Despite the strong presence of the Far Right, especially in its “modernized” forms, in various variations of governance from the 1990s onwards, when the post-war “taboo” requiring governments only from “constitutional arc” parties was broken, the fact that Prime Minister of Italy is a politician who not only comes from the political space that claimed continuity with fascism but also considers it a part of its political identity, it is an intersection, even for the country that bequeathed to the vocabulary of political analysis “transformation” ( transformismo), as a description of the shifts that often occur in the positioning but also in the role of parties.
This is precisely what makes the book by the British historian David Broder “Moussolini’s Grandchildren. Fascism in Contemporary Italy” Publisher Pluto Press (March 20, 2023), recently published by Pluto. An expert in modern Italian history, Broder attempts to trace the different paths followed by those who claimed in post-war Italy to be the continuation of the historic fascist movement, to explain how we arrived at the present condition where the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) are the dominant force of the right-wing government coalition.
Looking for the identity of the heirs of fascism, Broder starts from how they reappropriate a certain version of Italian nationalism, which considers Italians to have been victims by focusing e.g. not in the crimes of fascism, but in the atrocities of the Yugoslav partisans against the Italians in the area around Trieste, trying to maintain a history of alleged ethnic victimization.
MSI and anti-communism
Broder then traces the paths taken by the main post-war neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), not failing to underline that its historical cadres largely came not just from the fascist party, but also from the “Democracy of Salo”, i.e. the puppet regime of Nazi Germany that was established under the leadership of Mussolini, after the German Occupation of the northern part of the country. Broder documents how the MSI sought to secure its place in the political landscape by investing in Cold War anti-communism, culminating in the line for an “anti-communist front” in the 1970s, which communicated both the practices of neo-fascist armed organizations and the services. security forces who were deploying the “strategy of tension”.
Broder stands out for the way in which in the 1990s, amid the wider restructuring of the Italian political landscape, in the wake of the great revelations about the endemic corruption of the parties and the restructuring of the Christian Democracy, the MSI claimed under Fini’s leadership to be recognized as a party of governance and an equal part of the wider Right. Broder records in detail these shifts, the attempt to establish that it is not a simple continuation of the fascist and neo-fascist movement, as well as the great reactions this caused within the movement, especially from those who wanted a more clear far-right position. He does not fail to note the peculiar competition with the League in terms of the far-right stigma, but also the emergence of a spectrum of more “activist” and ideologically harder versions of the Far Right, with Casa Pound being the most typical example.
The Meloni phenomenon
In this way it shows how we arrived at the Meloni effect. A politician who contributed to the formation of a party that basically believed that the current of the National Alliance, the evolution of the MSI, had moved too far to the Center-Right by merging with the Berlusconian “People of Freedom”, losing its right-wing identities and who despite her insistence that she is just another right-wing conservative politician, she has often shown that she is anything but renouncing her neo-fascist political heritage.
This is perhaps the most important element of Broder’s book: the way he presents how the Far Right claims to be the true representative of the “ruling Right”. This concerns both the acceptance of certain “systemic” parameters such as European orientation, economic neoliberalism and Atlantic militarism, but also the promotion of basic elements of the Far Right such as nationalism, anti-immigrant racism and a deep social conservatism.
The modern Far Right
Essentially, what the example of Italy shows is how, in a condition of a deeper crisis of hegemony, which, among other things, also means a crisis of the traditional formations of the Center-Right and their ability to form representative relations, the contemporary Far-Right claims political space by proposing a deeper re-signification of the very concept of the Right / Center Right, where racism, nationalism that often becomes historical revisionism, cultural conservatism and authoritarianism are proposed as the elements that will give an era of increased precariousness and insecurity that sense of coherent social identity that both the classical liberalism as well as the ideologies of globalization fail to provide.
The example of France
In neighboring France, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected with the reduced legitimacy of the low percentage in the first round of the presidential elections (27%) and the failure of his party in the parliamentary elections. The extremely unpopular pension reform that he chose to pass in a particularly authoritarian way in the face of an impressive movement, created a landscape where opinion polls show that if the second round of the presidential election were held now, the far-right Marine Le Pen would win.
