The political climate of the past weeks in Italy already anticipated that yesterday, the day the country commemorated the liberation party from Nazi-fascism, was going to be a committed day for the Italian government of Giorgia Meloni, the most right-wing in the country since World War II. World War. Meloni leads Brothers of Italy, a party heir to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded by those nostalgic for Benito Mussolini in 1946. For this tense April 25, the party celebrating the victory, in 1945, of the partisan resistance on fascism and the Nazi occupation, the opposition had been demanding that he openly declare himself anti-fascist for days.
Meloni responded by going, as is expected of a prime minister, to the Altar of the Fatherland, a monument to the unity of Italy. He also published a long letter on the issue in Corriere della Sera, where he stressed the “incompatibility with any nostalgia for fascism” on the part of the right-wing parliamentary parties and criticized those who “use the category of fascism as an instrument to delegitimize any adversary political”. However, his words were dismissed as lukewarm for invoking the concept of a “freedom party”, recovering an idea from former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2009.
The prime minister’s letter comes after some controversial statements by one of her closest collaborators, Ignazio La Russa, president of the Senate – and therefore the second highest office in the State – and who founded Brothers of Italy with her. La Russa, who collected Mussolini relics at her home, said 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 it wasn’t enough for everyone.
“Meloni has sometimes shown a determined face, she has shouted certain words and certain slogans and what she should do is show her face and say clearly and definitively: we are anti-fascists,” criticized the mayor of Milan, the progressive Giuseppe Sala, first row of the demonstration to celebrate April 25 in the Lombard capital.
Since coming to power, Meloni, who declared herself an admirer of Mussolini in her youth, has renounced fascism and has also taken steps to get closer to the Italian Jewish community, victim of the dictator’s terrible racial laws. However, some of her relatives are not making it easy for her. Especially La Russa himself who, after going to the Altar of the Fatherland yesterday, traveled to Prague to participate in a meeting of EU parliamentary presidents and lay a crown on the monument of Jan Palach, a student who committed suicide by setting himself on fire fire in 1969 in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets.
At the end of March, the president of the Upper House was also highly criticized after calling the attack by a group of partisans against a battalion of the Nazi army, an episode that occurred on March 23, 1944 on the Roman Via Rasella, as little “noble”. and that motivated a retaliatory action the following day that culminated in the massacre of the Ardeatine Trenches, when Adolf Hitler ordered at least 10 Italians to be shot for every German killed and ended up executing 335 Italians, many of them Jews. La Russa then maintained that those murdered were “a band of semi-retired men and not vile Nazis from the SS.” Meloni magnified the controversy by assuring that the innocent were massacred “just for being Italian.” She later justified that she said it to be inclusive: “What do you mean, that the anti-fascists are not Italian?â€, The Prime Minister maintained.
The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, was blunt yesterday when delivering his speech on April 25 and assuring 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 imprisoned, to the fields where they were hanged, where an Italian died (…), because our Constitution was born thereâ€.
