Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic
\n When Roberto Vannacci’s controversial book came out last August, he was widely mocked and criticised for his extreme views \u2013 yet now he’s the lead candidate for Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega party in the European elections.
\n ADVERTISEMENTFor many years, Italian General Roberto Vannacci was a complete unknown despite his illustrious military credentials.If anything, the Spezia-born paratrooper was only familiar to those in the army. His participation in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and interventions against the so-called Islamic State group made him a war hero among his peers.Today, he is the lead candidate in the European elections for Matteo Salvini\u2019s far-right Lega party and will almost certainly go to Brussels.\u201cI will be an independent candidate who has his own identity and who will fight, with courage, to affirm my own values of homeland, tradition, family, sovereignty and identity that I very much share with Lega,\u201d Vannacci said after Salvini announced him as the party\u2019s top choice earlier in April.However, his transition from soldier to politician was not the straightforward uniform-for-a-suit path one would expect.Vannacci vaulted to the top of public debate last summer when he published the book Il mondo al contrario\u00a0\u2014 The World Upside Down \u2014 replete with extreme views on women, the LGBTQ+ community and immigrants.All of a sudden, no one could stop talking about him. The book drew furious criticism for its homophobic and sexist contents, while its numerous grammatical and spelling errors were ridiculed in the domestic press.\u00a0Nonetheless, The World Upside Down, which was originally published in a small edition, shot up to a bestseller by mid-August, with more than 22,000 copies sold. By September, Vannacci, dubbed \u201cItaly\u2019s most famous general\u201d by his publisher, was touring the country.The book ultimately sold nearly a quarter of a million copies, and in March, he published a follow-up, Il coraggio vince, or Courage Wins, which he\u2019s been promoting along with his electoral campaign.\u201cThe success of Vannacci’s book is due to a mistake by (Italian daily newspaper) La Repubblica, which, instead of doing what the progressive-leaning press usually does \u2014 ignoring the thoughts of its opponents \u2014 could not resist the temptation to mock the author of an unpleasant book,\u201d sociologist and political scientist Luca Ricolfi told Euronews.Ricolfi, a former columnist for La Repubblica and other notable Italian outlets, explained that the press underestimated the power of Vannacci\u2019s often brutal words \u2014 including claims that homosexuals \u201care not normal\u201d and that stabbing someone in the jugular with a pencil should be acceptable self-defence for petty theft \u2014 and overlooked the fact that his message resonated with some parts of Italian society.\u201cIntellectuals and journalists thought so when they naively said, \u2018wait until the end of September, and you will see that no one will talk about it any more,\u2019\u201d he pointed out, \u201cyet with Vannacci on the list, Lega will get more votes than it would without him.\u201d’Be yourself, say whatever you want’Publicity stunts are a standard feature of Italian politics across the political spectrum, and it\u2019s not uncommon for politicians to use outrage as a tool to mobilise support, even over marginal or trivial issues.Earlier in May, Salvini and centrist candidate Carlo Calenda publicly sparred over the EU regulation requiring all plastic bottles to have the cap attached.\u00a0Yet Vannacci\u2019s appeal comes not from his outrageous statements themselves, but from the average Italian\u2019s belief that freedom equals common sense and that no topic should be off the table.\u00a0In defending his words simply by asserting his right to say them, the general is cashing in on decades of work by populists who have convinced many voters that being authentic means being able to say anything without any consequence \u2014 a style of politics most closely associated with Silvio Berlusconi.Berlusconi, the media mogul often labelled as Europe\u2019s first populist, was a constant presence in Italian politics since the 1990s until his death last June. While he led his own party, Forza Italia, he is credited with kickstarting the careers of Salvini and Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who leads the far-right party Fratelli d\u2019Italia.The four-time prime minister made a name for himself as a no-nonsense politician ever since he declared his \u201cdescent into the field\u201d, claiming politics should come to the people. However, Berlusconi was no stranger to self-instigated chaos, arguing with journalists or saying that migrants are welcome as long as they are \u201cattractive women\u201d.ADVERTISEMENTWhile the term “Berlusconism” was originally coined to describe its namesake leader’s entrepreneurial optimism, it has since become a catch-all term for hard-right views and questionable practices, including alleged conflicts of interest, links to the mafia, sexual misconduct and corruption.