A hundred years after the rise of Italian fascism was heralded by Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome, the country is on the verge of electing a party with its roots in neo-fascism.
With just over a week to go until polling day, the smiling face of Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, is emblazoned on thousands of posters from the heel in the south to the Alps in the north.
When polls close on the evening of 25 September, Meloni is expected to emerge triumphant, making her Italy’s first far-right leader since the second world war.
Meloni has always distanced herself from fascism and recently declared that the Italian right had “handed fascism over to history”. Her current political success owes much to her decision, unlike that of Matteo Salvini and his Northern League, to keep her party out of the outgoing prime minister, Mario Draghi’s, cross-party government. The move cemented her as an opposition voice and has given her the leading position in a rightwing electoral coalition, that includes the League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, now polling in excess of 45%.
But she has been reluctant in campaigning to shed the political slogan Dio, Patria, Famiglia (God, Homeland, Family), widely used in the fascist era, and her party retains apparent fascist visual references. It shares its party logo, an Italian tricolour in the form of a flame, with the now defunct Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party formed in 1946 by supporters of Mussolini’s regime and former high-ranking members of his fascist party. Some supporters of her party have performed the fascist salute during public commemorations.
How can it be that Italy, which lived through Mussolini’s bloody regime and passed discriminatory laws against its Jewish citizens, is close to electing as prime minister the leader of a party with these associations, who in a recently surfaced video from 1996 said of the fascist leader: “Mussolini was a good politician. There have been no other politicians like him in the last 50 years”?
Paolo Berizzi, of La Repubblica, has been asking such question for years. The journalist, who has written extensively about the extreme right in Italy, has received numerous threats from neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups and now lives under police protection. “Italy is a country that never came to terms with its fascist past,” he said. “Fascists didn’t die in 1945; they’ve always been around.”
To find some answers, one must go back to the immediate aftermath of the second world war, when the first issue for Italy to address was national unity. The toppling of Mussolini in 1943 was followed by bloody civil war between a Nazi-backed puppet state and the partisans of the Italian resistance, so when peace came to Europe, fears of aggravating civil tensions overrode the purging of fascists from Italian institutions and prosecuting them for war crimes. While the Nuremberg trials against prominent members of the Nazi party began in Germany in November 1946, Italy, in part concerned about growing numbers of communists, on the brink of the cold war, had from June of that year run an amnesty programme, releasing thousands of fascists from prison.
Many took jobs in the postwar administrations: Ettore Messana, a fascist official whose name appears in a UN list for war crimes, was appointed inspector general for public safety in Sicily; Gen Giuseppe Pichè, who carried out counter-espionage for Mussolini, was nominated director general of the Civil Protection Agency.
“After the war there were a lot of Italians who thought that, despite the conflict, Mussolini hadn’t done so badly after all,” said Salvatore Lupo, a professor of contemporary history at Palermo University.
Giorgio Almirante, a culture minister in the Nazis’ short-lived puppet state, founded the MSI with former members of the Italian Fascist party in this climate of tolerance. By 1948, three neo-fascists sat in the Italian parliament. It is from this heritage that the Brothers of Italy would later emerge.
The neo-fascist MSI, meanwhile, remained sidelined from mainstream politics until the early 1990s, when a nationwide judicial investigation into political corruption resulted in the disappearance of many traditional political parties and gave it an opportunity. Its members formed the National Alliance party in 1995, maintaining the tricolour flame as their symbol, and, presenting themselves as neoliberal conservatives, found in Berlusconi’s Forza Italia their first ally in national government.
It was Berlusconi who, during a political rally in 2019, boasted about having been the first to engage with neo-fascists. “The parties that governed Italy from the beginning of the First Republic had never allowed the fascists to enter the government”, he said. “We let them in for the first time. We legitimised them.”
Berizzi said: “It was in those years that the criminal revisionism of fascism, as I call it, began, fuelled by talkshows and many newspapers. Fake news began to circulate around fascism, which still today is presented as a regime that ‘did many great things’.”
Many Italians today are convinced that Mussolini introduced public housing in Italy, when in reality it had begun in 1903, nearly 20 years before his rule. The enduring cliche is that Mussolini made the trains run on time, but during the fascist period trains were chronically late. Unable to resolve the problem, the regime instead forbade people from discussing it, because to do so would be “dishonourable to the homeland”.
More than 70 years after Mussolini’s death, thousands of Italians started to join self-described fascist groups in a surge of support antifascists blame on the portrayal of the refugee crisis, and Italy’s economic and political instability. In this context, in 2012 Brothers of Italy was founded, largely from the ranks of MSI and National Alliance. Two years later, Meloni, previously an activist in the MSI’s Youth Front, rose to become its leader.
“Meloni became the leader of her party in a period in which fascism in Italy was almost normalised and getting popular among young people,” Berizzi said. “Statuettes of Mussolini and calendars of the Duce are on sale in kiosks and shops. The fascist salute […] has become an almost folkloric gesture.”
Antonio Scurati, the author of M, an international bestseller about Mussolini’s rise to power, said: “While in Germany there was a long process of overcoming the past, which had as a prerequisite that of making all German people reflect on the co-responsibility of the crimes of nazism, in Italy this process has never taken place. Whenever we speak about the war and racial laws in Italy, we always identify ourselves with the role of victim and anti-fascists, and this has prevented us from admitting to ourselves that we were fascists.”
Meloni has “unambiguously” condemned “the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws”, emphasising that her party has nothing to do with fascism and is a conservative champion of patriotism. She told Corriere della Sera after local elections there were no “nostalgic fascists, racists or antisemites in the Brothers of Italy DNA” and she had always got rid of “ambiguous people”.
“Let’s believe that Meloni is not a fascist. Let’s believe that technically her party is not neo-fascist,” Berizzi said. “You still can’t deny that in her ranks there are numerous fascists […] If Meloni wins the election, fascism may not be back, but our democracy will be at risk.”
Just as the far right is moving forward, some Italians have compared the current situation to a satire movie released in 2018, which imagines Mussolini returning to Italy and being acclaimed by people.
“If Mussolini were to return, Italians would re-elect him,” Scurati said. “In fact, Italians, Europeans, North Americans and Brazilians have already elected several ‘neo’ Mussolinis.”