I thought London was going to have it bad by voting in Johnson supported by the secondary votes of the BNP, but it seems in Italy they have gone one worse. While we were involved in the elections we failed to spot that Gianni Alemanno a former Neo-fascist youth leader has become Mayor-elect of Rome.
After the victory was declared, Alemanno supporters flooded onto the steps of the Campidoglio city hall and gave “saluti Romani” — the stiff-arm salute adopted by Mussolini and later used by the Nazis. They also chanted, “Duce! Duce!”, which was what Benito Mussolini styled himself.
A young graphic designer named Nicola Tommasoli died in Verona after being attacked by a Neo-Fascist mob, and much of the coverage of the attack in the Italian press has asked, is this the first sign of things to come in a new right-dominated Italy?
In the early 1980’s Alemanno became well-known for leading violent fascist youth demonstrations in Rome. He became a protégé of Gianfranco Fini, the rightist leader who later founded the neo-Fascist National Alliance party in 1993. Since then Alemanno has worked hard to become the legitimized voice of Fascism in modern Italy, appearing often on Silvio Berlusconi-owned television stations. Berlusconi later appointed Alemanno as agriculture minister in his 2001-2006 government.
The new mayor of Rome ran on an anti-immigrant law and order platform, blaming gypsies, intellectuals, immigrants and artists (sounds very familiar)for Italy’s troubles. He’s already vowed to demolish a controversial new Rome museum and it is expected that he will shut down or greatly diminish the popular Rome Film Festival. One of his campaign’s print ads carried the slogan, “Alemanno, for less cinema and more security.” – referencing his plans for the festival.
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the new Falange.” The word Falange means “phalanx” – was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, which supplied Francisco Franco’s dictatorship with its ideological underpinning.
The prime minister-elect’s closest ally, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League leader, kept up the intimidating rhetoric, arriving for the first session of Italy’s parliament warning of violence if the centre-left did not go along with his plans for federalism. “I don’t know what the left wants but we are ready,” he told reporters. “If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand.”
Of course the Neo-Fascists in power are quick to insist that such violence has nothing to do with them.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Gianfranco Fini’s speech to parliament last week as he took office as the new speaker of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Though Fini, the leader of National Alliance, once called Mussolini the ‘greatest Italian of the 20th century,’ in this speech he pledged his loyalty to Liberation Day, which celebrates the fall of Mussolini’s government. And each elected Neo-Fascist politician seems to be required to make two token gestures – to renounce militarism and to express regret to Jewish leaders for the Holocaust. Yet aside from these two things much of their platforms are remarkably similar to the Mussolini era, most notably in the vilification of all things ‘different’ (immigrants, those with darker skin, gypsies, homosexuals, artists) and the insistence that a crack-down on ‘lawlessness’ is the only solution to Italy’s political and economic woes.
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