‘There is a Connection Between their Roots in Fascism and their Embrace of these Ideas’: Italy’s Drift to the Far-Right

DB: She has been a political activist since a very young age. She’s from a working-class district of Rome and joined the Italian Social Movement (MSI) in 1992. The MSI was a neo-fascist party founded by members of the defeated fascist regime in 1946… it has a long and often violent history.

In the post-war decades, it was always quite a small party, but Meloni joined at a time of great upheaval in Italian politics and she made her career in the MSI.

She was a councillor in Rome, then an MP, and became the youngest ever Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies when she was only 29. She was Youth Minister in the last of Silvio Berlusconi’s Governments at a time when her post-fascist party was welcomed into a broad right-wing coalition. 

So, already in the 1990s, former fascists were in government as a junior partner to Berlusconi. But what we’ve seen in more recent decades is that the most right-wing parts of that coalition, including former fascists, have become the dominant force. This election result is really the culmination of that process.

Yes and no. In the 1990s, the MSI renamed itself the Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) and then it directly merged with Berlusconi’s party (Forza Italia). In those years, its leader Gianfranco Fini made some efforts to distance it from fascism, with a commitment to taking part in electoral politics and rejecting violence and authoritarianism.  

After Fini took the party into a merger with Berlusconi’s party, Fratelli D’Italia was created in 2012 by people who rejected that process and who reasserted the claim to the party tradition. They adopted the MSI’s logo, which is a tricolour flame, and Fratelli D’Italia’s flag even now has the flame of the MSI in it. 

In the early years of the party, Meloni leant into a very severe denunciation of those who had earlier dissolved the neo-fascist tradition.  

Yes. Giorgia Meloni often cites as her political forefather Giorgio Almirante, who was the founding leader of the MSI and led it through most of its history until his death in 1988. Almirante had taken part in the [wartime fascist] regime; he had written for a journal called La Difesa della Razza (The Defence Of The Race) in which he advocated explicitly biological racist ideas. 

At the time Meloni joined in 1992, many of the main leaders were still people who had directly participated in the Nazi collaborationist Social Republic [led by Mussolini].

Of course, over the decades, the way that they organised changed and it isn’t just the same as historical fascism. For instance, they showed commitment to the constitutional process, taking part in elections and have generally, over time, rejected terrorist groups who were within the orbit of the party.

Yes, absolutely. And often, we hear the kind of story which goes, ‘oh well, the party has broken with the past, that no longer applies and so on’. But when you look specifically at what her party is saying, it’s actually very indulgent and [only a] partial criticism of fascism.

For instance, Giorgia Meloni about a month ago issued a video where she sought to dismiss claims that her party is steeped in fascism. What was really interesting was the pedantic phrasing she used it in order to not condemn fascism in general. A typical way of doing t