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A fascist past rekindled

— PHOTO: AFP

Resurgence of the right: Supporters of newly-elected Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno celebrate in Rome’s Campidoglio on Monday. Mr. Alemanno is the city’s first right-wing Mayor since the Second World War.

It is now clear that the victory of the Left in Italy’s 2006 general election was no more than a brief pause in the remorseless shift to the Right that has characterised the country’s politics since Silvio Berlusconi’s first election success in 1994.

The new government lies significantly to the right of the previous two. Armed with a sweeping majority in both chambers of Parliament after the election in early April, it does not have to worry about ensuring that the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats are on-side. The anti-immigrant Northern League doubled its vote, cornering 28 per cent in the northern cities and emerging as the largest party in Venice. The neo-fascists have just flexed their muscles in the election for the Mayor of Rome and convincingly defeated the candidate of the Left. With Mr. Berlusconi enjoying a new-found confidence enabled by a government that enjoys more power than any in recent times, and the Northern League and National Alliance similarly encouraged, this phase in Italian politics has reached a new level.

This was demonstrated on Monday by the way supporters of Gianni Alemanno, the new Mayor of Rome and a man steeled in the fascist tradition, celebrated in the Campidoglio with fascist salutes and cries of “Duce, Duce!,” just as Benito Mussolini was once acclaimed. Or the way in which Mr. Berlusconi felt able to declare, in response to the victory, that “we are the new Falange,” the name given to the fascist party in Spain in the 1930s. Or by the fact that in the first session of Parliament, Northern League leader Umberto Bossi threatened violence if the centre-left did not acquiesce in its plans for federalism.

The roots of the revival of this far-Right populism are five-fold. First, the disillusionment with the political class that followed the collapse of the Cold War system, together with the tangentopoli (city of bribes) corruption scandal, which provided the conditions for a new wave of anti-politicians untainted by the old system, such as Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Bossi. Secondly, the creeping corrosion of the democratic system, as represented by Mr. Berlusconi, which has habituated Italians to a political system based on a populist authoritarianism. Thirdly, the chronic stagnation of the economy, and growing hostility towards one of the most visible signs of globalisation — namely immigration.

Fourthly, as the post-war political order has unravelled, so older historical faultlines have re-emerged more clearly and more contentiously: in particular, the division between north and south, exemplified by the secessionist Northern League. Finally, the fact that the fascists are such an integral feature of modern Italian history, having governed from 1922 until their final defeat in 1945, means that the tradition’s values, symbols, philosophies, assumptions, prejudices, and emotions remain embedded in the Italian psyche, ready to be reawakened by a new generation. That, alas, is what we are now witnessing.

One of Europe’s great countries threatens to return to its worst past. Europe must take heed.

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