Giorgia Meloni and Her
Fascist Fratelli d’Italia

This article is translated from L'internazionalista No. 8, May 2025, the newspaper of our comrades of the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia.

When Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Fd’I, Brothers of Italy), took office as prime minister in late October 2022, there was a wave of concern internationally about a first-ever Italian government headed by a party descended from the fascist movement of Benito Mussolini. In Italy not so much. While leftist anti-fascists protested against the new right-wing coalition government – also including the Lega of Matteo Salvini and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – the “mainstream” bourgeois parties and media have long since “normalized” the Fd’I. Even much of the left routinely refers to Meloni’s party as just another party of the bosses.

Many circumlocutions are used: in the press. Fratelli d’Italia is often referred to as “populist,” “right-wing populist” or at most “radical right-wing populist.” The Fd’I defines itself (in its 2017 Trieste Theses) as a “patriots movement” and “national conservatives.” Another frequent label is “post-fascist.” For our part, the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia and League for the Fourth International hold that there is nothing “post” about it: while the Fd’I may adapt its electoral pitch, it is the latest iteration of the post-WWII fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). And the aim of the right-wing coalition government that it leads is to erect a bonapartist “strong state.”

Fratelli is a personalist party, with “Giorgia Meloni” in big letters in its logo (along with the MSI tri-color flame). But then, what fascist movement hasn’t had a leader cult? Her campaign biography (Io sono Giorgia [I am Giorgia]) and viral campaign video (“I am Giorgia, a woman, a mother, an Italian, a Christian”) project an everywoman, “just folks” image. Internationally, Meloni has portrayed herself as the top European ally of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The imaging is all very “mainstream.” But on the domestic front, the Fd’I’s hobbyhorse is virulent anti-immigrant xenophobia, with anti-Muslim hysteria taking the place of antisemitism in the cosmography of previous fascist movements, combined with anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry.

If today, the Fd’I strikes a populist pose for the masses while enforcing austerity and militarization for the “democratic” imperialists, this does not contradict its fascist credentials. Mussolini and Hitler both served (and were financed by) top Italian and German industrialists. In 2025, Fratelli d’Italia and their cognates around Europe – National Rally (RN) in France, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) – as well as fascistic (fascist-like) electoral parties like the Lega or Alternative for Germany (AfD) look to beef up the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. If they don’t have squads of marauding blackshirt thugs, it’s because they will use the police.

And let’s not forget that Mussolini initially ruled through a parliamentary alliance with liberals and conservatives. That right-wing coalition government pushed through the 1923 Acerbo Law that gave the largest party two-thirds of the seats in parliament, if it got at least 25% of the vote. On that basis, and a program for “God, fatherland, nation, strong state and traditional values,” in 1925 Il Duce installed a full-fledged police state. Today, Meloni’s right-wing council of ministers is pushing an ominous constitutional reform for direct election of the premier, with a guaranteed majority in parliament, while increasing police powers to suppress protests.

Fratelli d’Italia’s Forefathers: the Postwar Fascist MSI

Italy is the one country in Europe with an unbroken lineage of a fascist movement, with several incarnations going back for over a century. It started out as shock troops for the employers and landowners in crushing factory occupations by leftist workers peasant land seizures and heading off revolution during the Biennio Rosso (Red Two Years) of 1919-20. These paramilitary “fasci fighting squads” founded by Benito Mussolini formed the National Fascist Party. At the culmination of the October 2022 March on Rome by 25,000 squadristi in black shirts, Mussolini was named prime by King Vittorio Emmanuele III.

In carrying out this putsch, Mussolini was backed by big business and the military. After two years of parliamentary government in coalition with conservatives and liberals, Il Duce dissolved parliament and instituted the fascist dictatorship. This bonapartist regime imposed a corporatist system in which both workers unions and employers syndicates were firmly controlled by, and integrated into, the capitalist state. After Hitler’s 1933 takeover of Germany – also via the parliamentary system – and Mussolini’s alliance with him, fascist Italy increasingly resembled Nazi Germany, notably in passing the antisemitic laws “in defense of the race” in 1938.

In World War II, as the fascist Axis of Germany and Italy began to crumble in 1943 with the defeat of the German Wehrmacht by the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad and the invasion of southern Italy by the U.S. and British Allies, Mussolini was ousted by the king in concert with military leaders. The German army quickly occupied northern Italy and set up a puppet “Italian Social Republic” (RSI) with Mussolini as titular head. This “Salò Republic,” named after the last fascist stronghold, was then overthrown and the German occupiers driven out by a coordinated partisan uprising culminating in Liberation Day, 25 April 1945.

