Like drowning men clutching at straws, Giorgia Meloni’s opponents are trying ever more hopelessly to justify their claim that she is a far-right threat to democracy. It’s not that Meloni has stopped being far right since she became Italy’s first female prime minister 18 months ago. It is just that – despite all the apocalyptic warnings about her – she wasn’t far right to begin with.

The new law is not an assault on the 1978 law that made abortion legal in Italy.

Meloni as a premier has proved to be much more like a Mediterranean version of Margaret Thatcher than the heir to Benito Mussolini – which many of her opponents still call her. As a result, she and her party, Fratelli d’Italia, which tops the polls by a large margin, remain very popular. Campaigning has now begun for the June Euro elections and Fratelli d’Italia is expected to win many more of the 76 seats allocated to Italy than any other party.

As a result, the leading exponents of the Italian left, whose parties continue to fare badly in the polls, appear increasingly desperate. During the past fortnight alone, they have suffered two severe bouts of Drowning Man Syndrome. First, they flew into a frenzy about a minor new law that allows pro-life volunteers into family planning clinics to speak one-to-one to pregnant women seeking abortions – if those women agree. This was a shameless assault on a women’s right to abort, they howled.

Next, they became even more frenzied at what they claimed was the cancellation by programme chiefs at the state broadcaster, RAI, of a two-minute monologue by a left-wing writer. He wanted to accuse Meloni of being a ‘neo-fascist’ who has allowed ‘the ghost of fascism to haunt Italian democracy’. This was censorship worthy of the Duce himself, they howled – even more loudly. (Their cries were uncensored, naturally.)

For days Meloni’s outraged opponents ensured that the two episodes dominated the conversation on Italy’s chat shows, front pages and social media, where more often than not, the left rules the roost. It was clear to anyone able to cut through the noise, however, that the outrage was wildly exaggerated and largely unjustified.

As Meloni was quick to remind everyone, the new abortion law (which passed its final hurdle when it was approved by the Senate last Tuesday) is not, as her opponents claim, an assault on the 1978 law that made abortion legal in Italy. In fact, it aims to enact a key aspect of that very same law which has never been put into practice.

The 1978 law permits abortion in the first 90 days after conception for ‘economic,........

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