, has had nothing to do with any of this. His novel is complex, and reflects on mysticism and the occult in ways that are impossible to reduce to a single perspective. Meloni and her colleagues, however, have imposed their beliefs on his fable, twisting its message into a simplistic political binary that, as far-fetched as it might sound, underpins Atreju today. On the one hand is a good Italy: made up of patriots who express nationalist pride in food, landscape and politics. On the other is a bad Italy: one of leftwing hooligans, gangs and non-European migrants.
Previous editions of Atreju have run with themes such as “It’s time for patriots”, and “Conservatives’ Christmas” – in which panellists conjured up imaginary “woke threats” to the religious holiday. This year, the slogan was “You became strong … Italy with its head held high”, a strange blend of old-school far-right swagger and a contemporary gym slogan. In today’s context, it mainly communicated a desire to gloat.
Which is understandable, to some extent: after all, Atreju is now the mainstream. In just 13 years, Brothers of Italy has gone from a tiny upstart force with just 2% of the national vote to the largest party in Italy’s ruling coalition, while Meloni is now one of the country’s longest serving postwar premiers, and lauded by eminent international publications. As one Atreju panellist put it: Italy was once chaos, and now it is stable and credible.
For all the chutzpah, however, some in Meloni’s camp are worried. The PM underperformed in regional elections this year, and while Brothers of Italy’s polling lead is stable, there are the first signs that support may be peaking.
For Atreju’s organisers, the answer was to keep the attention on Italy’s increasing prominence on the global stage. Not so long ago, the country’s political class had seemed content to play a minor role in international affairs compared with neighbours France and Germany. Not any more. Meloni has been more active than her predecessors, increasing economic investment in Africa, fostering closer ties with India and withdrawing from China’s belt and road initiative. She was the only EU leader present at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, and has expressed a renewed commitment to transatlanticism ever since.
On closer inspection, Meloni’s international record is less robust than it first seems. Within the EU, she performs a delicate, often contradictory dance with the Brussels establishment she once derided. Her staunch commitment to arming Kyiv is perpetually undermined by her own deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, whose lingering sympathies for Putin’s territorial demands create a contradictory foreign policy. Even her supposed status as a “Trump whisperer” feels hollow. While she claims to be the bridge between Rome and Mar-a-Lago, her ideological kinship with Maga cannot shield Italy from the reality of US protectionism. The fear of tariffs is palpable among the standard bearers of Italian food and fashion, and an “America First” trade war may yet devour the very “Made in Italy” brand Meloni champions.
Meanwhile, at home, the cracks are deepening too. On 12 December, as Atreju was in full swing, thousands across Italy took part in a general strike against a budget bill they say is defined by stealth cuts and a chronic lack of investment in public services. These arguments cannot simply be brushed aside. Approximately 5.7 million people now live in absolute poverty in Italy, nearly one-tenth of the population. And while the government is quick to tout rising employment numbers, the reality is a landscape of precarious, underpaid jobs and a stubborn refusal to implement a national minimum wage. Purchasing power has not returned to pre-Covid levels, and inflation is crushing consumer spending. No wonder, then, that Italy’s historic mass emigration is accelerating again. In 2024, 191,000 people officially left the country, the highest figure in a quarter of a century.
Unfortunately, the current government seems less interested in addressing these structural problems than in imposing even greater control over the narrative. In 2026, Meloni will shift her focus to a high-stakes campaign for judicial reform, a move critics argue will give politicians excessive control over the state’s legal apparatus while distracting from the country’s economic emergency.
With a fraught season of debate looming ahead of a referendum on the reforms in the spring, Brothers of Italy supporters would do well to reacquaint themselves with the the moment in The Neverending Story when the werewolf Gmork warns Atreju about the treachery of human politics. “Who knows what use they’ll make of you?” the beast snarls, as the hero falters in his quest. “Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle.”