The political climate of the last few weeks in Italy already anticipated that yesterday, the day when the country commemorated the liberation party from Nazism, would be a busy day for the Italian Government of Giorgia Meloni, the most right-wing in the country since the Second World War. Meloni leads Brothers of Italy, a party heir to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded by Benito Mussolini nostalgics in 1946. For this you have April 25, the party celebrating the victory, in 1945, of the partisan resistance to fascism and the Nazi occupation, the opposition had been demanding for days that he declare himself openly anti-fascist.
Meloni responded by attending, as expected of a prime minister, the Altar of the Fatherland, a monument to the unity of Italy. He also published a long letter on the issue in the Corriere della Sera, in which he pointed out the “incompatibility with nostalgia for fascism” of right-wing parliamentary parties and criticized those who “use the category of fascism as an instrument to delegitimize any adversary politician”. However, his words were described as lukewarm for invoking the concept of “freedom party”, an idea he has recovered from former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2009.
The Prime Minister’s letter comes after the controversial statements of one of her closest collaborators, Ignazio La Russa, president of the Senate – and therefore the second most important position in the State – and who founded with her Brothers from Italy La Russa, who collected relics of Mussolini at her home, assured that the Italian Constitution does not include the word “anti-fascist”. Meloni seemed to respond by writing that the “affirmation of democratic values” is carved into the Italian Magna Carta, but not everyone was satisfied.
“Meloni has sometimes shown a determined face, he has shouted certain words and certain slogans and what he should do is show his face and say clearly and definitively: we are anti-fascists”, criticized the mayor of Milan, the progressive Giuseppe Sala, in the front row of the demonstration to celebrate April 25 in the Lombard capital.
Since coming to power, Meloni, who in her youth declared herself an admirer of Mussolini, has renounced fascism and has also taken steps to reach out to the Italian Jewish community, a victim of the dictator’s terrible racial laws. However, some of his supporters are not making it easy for him. Especially the same La Russa who, after attending the Altar of the Fatherland yesterday, traveled to Prague to participate in a meeting of EU parliamentary presidents and lay a wreath at the monument of Jan Palach, a student who committed suicide by setting himself on fire in 1969 in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
At the end of March, the president of the Upper House was also heavily criticized after calling the attack by a group of partisans against a Nazi army battalion, an episode that took place on 23 March 1944 in Rome’s Via Rasella and which motivated the next day a reprisal action that culminated in the massacre of the Ardeatine Pits, when Adolf Hitler ordered to shoot about 10 Italians for every dead German and they ended up executing 335 Italians , many of them Jewish. La Russa then maintained that the murdered were “a bunch of semi-retired men, and not vile SS Nazis”. Meloni magnified the controversy by assuring that the innocent were massacred “just for being Italian”. Then she justified that she said it to be inclusive: “What do you mean, that the anti-fascists are not Italian?”, said the prime minister.
The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, was definitive yesterday when he delivered his speech on April 25 and assured that the Italian Constitution is “the daughter of the anti-fascist struggle”. “Now and always, resistance”, said the head of state from Cuneo, a highly symbolic city for the partisan struggle. To begin, he chose an emotional quote from Piero Calamandrei, one of the fathers of the Italian Magna Carta: “If you want to go on a pilgrimage to the place where our Constitution was born, go to the mountains where the partisans fell, to the prisons where they were captured, in the fields where they were hanged, everywhere where an Italian died (…), because that’s where our Constitution was born”.
