Whatever Italian views about other aspects of Mussolini’s rule, Fini made clear that Mussolini had been wrong in several absolutely central things: in being an autocrat, in his alliance with Hitler and in his anti-Semitism. Although Fini’s career ended up dissolving within the decade in a blizzard of very Italian discoveries about a flat in Monaco, the fact that such a prominent figure from the far-right had made this move was a demonstration of a wider change in the country’s politics.
Nevertheless, Italian politics remains open to neo-fascism in a way which is unacceptable in almost every other western country, and few people have been accused of it more readily or more frequently than the most recent leader on the Italian right, Matteo Salvini.
Unlike Fini and others, Salvini did not originate on the far-right. Indeed. when he started off in Milanese politics in the 1990s he was involved in the communist faction of the Lega Nord. His success came about through his recognition that the party which campaigned for the separation of northern Italy from the south should become a national movement. More than anyone else it was Salvini who in recent decades pulled off the feat of making a separatist party into a national, and indeed nationalist, one.
However this success would not have been possible had Italy not been forced to deal with the consequences of migration surge from North Africa throughout the 2010s — and virtually alone.
While the European Union professes to hold to a policy by which all member- states take an equal share of the burden on migration, in reality Italy, like other frontline states, has been forced to cope alone. During the 2000s they did so —among other things — via a policy of dark and rarely acknowledged bribes to the Gaddafi regime in Libya. So long as Gaddafi held back the boats (and his regime certainly did not hold them all back) Italy could cope.
But in the wake of Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011 all of that changed, and soon boatloads of migrants were arriving every day on Italian islands like Lampedusa. Other European countries refused to pay for their share of this burden, and although the Italian population (spurred on not least by the Pope) were extraordinarily tolerant and sympathetic to the arrivals, nevertheless once the migrants got stuck on the islands or in major cities Italian public opinion began to shift.
Yet it was a major test of Italian tolerance; on top of the sheer weight of numbers, most came from culturally and religiously very different societies, as well as the criminality that the smuggling gangs brought into Italy. Salvini addressed the issue, and his arguments resonated with the Italian public: not only the unfairness of Italy being forced to cope with this alone, but his insistence that the new arrivals did not share the traditions or ways of life of the Italian people.
And while it is true that the Lega (especially while it was a separatist movement) had ugly and neo-fascist elements, in many respects the party was not especially right-wing — it did not, for instance, have any especially austere attitude towards social welfare. Yet it had an anti-intellectualism and instinctive nativism which made it easy to dismiss for a time.
Nevertheless, after the extraordinary events of 2015, when huge numbers surged into Europe, it was inevitable the party’s star would rise. After the election in 2018 the Lega formed part of an unlikely coalition government, with the Left populist Five Star Movement, and Salvini became Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister.
Although he is currently out of power (having attempted, unsuccessfully, to disband the coalition government last year) he remains the most dynamic force in Italian politics. Earlier this year, as the coronavirus began to enter Europe Salvini — like Marine Le Pen in France — called for his country’s borders to be closed. The rest of the political class called him a racist for suggesting such an unthinkable idea, and a few weeks later (after the severity of the crisis finally hit them) the same people who had condemned Salvini instituted the very policy.
Still he is regularly described in the foreign press as a ‘far-right’ politician, despite always having demonstrated a very un-Duce like respect for the democratic process (he quietly left office last September after his coalition broke apart). Partly this reflects the historical baggage of the Italian Right but much of it is misrepresentation by the press.
When last year the Italian Senator and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre called for a bill to be passed in the Senate setting up a commission to look into “intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred”, the Lega abstained from the vote, believing that it would be used to excoriate them on their immigration policy. Salvini himself currently faces prosecution in Italy for forbidding illegal landings while Interior Minister, so it is was not an irrational belief on the Lega’s part.
For abstaining in this vote Salvini and his party were accused of being anti-Semitic, yet he has been exceptionally outspoken on this issue. In January of this year I spoke alongside him on a panel in the Senate in Rome which called on the Italian government to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. It is the definition that the British Labour party — among others — has stumbled upon and it is the definition which among other things makes plain that hatred of the Jewish state is itself a demonstration of anti-Semitism.
If Salvini were a fascist or an anti-Semite it would seem an unusual thing for him to demand that the Italian government adopt a definition of anti-Semitism more stringent than they are currently willing to adopt. A definition which would — incidentally — almost certainly catch a number of ‘anti-racist’ but vociferously anti-Israel politicians on the Italian Left.
Fears of fascism in Italy are not unfounded, and the country does have parties and groupings whose attitudes towards the past and policies for the present should cause deep concern. Groups like Casa Pound, in this case named after the Mussolini-supporter and poet Ezra Pound, make no secret of their neo-fascism. To Salvini and the Lega’s Right there are parties which the rest of Europe would have a far bigger problem with.
Then there is Fratelli d’Italia, led by Giorgia Meloni, a former minister in Berlusconi’s last government. Meloni is a very Italian creation. Her public speeches and stances focus on her patriotism, her Catholicism and her support for the family – all popular things of course – but at heart her party is homesick for the fascist era.
When, a few years back, centre-left Jewish politician Emanuele Fiano (of the Partito Democratico) spoke in the Council of Deputies about an episode of anti-Semitism, Meloni and others objected to his speech by doing the saluto Romano (the fascist salute, with arm raised) in the chamber.
It was, and is, an action which it is almost impossible to imagine in any other European country, and a reminder that in Italy the past has not been fully or satisfactorily litigated, and that Italian politics remains as volatile as it ever was.
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