Ultra by Tobias Jones

Author:Tobias Jones [Jones, Tobias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786697356
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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If many were leaving the curva, others were moving in. On 30 January 1992, at the Hotel Universo in Rome, a conference was organized by two politicians from the MSI party. Entitled ‘A Fatherland Called the Terraces’, and with invitations issued to the notoriously right-wing fans of Lazio, Juventus, Inter and Roma’s Boys, it was an attempt to harness the energy and radicalism of the ultras for electoral politics. Within a year the Lazio ultras were chanting that ‘We want Fini [the MSI leader] for mayor’. Many ultras scorned the flagrant attempt at exploitation but the conference was evidence that reemergent right-wing political parties saw the ultras as the foot soldiers of a new movement.

Given what was happening on certain terraces, it was natural that neo-fascist politicians sought political support there. When Hellas Verona was on the verge of signing Maickel Ferrier, the Dutch midfielder from Suriname, a black mannequin was hanged from the stands by supporters wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits. There were also racist chants and banners (‘Give him the stadium to clean’). Bowing to ultra pressure, the club decided not to sign him. Another Dutch player from Suriname, Aron Winter, was bought by Lazio in 1992 and immediately, on the white marble walls on the way to the Stadio Olimpico, antisemitic slogans appeared. One read ‘Winter Dirty Jew Out’, accompanied by a swastika.

Ever since the end of the war, anti-fascism had been the foundation stone of the Italian Republic. But the collapse of the Soviet Union had gutted the credibility of Italian communism and by 1992 the other pillar of Italian post-war politics, the Christian Democrats, had been decimated by corruption scandals. These events represented the collapse of Italy’s First Republic and a political and ideological vacuum opened up.

Many of those who stepped into that vacuum conflated footballing populism with a fondness for the authoritarian strand of Italian history. When the owner of A.C. Milan, Silvio Berlusconi, burst into politics by creating his Forza Italia party out of Milan supporters’ clubs and Publitalia, he made anti-communism the centrepiece of his slick sloganeering. He identified the MSI and the anti-southerner, anti-foreigner Northern League as his ideal political partners. With a huge media empire to ram home his message, Berlusconi made sure that fascism was sdoganato, ‘cleared through customs’. Everyone could see what was happening. It was an assiduous but subtle rehabilitation of a political extremism that had been shunned by the mainstream for five decades. Berlusconi rarely missed an opportunity to express his admiration for Mussolini and pointedly avoided the traditional 25 April celebrations marking the country’s liberation from Nazi-Fascism. By 1994 many neo-fascists who had been imprisoned as militants in the 1970s and 1980s found themselves in mainstream politics, if not in the upper echelons of government.

The danger was sufficiently acute that in 1993, a law was passed (the Legge Mancino) outlawing fascist slogans, salutes and ideologies. It was an updating of the 1952 Scelba Law, which prohibited the recreation of the Fascist Party in post-war Italy.

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