The Return of Italian Fascism?
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The Brothers of Italy looks set to do well in Italian elections on September 25, making party leader Giorgia Meloni the favourite to become Italy’s next prime minister.
“Meloni has been an activist in post-fascist politics since her youth,” said Piero Ignazi, a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna and an expert on Brothers of Italy. “The party’s identity is, for the most part, linked to post-fascist traditions. But its platform mixes this tradition with some mainstream conservative ideas and neoliberal elements such as free enterprise.”
She is close to Hungarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban as well as the French far-right National Rally and Spain’s Vox. Meloni also has ties with the US far right, having attended the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference and the National Prayer Breakfast alongside ex-president Donald Trump.
Meloni’s party was founded in 2012 as the successor to the National Alliance, which rose from the ashes of the 1946-1995 Italian Social Movement formed by members of dictator Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. Meloni denies any link with Mussolini’s ideas but is careful not to condemn his rule.
Brothers of Italy does have some members who are nostalgic for the Duce’s rule, and its Secolo d’Italia newspaper has made ambiguous statements on this chapter of the country’s history.
What is fascism? Or, more pertinently, what was fascism, since the ideology and movement of that name developed in the specific historical conditions of the period between the last century’s two world wars.
The word itself originated in Italy as the name given itself by an ultra-nationalist group opposed both to parliamentary democracy and to left-wing parties and which employed direct physical force on the streets as a deliberate tactic against its opponents. But it was not through street fighting that the fascisti came to power. They did so constitutionally when in 1922 the King, with the support of a section of the ruling class and its political representatives, appointed Mussolini Prime Minister. Once in control of political power the fascisti were able to consolidate their rule with Mussolini as dictator by dissolving parliament and banning other parties.
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