Why Giorgia Meloni Won’t Distance Herself from Italy’s Fascist Past

When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni paid an official visit to the Jewish ghetto in Rome on Dec. 19, 2022, it was a big deal. Meloni, who was appointed in October 2022, is Italy’s first prime minister with a past in a neofascist organization: As a teenager, she was an activist with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a now dissolved neofascist movement that was openly apologetic for former dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime. But when she visited the ghetto, Meloni used tough words to condemn one of Mussolini’s greatest crimes: “The racial laws were a disgrace,” she said. Then, she hugged the president of the local Jewish community, Ruth Dureghello, and briefly wept.

Only two weeks later, however, Meloni publicly defended MSI in a press conference. “It was a party of the democratic right,” she claimed, adding that the neofascist movement “ferried millions of Italians defeated by the war towards democracy.”

The two episodes encapsulate Meloni’s savvy but ultimately misleading communications strategy: Rather than distancing herself from her neofascist past, as some people might have expected, she’s trying to distance her neofascist past from fascism itself.

MSI leaders took pride in their disdain for democracy. One of them, Pino Rauti, wrote a book titled “Democracy, Here’s the Enemy!” Presenting MSI as democratic is “a nonsense that can only convince those who don’t know the history of Italy,” said Piero Ignazi, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna. “No one in MSI ever embraced the position that fascism is bad and democracy is good.”

The MSI was born in direct continuity with Mussolini’s regime soon after its fall.

The MSI was born in direct continuity with Mussolini’s regime soon after its fall, founded in a semi-clandestine way in 1946 by veterans of the Italian Social Republic, the political entity that governed Northern Italy between 1943 and 1945, officially led by Mussolini but in practice a German puppet state. Back then, its founders—including Rauti; Giorgio Almirante, set to become MSI’s most prominent leader; and Rodolfo Graziani, a commander in Mussolini’s army—were still in hiding, but they emerged to public life after Italy passed an amnesty for collaborators in 1946.

“The function of MSI was to gather Mussolini’s veterans and keep their political identity alive and functioning in contrast with democracy,” said historian Davide Conti, who wrote a book on the movement.

In the war’s aftermath, the MSI was isolated by other major parties, such as the Christian Democracy party and the Italian Communist Party, both of which had their roots in the anti-fascist resistance. For decades, Italian politics was dominated by the so-called patto costituzionale, an unwritten rule that made neofascists pariahs, barred from any alliance, consultation, or even temporary collaboration. The MSI motto of “non rinnegare, non restaurare” (“neither disown nor reinstate”) summarized its approach to Mussolini’s dictatorship: The group saw the regime as a source of inspiration but did not plan to bring it back any time soon. It also conveniently helped the regime bypass a law, approved in the 1950s, barring the rebuilding of the National Fascist Party.

MSI’s outcast status—and the toxicity it brought to anyone even remotely associated with it—became apparent in 1960, when then-Italian Prime Minister Fernando Tambroni, a staunch conservative hailing from the right-wing branch of the Christian Democracy party, briefly formed a government that relied on MSI’s external support in Parliament—without including them in the coalition. The move was so controversial that Tambroni was forced to dissolve his government within four months, after anti-fascists waged a wave of violent protests during the MSI congress in Genoa. No one else after him tried to accept MSI’s support again.

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Cornered by the anti-fascist parties, including the mainstream right, the MSI managed nevertheless to build a consensus in the most reactionary segments of Italian society, especially those individuals worried about the rise of the Italian Communist and Italian Socialist Parties. The late 1960s throughout the 1970s was an especially turbulent time in Italian history, characterized by a wave of social upheaval with protests from unions, students, and feminists that were often repressed harshly by authorities.

These protests were eventually followed by the rise of more radical movements, including politically motivated armed groups, such as the communist Red Brigades. In this context, Italy’s far right, worried by the prospect of a communist revolution, positioned itself as a force of law and order. (Never mind that at the time, neofascist armed groups—such as the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, founded by ex-MSI members—were also wreaking havoc in the country, so they posed as much a threat to the Italian far right’s stability as the Red Brigades did.) Almirante went as far as to praise, in public, the idea of having a Chile-style coup.

