Why Giorgia Meloni Won’t Distance Herself from Italy’s Fascist Past
-
Loading... - Alejandro Diaz
- 07 Feb 2023
- 84 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
The Italian prime minister is proudly defending her party’s extremist predecessor by falsely claiming they were never fascists.
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. Read More…
