The images of the crowd, with participants mainly dressed in black and filmed from above, have quickly circulated throughout Europe since Sunday evening. At the annual commemoration of the death of three young neo-fascists who died in 1978, the participants stood in military order and dozens of them gave the Roman salute, the fascist salute with the arm extended forward.
The three young people died during the violent Leaden Years in Italy. Two of them were shot dead, most likely by far-left militants, and the third was fatally shot by police during the ensuing commotion. No one was ever convicted. Sunday evening’s annual commemoration was the occasion for these clear nostalgic expressions of sympathy with fascism. As if Rome is still head and heart in 1924, left-wing opposition leader Elly Schlein (Democratic Party) responded.
Another, institutional commemoration of the three neofascist youths took place in the morning. Several elected politicians and intimates of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took part. They were not caught with the fascist salute, but there were no clear condemnations of the fascist salute later in the evening either. Praising fascism is indeed prohibited in Italy.
Bust of Mussolini
In fact, Senate President Ignazio La Russa said he doubted whether there was a crime here. At home, La Russa has a collection of fascist paraphernalia, including a bust of Mussolini.
For now, Giorgia Meloni is keeping tight-lipped. In addition to being prime minister, she is also leader of the radical right Brothers of Italy, a party that certainly has its roots in the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), but has since evolved into a broad right-wing party that polls around 30 percent.
There are certainly fascism nostalgics hanging around in and around that party, but how large that group is within Brothers of Italy remains unclear. After all, purely neofascist parties hardly amount to anything electorally in Italy. For example, Forza Nuova and CasaPound, two neofascist parties, did not even reach 1 percent when they went to voters alone in 2018.
“But you could also look at it the other way around,” responds Paolo Berizzi, a journalist at the newspaper La Repubblica, who is under protection due to threats from neo-fascist quarters. “If it were such a marginal group within the Brothers of Italy, why do politicians like Meloni and La Russa have such a hard time distancing themselves from fascism? Why does the flame, symbol of the extreme right in Europe, still appear in the party logo?”
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According to him, it proves that symbols matter, and how. “Incidentally, the love for this kind of symbolism and militaristic rituals also lives on in the youth sections of Brothers of Italy.”
The extravagance at the commemoration on Sunday is also not an isolated event. Every year there is a chance of similar images from Predappio, Berizzi recalls, where Mussolini is buried, or from other places that were important in the Duce’s life. “Neofascists know that Italian law is clear, but the Court of Cassation – the highest court – is much less so. In the past, convictions resulted, but sometimes acquittals followed.”
Nostalgia
Since Meloni has become Prime Minister, neofascists feel even less need to exercise restraint, according to him. “If the institutional right, which is now in power, does not distance itself from nostalgia for fascism, why would they do it?”
Although not every voter of Meloni can be attributed neo-fascist sympathies, Italy remains essentially a right-wing conservative country, says Berizzi, where the fascist slogan ‘for God, for country and for work’ remains attractive to a significant group of Italians even a century later. stays. “In that sense, what Europe saw on Sunday evening is just the tip of the iceberg.”
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