At the end of World War II, Italy was in vast turmoil. From huge strikes that braved fascist repression in 1943 up until the defeat of the popular front led by the Communist Party (PCI) in the 1948 elections, the Italian working class showed over and over its power and willingness to do class battle. In the massive upheaval of April 1945, armed workers strung up Mussolini and drove out the Germans: northern Italy was de facto in workers’ hands. But instead of leading the struggle forward to socialist revolution, the Communist Party (PCI) handed power back to the bourgeoisie, joining a Christian Democratic-led government together with the Socialists.

Both before and after the PCI’s April 1944 “Salerno turn” (svolta di Salerno) – when under Stalin’s instructions it joined a “national unity” coalition with “anti-fascist” bourgeois figures, monarchists and former fascist general Pietro Badoglio – the Communist Party followed the Stalinist program of a “popular front” of class collaboration. As minister of justice in the postwar government, in June 1946 PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti issued an amnesty of almost all fascists except for a few of the most notorious butchers. Later that year, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) was formed by veterans of the Salò republic to carry forward the “flame” of fascism.

Despite all the leftist references to Italy’s “antifascist Constitution” of 1947, the laws that supposedly ban “condoning fascism” were deliberately written so as not to apply to the “neofascist” MSI. The historic leader of the MSI, Giogio Almirante was a propagandist for the antisemitic Racial Laws of 1938 in the Mussolini regime, editor of the hate-sheet Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race). In 1942 he wrote that “our racism must be that of blood.” He didn’t change his colors. At the 1956 MSI Congress Almirante declared that “what we really are” is “the fascists of the RSI” (the Salò Republic) and not “fascists in a democracy,” from which they were “estranged.”

“Almirante routinely insisted that fascism did not die with Mussolini but continued as a ‘movement’ once the regime was over,” writes journalist David Broder in his book Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy (2023). Giorgia Meloni became a fascist activist in 1992 at the age of 15, when she joined the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front), the youth group of the MSI. To this day, Meloni has never stopped praising MSI founder-leader Giorgio Almirante. At the first congress of Fratelli d’Italia, standing before a giant image of Almirante, Meloni praised “those who run from one era to the next … carrying with them a fire, a flame.”

The Normalizing of the MSI

In the post-World War II period, when the not-so-neo-fascists of the MSI felt ghettoized in the purportedly “anti-fascist republic,” these heirs of Mussolini sold their services as the cutting edge of the anti-Soviet Cold War in Italy (see article on page xx). The fascists were up to their necks in Operation Gladio, the P2 secret lodge, coup plotting, horrific massacres and street fighting against against leftist 68ers and the Communist Party. Whether the dirty work was carried out directly by the MSI or by its offshoots, they worked together with the state repressive organs as the fascist battering ram of imperialism.

The counterrevolution, under intense imperialist pressure, that destroyed the bureaucratically degenerated, Stalinist-ruled Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states during 1989-1992 had a seismic effect in Italy. The end of the Cold War was intimately related to the explosion of the tangentopoli (“kickback city”) scandals of the early 1990s. While there was plenty of personal corruption (over half the members of parliament were indicted), at bottom this reflected the lotizzazione (parceling out) of different sectors of the government apparatus and state-owned enterprises among the various factions of the partitocrazia of anti-Communist rule.

The mani pulite (“clean hands”) judicial investigation led to the collapse of the Christian Democracy (DC), which ruled Italy continuously from 1947 to 1993, either alone until the 1980s or in coalitions thereafter. At the same time, the PCI, long the largest Stalinist reformist party in West Europe, abandoned any pretense of communism or even socialism. The PCI rebranded iself as as a bourgeois party, at first the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS), then as the Left Democrats (DS) and ultimately (in 2007), eschewing even the “left” qualifier, as the Democratic Party (PD). The parallel demise of the DC and PCI has been termed the end of the “First Republic.”

The fascist MSI saw this as as political opening to make its way out of the “ghetto.” With Gianfranco Fini, Almirante’s chosen successor, at the helm, at the beginning of 1994 the Movimento Sociale Italiano – Alleanza Nazionale (MSI-AN) was launched, hoping to pick up right-wing sectors of the now defunct Christian Democracy. It promptly joined a coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI), winning 105 seats in parliament and five ministers in the coalition government. At a final conference in Fuggi in 1995, Fini buried the MSI and proclaimed the A.N. (the svolta di Fuggi). Pino Rauti split off to form the Tricolor Flame party.

In 1996 Meloni was elected national leader of Azione Studentesca (A.S.), the high school student group of the Alleanza Nazionale.  While Fini portrayed the A.N. as a “postfascist” party, in reality it was the continuation of the MSI, keeping its tri-color flame as an insert in the new party’s symbol. For her part, A.S. leader Meloni told French TV channel FR3, “I think that Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy. There were none like him in the politicians we have had for the last 50 years.” In the 1996 elections, A.N. became Italy’s third-largest party, although the “center-left” Ulivo (Olive Tree) coalition won the vote.

