Francesco Giubilei, who has ties to neo-fascists, will join the International Visitor Leadership Program and tour the US
On October 14, 2024, an influential figure in the transnational far-right movement with ties to neo-fascists, Francesco Giubilei, announced that he would be in the United States for the next few weeks as an invitee of the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). Giubilei is the head of the far-right Italian political party Fratelli d’Italia’s (Brothers of Italy, FdI) think tank Nazione Futura (Future Nation) and has been described by Rolling Stone Italia as “[Italian Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni’s Millennial intellectual.”
Meloni’s government and her party are known for their failure to distance themselves from the country’s fascist past, and for anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ policies, including recently banning surrogacy by Italian citizens anywhere in the world, which would make it impossible for certain LGBTQ+ couples to be recognized as parents or to have children.
In an online post, Giubilei announced that he was accepted to the program, which he described as intended for “emerging leaders from around the world.” It’s not clear how or why he was chosen for this fellowship, but the process for getting into the program requires one to be “nominated and selected…by the staff at U.S. Embassies around the world.” According to the Council for Global Equality (CGE), “the U.S. Embassy in Italy approved his participation in this prestigious U.S. exchange program and, most likely, nominated him.”
The fact that he was nominated to join an official State Department program sets a disturbing and worrying precedent which further testifies to the growing influence of the global far right on American institutions. As CGE pointed out, “is bolstering the credentials of those that promote Christian nationalism and oppose the rights of LGBTQI+, women, and other vulnerable populations the direction the U.S. government wants to go?” Do we want to use tax dollars to pay for this?
Given his position as the head of Nazione Futura, Giubilei is an elite figure within the Italian far-right ecosystem, and especially the movement surrounding FdI, the governing party headed by Meloni. Institutionally-speaking, Nazione Futura serves a similar purpose to far-right think tanks in the United States such as the Heritage Foundation or the Claremont Institute; they use their resources and connections to those in power to influence political policy and the selection of people the party will place in positions of power. As such, Nazione Futura events are often filled with speakers from the FdI, Lega, another far-right Italian party, or representatives of Lega’s think tank the Centro Studi Machiavelli (Machiavelli Study Center) (see the Global project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) recent report entitled “Mapping The Far Right” for more on Nazione Futura events here).
It is important to note that both Giubilei and FdI have connections to historical and contemporary neo-fascist groups. The FdI is the modern-day successor to the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), created by fascist ideologues after the fall of Mussolini’s authoritarian regime. This trend within the party lasted until the 1990s, when the MSI evolved to resemble a more contemporary far-right party, and also began to enter government as a junior partner in the coalitions headed by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and the government now headed by Meloni (for more on FdI, see GPAHE’s country report for Italy here).
Similarly, Giubilei has ties to neo-fascists. He is the president of the Fondazione Tatarella (Tatarella Foundation), named after Giuseppe Tatarella, a leader of the postwar MSI and founding member of their youth organization, Giovane Italia, and member of Berlusconi’s government in the 1990s. The Fondazione Tatarella serves as a far-right “cultural center” and archive for the two historical predecessors of the FdI, the MSI and Alleanza Nazionale (AN). When the FdI-led government came to power in October 2022, Giubilei very briefly held the position of special advisor to the Italian Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, who emerged from far-right youth groups in the days of the MSI. Giubilei resigned from this position on June 11, 2023 after Il Foglio reported on a conflict of interest after the Tatarella Foundation was granted a contribution of 46,000 euros (50,000 USD) from the Ministry of Culture for “interventions on archives of political movements and workers’ representative bodies.”
Hardly a “conservative” as he and his associates like to portray themselves, the topics addressed in Giubilei’s books “reveal not only an interest in contemporary far-right politics, but also a deep knowledge of—and fluency in—the language and ideas of historical fascism,” including the works of post-war fascist intellectual Julias Evola, according to George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
While Nazione Futura may brand itself as “conservative,” the people that Giubilei associates with indicate otherwise. Recently, a group that Nazione Futura frequently organizes events with, the Generazione Popolare (The People’s Generation), described in the Italian press as a “neo-fascist organization,” made headlines after two of its members were pictured dressed in black shirts and performing fascist “stiff arm” salutes in a Montessori High School, leading spectators to believe that the list for student elections they were sponsoring was an attempt at fascist infiltration. Nazione Futura, according to GWU’s Institute, has collaborated with Generazione Popolare on several occasions, including at least one event where Giubilei himself was a speaker.
Within Europe, Giubilei and the Nazione Futura are central to a network of propaganda organizations supporting the authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and elites close to major European far-right parties. These include the Orbánist Center for Fundamental Rights (CFR) and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), both of which frequently attend Nazione Futura events and invite their speakers to their own. Notably, Giubilei has signed a partnership agreement with the CFR’s Miklós Szánthó, Péter Törcsi from the Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation, and Daniele Scalea from the Centro Studi Machiavelli in October 2023, and is a signatory to the “Wokebusters” rapid response task force led by the CFR and CPAC Hungary (see GPAHE’s previous reporting on wokebusters here). The pan-European magazine, The European Conservative, whose headquarters is located at the Budapest campus of the MCC, is published in collaboration with Nazione Futura, and has ties to the broader European far right.
Giubilei has a near constant presence on the European far-right conference circuit. He has spoken at the Christian Nationalist university CEU-CEFAS’ “Hacia una renovación cristiana de Europa” (Towards a Christian Revival in Europe) conference, of whom Nazione Futura is a partner organization, the CFR’s CPAC Hungary in 2022 and 2023, and the large pro-Orbán National Conservative Conferences (NatCon) in Rome in 2020 and Brussels in 2022, for which Nazione Futura is one of the co-sponsoring institutions.
In Italy, Giubilei and his Nazione Futura and Fondazione Tatarella also co-organize the large “Italian Conservatism” conferences. In September 2022 and 2023, these events brought together speakers from far-right political parties in Europe, and particularly individuals who are prominent in Orbánist circles such as Orbán’s closest advisor Balázs Orbán, Danube President John O’Sullivan, and CFR’s Miklós Szánthó. Beyond this, Nazione Futura organizes smaller conferences with far-right elites on a regular basis. In this respect, Giubilei and his organizations play an important role unifying far-right groups across the European continent. In a recent report published by GPAHE, Giubilei was identified as one of the most influential figures within the transnational far-right network.
This is not the first time that Giubilei has had an interest in the United States. In February 2024, Giubilei and an entourage of associates from Nazione Futura were present at the 2024 Washington, D.C., Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). There, they met with several American far-right groups such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the Heritage Foundation, responsible for creating the rights-stripping Project 2025, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), formed from former Trump administration officials that has been described as a “White House in waiting,” and Grover Norquist and Lorenzo Montanari from Americans for Tax Reform. Giubilei stated that his purpose for attending CPAC was to “build a network of the conservative world in Europe and the West, a project that we have been working on for years but are intensifying in advance of the European elections and the U.S. presidential election.”