\u201cBerlusconi’s TV channels had an important re-educational role on human relations \u2014interpersonal relations, sexual relations, family relations \u2014 every day. So now we have Vannacci who tells people what they have already learned over the years through TV,\u201d Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, told Euronews.\u201cIn the name of what’s ‘natural’, they have been selling behaviour that is oftentimes offensive against immigrants, homosexuals, and ‘unnatural’ forms of families. It’s a type of reaction against the politically correct mentality: ‘We can finally openly in public say what we think without any control or check because this is what human life is,\u2019\u201d she explained.Vannacci is simply the latest iteration of a decades-long shift in which voters are the ones shaping politicians\u2019 positions rather than the other way around, Urbinati said.\u201cThey follow the media, and they follow the audience. It is the audience that decides the opinions. This is the problem.”ADVERTISEMENT\u201cIt’s a sign of a change \u2014 that is very radical \u2014 in the way in which our democracies work. We certainly can’t go back to the past good place in which parties were able to shape political minds any more. There is no longer politics here, there are ordinary opinions concerning what we think personally, individually, subjectively,\u201d she explained.Trouble at home, blue skies aboveWhile he might already be packing his bags for Brussels, Vannacci has found himself in significant trouble on the domestic front.In late February, he was suspended from the army for 11 months over claims of dereliction of duty. He is also expected to face charges for embezzlement and fraud related to the expenses he incurred during his time as a military attache in Moscow between 2021 and 2022, including alleged lavish restaurant bills and an unauthorised spending of \u20ac9,000 on a BMW \u2014 questions Vannacci vowed to answer \u201cin front of appropriate authorities\u201d.\u00a0On top of that, he is being investigated for alleged incitement to racial hatred by Rome\u2019s Prosecutor\u2019s Office.\u201cThe only incitement made was to reflect and read,\u201d Vannacci\u2019s lawyer, Giorgio Carta, said in February, according to the domestic press. \u201cGalileo Galilei was also tried for his ideas, but 300 years later, he was ‘acquitted\u2019.\u201dADVERTISEMENTSalvini has defended Vannacci on a number of occasions, highlighting his conviction at Lega\u2019s final rally in Rome on Thursday.\u201cWe have the captain and the general, but you are the infantry,\u201d Salvini told the crowd. He then passed the microphone to Vannacci, who spoke briefly about the D-Day landings 80 years ago before switching back to his main talking points.\u201cWe are no longer free to speak,\u201d Vannacci continued, \u201cwe are no longer free because our cities are not safe. We don’t like this Europe anymore … (but) the skies above Rome are blue. The die has been cast.\u201dAccording to Urbinati, while some might dismiss Vannacci as yet another unserious Italian populist, this should not mean that what is happening in the country should be easily written off as peripheral or folkloristic.\u201cItaly is the lab where you can anticipate what is going to happen in other countries. We had\u00a0fascism originate here with Benito Mussolini, then populism with Berlusconi.\u201dADVERTISEMENT\u201cVannacci and Salvini are conducting a cultural operation in the classical sense, a way of shaping collective minds,\u201d she explained. \u201cWe are witnessing a decline of civic relations among individuals across Europe. And the Italian case is a classic case of this new reality.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When Roberto Vannacci’s controversial book came out last August, he was widely mocked and criticised for his extreme views \u2013 yet now he’s the lead candidate for Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega party in the European elections. ADVERTISEMENTFor many years, Italian General Roberto Vannacci was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":109869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-109868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109870,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109868\/revisions\/109870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}