Mussolini's Grandchildren by Broder David;

Author:Broder, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

OUT OF THE PARTY

Fini had become the leader of the MSI youth, then the party itself with Almirante’s personal blessing, but increasingly became a liberal ‘moderniser’ in conflict with his party. With the end of the Cold War and the Italian political system based upon it, he led the veterans of the MSI over a series of hurdles, in the attempt to form a broader party which could mould the Second Republic. Some Christian Democrats congratulated him on the bid to form a ‘normal’ right. Each time, there was a progressive distancing of his party from an identity focused on neofascist assumptions and a growing separation between judgements on the MSI tradition and the historical regime. This required several stages, from the first project for the Alleanza Nazionale, to the formal dissolution of the MSI, to the condemnation of the ‘absolute evil’ and, finally, to Fini’s own ‘identif[ication] with antifascist values’. Each such statement came with multiple qualifications and contradictions; often the tone of the intervention and the backlash against it, notably in the case of the 2003 visit to Israel, had a broader effect on public perception than the literal content of what was said. But through all this we see that the political normalisation of a post-fascist party was not just an artefact of its obedience to antifascist speech codes, but rather a by-product of its involvement in government. Berlusconi was often less bound to pay even formal or conditional respect to antifascism than Fini, making many statements that trivialised Mussolini’s rule and the ‘holidays’ on which he sent opponents. Only on 25 April 2009, four weeks after the two parties fused, would Berlusconi mark Liberation Day for the first time, 15 years after he first became prime minister.

What Berlusconi in 2019 called the ‘legitimisation’ and ‘constitutionalisation’ of ‘the Lega and the fascists’ also had a contradiction in the norm erosion in which he was himself involved. While corruption had already become a highly visible political issue in Mani Pulite, the governments which Berlusconi led – allied to his own personal involvement in multiple criminal cases – intensified a strong politicisation of the justice system and its decisions, which in turn embroiled his allies. His party raised to high office figures steeped in organised crime and the P2 masonic lodge, and passed ad personam legislation designed to protect his business interests; and he was banned from public office in 2013 after his definitive conviction for tax fraud. Many current Fratelli d’Italia leaders who joined the MSI in the early 1990s, including Meloni, claim that they first entered politics in response to the murder of antimafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino; the party claimed to be ‘clean’ and ‘honest’ unlike the ‘partyocracy’. They would later vote to protect associates such as Marcello dell’Utri – later jailed for his historic role as a mediator between Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra mafiosi – from prosecution, and indeed to back up Berlusconi’s story that he had pressured Milan police to release the teenage prostitute Karima

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