On this winter Saturday in Rome, in the moat of Castel Saint-Ange – the papal fortress built over the mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian – science fiction met fantasy. On December 16, 2023, Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet and entrepreneur eager to colonize other planets, was the invaluable guest star at Atreju, the annual party hosted by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's party, Fratelli d'Italia. The event, which Meloni launched as a young activist in 1998, takes its name from a character in German author Michael Ende's 1979 fantasy novel The Neverending Story.
Meloni's political party, long relegated to the margins of Italian public life, has a heterogeneous heritage that includes an immoderate taste for the epic tales offered by this literary genre. These stories often depict the Manichean struggles and are viewed through a traditionalist lens. Curiously, the event, whose name refers to a certain nostalgic revolt against modernity, welcomed a transhumanist billionaire with pioneering companies involved in various fronts of innovation, including space exploration, neural implants and electric vehicles.
No matter, Meloni and Musk had already discovered they had a lot in common. Meloni was in the front row facing the stage where the billionaire set out his views in a laborious interview with journalist Nicola Porro, deputy editor of the right-wing daily Il Giornale. While raising his raised fist and being carried along by an elated audience, Musk denounced the "woke virus," the environmentalists responsible for a "loss of hope" in the future, illegal immigration, the tyranny of political correctness and the excessive bureaucracy in Europe. He elaborated on interplanetary exploration, much to the satisfaction of far-right supporters.
The Italian prime minister had reason to rejoice: One of the most powerful men in the world had come to her capital to declare that he had the same enemies as she did. It didn't matter that some of Musk's children were conceived through surrogate motherhood, which the ruling majority in Rome has since deemed "a universal crime." The billionaire's natalist obsessions were welcomed in a country with an inescapable demographic decline. However, above all, the advantageous relationship that Meloni was building with him would provide her an additional gateway for gaining international influence, particularly in the political world of former US president Donald Trump, whose return to the White House she hopes for.
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