The political heirs of Benito Mussolini resumed, this Sunday (25), the path to power started a century ago by the Italian dictator, responsible for the term fascist having become Europe’s cursing of Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, albeit with meanings to the taste of the client. .
The victory of the far-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, pointed out at the exit of the polls, is impressive in context: the rise of extremist groups in the institutional politics of countries like France and Germany was somewhat naturalized due to the nods they made to the center, but In fact, they never had a chance to seize central power.
In Italy, the most enduring post-war prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, inhabits the frequency band of the half-fascist, half-swashbuckling right, so to speak, but his governments have been controversial for other reasons. He may have degraded politics, but he did not turn the country into a dictatorship.
We thus have a new March on Rome, to be in parallel with the final movement of the implantation of fascism under the ex-leftist Mussolini (1883-1945). In late October 1922, the Black Shirt paramilitaries who formed the violent vanguard of the nationalist group prepared a coup.
They would occupy strategic points in the capital on the 28th. The government was terrified and wanted to declare a state of siege, which was denied by King Vittorio Emanuele III (1869-1947), in an opaque episode: he could seek to avoid bloodshed, but he wanted to stay on the throne as an extra, which he did.
In any case, the king not only left the city open to Mussolini, but invited him to form a government. The rest is history: the standard dictatorship of the ultra-rightists emerging from the First World War (1914-18) was formed, which became an aberrant social experiment under Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in Germany.
If the temptation of comparison is great, it obviously involves exaggeration. Owner of a trajectory of ambiguous turn to the center similar to that of the French Marine Le Pen, Meloni insinuated in the campaign to understand the rules of the game. She condemned the invasion of Ukraine, unlike her troubled partner Matteo Salvini, whose League party has joined Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and supports the next prime minister’s Brothers of Italy.
To govern in Italy’s rampant politics, which has changed premiers for decades, the likely prime minister Meloni will have to be more Berlusconi, whom she served as youth minister in 2008, than Salvini, who rose to deputy prime minister. but he really likes the company of Steve Bannon and Eduardo Bolsonaro.
But with every breath given by the 45-year-old politician, there is a painful bite: Italy is one of the main gateways for undocumented migrants to Europe, and the xenophobia in his speech promises a cruel clash in this field. In addition, she is a partner of the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, who managed to make the European Parliament declare his country a non-full democracy. She adopts the Portuguese fascist motto Deus, Pátria e Família, the same ape Bolsonaro.
As long as the real Meloni does not present itself, it is possible to have reasons to support the postmodern version of the March on Rome. At 19, she gave an interview as a prominent leader of the former Italian Social Movement, the main post-war neo-fascist group.
In it, he said that “Mussolini was a good politician, and everything he did, he did for Italy.” Of course, that disappeared from his subsequent speeches, but his predecessor in the leadership of the Brothers of Italy, Ignazio La Russa, was clear: “We are all heirs of the Duce”.
None of this suggests that she will be taking possession of the black shirt and giving the Roman salute, which, incidentally, she urged her followers to avoid. As Meloni herself stated, the Italian right today is post-fascist – it remains to be seen what she is talking about in practice.
Some hints can be found in Bolsonaro’s foreign policy in his first two years, when Itamaraty became a playground for ideological flat-earthers. Like former foreign minister Ernesto Araújo, Meloni sees the Great Satan not only in immigrant Islam, but in a certain “globalist left” financed by names such as the Hungarian Jew George Soros, not by chance a pariah for Orbán.
The rise of the ultra-rightist in Italy is frightening for other reasons, as the Italian writer Roberto Saviano recalled. The country has always been a test tube of degenerate policies: it gave Mussolini before Hitler, the leftist terror of the Red Brigades before the wave that swept Europe in the 1970s, Berlusconi and the 5 Star Movement before Donald Trump.
The underlying reason, it can be argued, is that Italy is at a civilizational breaking point, close to a turbulent Middle East and Africa, and at the same time having a huge economy, creating social tensions. And fascism’s simplistic responses have always found echo in times of crisis like the current one, with Putin’s winter haunting European leaders.
In this sense, the new March on Rome has a time frame, but it has been going on for decades, because fascism, with different gradations, has never ceased to be part of the Italian political landscape.
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