Almirante created a militia around the party called “Volontari Nazionali,” whose job was to violently repress the student movement and labor unions that were organizing protests. The Volontari Nazionali’s most famous exploit was the attempted assault on Sapienza University in Rome, as it was being occupied by left-wing students in 1968. They failed.

But Meloni has not distanced herself. She described Almirante as a noble father of the Italian right, a “politician and a patriot of the past esteemed by friends and adversaries.” She saw no contradiction in praising him while disowning Mussolini’s racial laws. But, of course, there is a glaring one: Almirante played a major role in the antisemitic propaganda of Mussolini’s regime. Between 1938 and 1942, he was the chief editor of La Difesa della Razza, a propaganda outlet whose name (“The Defense of the Race”) says it all. Even decades after the fall of the dictatorship, Almirante said he did not trust democracy.

MSI was pretty extremist on its own. But, as if that weren’t enough, some of its members overlapped with right-wing terrorist groups.

“In the ‘60s and ‘70s, explicitly subversive groups gravitated within and around MSI,” Conti said. Rauti—who was Almirante’s rival within the MSI and father of the current undersecretary of defense, Isabella Rauti—was one the founders of Ordine Nuovo, a neofascist group responsible for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing that killed 17 people in Milan, although Rauti himself was cleared from any direct involvement in a trial. (Almirante has also been accused of protecting a right-wing terrorist but received amnesty before his trial began.)

Meloni seems to be trying to capitalize on a contrarian underdog narrative to hold on to support from extremists.

By the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Silvio Berlusconi era, MSI had exhausted its role as a neofascist party. Its new leader, Gianfranco Fini, dissolved it and founded, from its ashes, Alleanza Nazionale (AN), a conservative party that embraced democracy. Fini formally renounced fascism in his famous 1995 Fiuggi speech and later went so far as to call it an “absolute evil” in a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel.

In 2009, AN merged with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, taking the name People of Freedom, a big tent conservative party that mimicked the U.S. Republicans. Meloni, who followed Fini in AN and then served as a youth minister with People of Freedom, founded her own party, Brothers of Italy, in 2012 with Guido Crosetto, a member of Berlusconi’s circle who had no association with neofascism.

In other words, most of Meloni’s political career took place within conservative parties that were, to different degrees, distanced from fascism. Which raises the question of why she has chosen to embrace, in her current public image, her past in the MSI, where she spent only two years as a teenage grassroots activist.

There are three possible explanations. First, Meloni’s past as a Fini protégé isn’t marketable. “Fini is considered a traitor because he tried to overcome neo-fascism and transform it into a conservative force, but the rest of the party did not follow him,” Ignazi said. “The right constituency has remained nostalgically attached to neofascism.”

Another rationale for embracing MSI lies in Meloni’s efforts to present herself as coherent—in contrast with political leaders who change their minds frequently. “Clinging to MSI is to give the message that one has stayed true to themselves,” Ignazi added.

The third reason has more to do with revanchism and the idea that a group that perceives itself as unfairly marginalized can finally have its voice heard. This victimhood rhetoric resonates well with MSI’s old fanbase. “Many of the Brothers of Italy come from MSI,” said Marta Lorimer, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She pointed out that MSI, which emerged out of fascism’s defeat and endured for decades as an outcast, has “developed a self-image of losers of history.” A big part of this identity, according to Lorimer, “was this perception that their ideas were right but were not accepted after the war, so they saw themselves as a counterhegemonic force to the existing one.”

Meloni, she said, is trying to capitalize on this contrarian underdog narrative. “In her autobiography, she explains that she approached the Italian Social Movement precisely because she was ostracized,” Lorimer added.

Rather than trying to polish her image as a mainstream, if not moderate, leader or owning up to her political roots in fascism, Meloni chose the intermediate path and used her brief past in the MSI as an identity flag. The Movimento Sociale Italiano is close enough to be remembered as part of Italy’s recent democratic history, but at the same time, it is far enough away for the movement’s most controversial episodes to have faded from public memory.