Mussolini & Berlusconi. Image from berlusconite.blog.excite.it-----
The triumph of the right?
Silvio Berlusconi has swept back into the presidential palace, the far right have won Rome's mayoral election - no wonder many Italians are worried their country is slipping back into its dark past. But are comparisons between the new right and Mussolini's fascists accurate, wonders Tobias Jones
- The Guardian,
- Friday May 2 2008
The images of voters celebrating the recent election results in Italy were as eloquent as they were alarming: amid the sea of tricolour flags were hundreds of people raising their right arms to the skies, their fingers tense and straight. Everywhere you could see the old fascist salute. It is back in fashion and many are now wondering if the boot-boys themselves are back in power.
It is never easy to understand what is happening in Italian politics, but the past fortnight has been uncharacteristically clear. Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate, has been swept back to power, winning convincing majorities in both upper and lower houses. This week there have been regional and mayoral elections. The story has been the same almost everywhere: overwhelming victories for the right. They even won the mayoral contest in Rome, where the left had assumed it had a divine right to rule.
Many in Italy are deeply worried by the results. Berlusconi's coalition, they say, wasn't an ordinary rightwing movement, but instead an assortment of far-right extremists and dangerous, deluded rabble-rousers. The Popolo della Libertà coalition, for example, includes Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of you-know-who. It includes the rump of the so-called post-fascist party, the National Alliance. Its leader, Gianfranco Fini, once said that Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the 20th century.
Fini has just been elected speaker of the lower house. One of his colleagues, Ignazio La Russa, grandly kissed Alessandra Mussolini as the election results came in, saying loudly, "I love you and I love your grandfather."
Perhaps most worrying of all is that the Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, won 8% of the national vote. For a party that only wins votes in the north, it was an astonishing result. The Northern League is renowned for its inflammatory language. Its politicians frequently try to out-do their colleagues by displaying their xenophobic instincts: one recently suggested that foreigners should be forced to use separate train carriages; Bossi himself has, in the past, urged the Italian navy to use live rounds against the thousands of immigrants arriving on Italian shores.
The Northern League likes fighting talk. Its symbol, after all, is the Carroccio, the wheel of the war-chariot used in the middle ages. Bossi's comments since the election have not exactly reassured those worried that Italy is sliding back towards political extremism: he has said the rifles are still warm and that he has 300,000 martyrs ready if the leftwing tries to get in his way.
It may all be hot air, something never in short supply in Italian politics. It may be just bluster or qualunquismo ("whateverism" or meandering populism). But some of Europe's most authoritative voices have been warning of this trend for years. Serious academics and commentators such as Alexander Stille, Paul Ginsborg and David Lane have all written at length about the worrying trend towards a post-democratic world in which a sort of Italian Rupert Murdoch presides over a cabinet of far-right footsoldiers. The Nobel prize-winning playwright Dario Fo warned in Le Monde in 2002 that a new kind of fascism was on its way, and two years ago Martin Jacques wrote in these pages that Berlusconi "represents an incipient fascism, a fascism born of the conditions of our age rather than the interwar period. I choose my words carefully, without hyperbole."
In many ways, of course, talk of a return of fascism sounds precisely that: hyperbolic. Italy is a democratic country at the heart of the European Union. Leaders such as Fini have visited Israel and made great shows of renouncing any vestiges of antisemitism. Indeed, in his acceptance speech this week, he spoke of April 25, the day that marks Italy's liberation from fascism, as a date which "should be honoured, and a value which should be shared".
If you talk to many rightwing commentators in Italy, they are amused by the hysteria surrounding the rightwing election victory. Comparing 2008 to 1922 is, they say, "pathetic", "completely alarmist", "ridiculous". "Every time the left loses an election they say it's because the other side is undemocratic", laughed one rightwing journalist I spoke to.
But what has changed in recent years is the cultural backdrop to Italian politics. Rather than being demonised, Mussolini has been reconsidered and rehabilitated. The motivations behind that are many and some are even noble. In an attempt to heal the deep scars of Italy's subterranean civil war between right and left, many Italian historians have recognised that Italian fascists were fighting for their country just as much as the antifascists were, and they have recognised that both sides committed atrocities in the dirty warfare of 1943-45.
That subtle shift in the historiography (still hotly debated) allowed a sort of equivalenza to emerge: partisans and fascists were both legitimate combatants. Both sides came to be seen as Italian patriots caught up in a national tragedy. It was against that backdrop that Berlusconi was able to ally himself firmly with the descendants of the fascist tradition. The last time he was prime minister he pointedly avoided any April 25 celebrations, and in an infamous interview with the Spectator opined that Mussolini's habit of sending political prisoners to the border was like accompanying them to a holiday camp.
According to Richard Bosworth, author of Mussolini's Italy, "quite a cunning job has been done on the past. Fini has admitted that the era of fascism is over, he has apologised for antisemitism in 1938, apologised for wicked German bits of fascism, but there has been no apology for entering aggressive wars, for the killing of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians."
In part, the rehabilitation was possible because the mainstream representations of fascism during the First Republic were so superficial. The archetypal images of a fascist in the postwar period were created by Bertolucci and Pasolini (in their films 1900 and Salò respectively). Fascists were perverted, murderous pederasts with Germanic names and overlords. Because antifascists used such caricatures, post-fascists had a very easy time reinventing themselves. But once the genie was out of the bottle, it became apparent just how many people had been rubbing the lamp. People who felt they had been politically neutered by the postwar alliance between Christian Democracy and communism "came out" and found there was a national resurgence of nostalgici. In the early 1990s, the MSI, the flame-carrier of fascism, renamed itself the National Alliance and suddenly found itself a party of government.
Now, 15 years after the rehabilitation began, it is very obvious that Mussolini's mystique still survives. You can buy endless magazines about him in the little newsagent-boutiques. In Predappio, his home town, there is a cottage industry selling Mussolini busts and fascist paraphernalia. The mausoleum there is a place of pilgrimage and there is always a queue of pilgrims. The graffiti adorning the walls of many Italian cities will be a Celtic (encircled) cross, the contemporary equivalent of the swastika. The new mayor of Rome allegedly wears one around his neck...
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