The rise of far-right politician Giorgia Meloni has left many outside Italy asking how her brand of what many argue is fascism can achieve such prominence in a country that has experienced life under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. The answer can be traced back to a recent normalisation of reactionary politics.
In truth, the existence of a far-right government in Italy is not entirely without precedent in the post-war era. Between 1994 and 2011 a speciously labelled “centre-right” alliance – consisting of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI), various iterations of a small Christian democratic or centrist wing, Umberto Bossi’s Northern League (LN) and Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance (AN) – governed Italy four times. The National Alliance was the predecessor party to Meloni’s Brother’s of Italy
Berlusconi takes a revisionist view of Mussolini’s role in Italian history. He believed him to be one of Italy’s “greatest statesmen” and an essentially “benign dictator” who had “done good things for Italy”. This provided a counter-narrative that contradicted the reality of the Italian republic’s anti-fascist foundations. That, in turn, was exploited by the far right.
