To analyse. On October 28, 1922, Benito Mussolini was preparing to seize power in Italy at the end of his March on Rome, a confused insurrection to which a weakened Italian liberal state abandoned itself. One hundred years later, to the day, on October 28, 2022, Giorgia Meloni, 45, a professional politician from the far right, takes her first steps at the head of the Italy. The logic of the centenary and the tortuous thread that connects his political family to the history of Mussolini’s fascism set us an intellectual trap in which it would be easy to fall. For to observe the beginning of Ms. Meloni’s mandate in the perspective of an event that occurred a century ago would be both historically misleading, insulting to the institutions of the current Italian Republic and detrimental to the understanding of what implies for today’s Europe its coming to power.
Fratelli d’Italia, the party Ms Meloni founded in 2012 and has chaired since 2014, is the latest incarnation of the post-fascist political tradition. This term, increasingly disputed, was forged following the efforts carried out in the 1990s by its leader Gianfranco Fini, born in 1952, to bring this political family out of marginality. With the end of the Cold War and then the collapse of Christian Democracy and the transformation of the Communist Party, the post-fascist tendency accompanied in power, from 1994, a paradoxical coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, with the support of the autonomists of the Northern League.
By inserting himself into the political game, Gianfranco Fini distanced himself from the legacy of fascism, which he declared in 2004 to be a ” pure evil “. Pushing the logic so far as to unite the destinies of his party with those of Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Mr. Fini however hastened his downfall, the graft having finally not taken. It was precisely to attract those disappointed by this aborted merger that Mrs. Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia, whose logo, decorated with a tricolor flame, re-established a continuity of appearance between the post-fascism of which she became the leader and the “neo-fascism” born in the immediate post-war period.
A legacy spanning four generations
This flame, supposed to evoke the eternal memory of Mussolini and which served as a model for that of the French National Front, had in fact been the symbol of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded in 1946 by young representatives of the old regime and where Gianfranco Fini, Ms. Meloni’s mentor, had started his career. After rising through the ranks in the 1980s, Mr. Fini had become the dolphin of Giorgio Almirante. The latter, one of the founders of the party, born in 1914, had belonged to a generation which, without having known fascism from its origins, had reached maturity in the last period of the regime. Mr. Almirante had thus served in the ranks of the Republic of Salo, a puppet State led by a weakened Benito Mussolini and placed under the effective control of the IIIe Reich after the capitulation in 1943 of the Kingdom of Italy to the Anglo-American Allies.
You have 46.23% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.