Over the next decade and a half, the Alleanza Nazionale alternated in office (1994-96, 2001-06) and in opposition (1996-2001, 2006-08), always as part of a right-wing alliance led by Berlusconi. Then in 2008, Fini dissolved the A.N. into Il Caviliere’s new party, Popolo della Libertà (Pd’L), which governed during 2008-11. But Berlusconi’s high-handed behavior rankled, and a year after losing elections at the end of 2011, he abruptly canceled primary elections in the Pd’L. The former A.N. cadres revolted and in December 2012 Fratelli d’ Italia was born, initially led by Ignazio La Russa and Giorgia Meloni, both ministers in the Pd’L government.

The formation of the Fd’I was basically a reaction against the step-by-step distancing from the MSI heritage that Fini had carried out with, culminating in the dissolution into Berlusconi’s Pd’L. A month before Fratelli was formed, the whole of the ex-MSI “family” gathered at Pino Rauti’s funeral, where hundreds raised their arms in fascist salutes. In many respects, the Fratelli embraced Rauti’s heritage, as the hard-liner who refused to go along with the “turn” at Fuggi to formally bury the MSI. Now the MSI’s tri-color flame, which had disappeared during the Pd’L phase, reappeared in the symbol of Fratelli.

Rauti was one of the heroes of the MSI’s Azione Studentesca when Giorgia Meloni took the helm in 1996, and he is a hero today for the the reborn A.S., the high school student group of the Fd’I. Meloni was at Rauti’s funeral, as was his daughter, Isabella, who since 2018 has been a member of the Senate on the Fd’I slate. She is also president of the Pino Rauti Studies Center, which in 2020 held an exhibition of 50 Years of Press and Propaganda of the Italian Right, 1945-1995 – that is, of the MSI – stressing the continuity of she called the “anti-communist right” up to today. So the Fd’I honors the man who declared “democracy” the “enemy.”

Fratelli d’Italia Reclaims Its Fascist Heritage

In the lead-up to the 2022 vote, Giorgia Meloni expressed exasperation with Fratelli d’Italia being called neofascist, postfascist “or afascist.” Yet the Fd’I’s claim to the heritage of the MSI and its leaders, veterans of the Nazi puppet Salò Republic who frankly proclaimed their fascism, is ostentatious in the Fratelli symbols. The Fd’I received exclusive permission to use the tri-color flame, including the initials MSI, from the Fondazione Alleanza Nazionale which held the legal rights (and is controlled by Fd’I). Likewise with the MSI/AN/Fd’I youth groups, which from the 1950s to today feature a tri-color flare, while the high school group sports a stylized Celtic cross.

The direct fascist lineage of the Fd’I is also seen in its personnel. The title of David Broder’s book on Fascism in Contemporary Italy is Mussolini’s Grandchildren. In the case of Fratelli, the latest incarnation of the MSI, this is literally the case. Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce, came in first in Rome’s 2021 city council elections as a candidate of the Fd’I. Her half-sister Rachele Mussolini has been a Rome city councilor for the Fd’I since 2016 (until going over to Fuerza Italia last year). In 2019, Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, his great-grandson, was an Fd’I candidate in the European Parliament elections (where Alessandra is a MEP).

Clearly, the name Mussolini is still a vote-getter in a sizeable sector of the Italian electorate. Other Fd’I candidates also come from prominent fascist families, like the senator Isabella Rauti. Ignazio La Russa, who cofounded Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 and was its first president for a year until Meloni took over, was given the middle name of Benito by his father, who was a local leader of the National Fascist Party in the early 1940s and later a parliamentary deputy for the MSI. A week before the 2022 elections, La Russa declared that “we are all heirs of the Duce.”

Many of those who characterize the Fd’I as “postfascist” try to distinguish it from other fascist groups, such as CasaPound (named after the American poet Ezra Pound, die-hard backer of  Mussolini), and action groups like Forza Nuova (FN), known for its attacks on immigrants and leftists. But there is no hard separation – they are all part of the fascist milieu. At a 2019 leadership meeting of CasaPound the Fd’I’s La Russa said that he considered accusations of being a fascist a “compliment.” And during the COVID-19 pandemic, he proposed to replace “unhealthy” handshakes with the straight-arm “roman (i.e., fascist) salute.”

As for Forza Nuova, its leader Roberto Fiore was a main speaker at the Fd’I youth’s annual Atreju festa, along with spokesmen of Memento, a group which honors fascist blackshirts from the 1920s and the Salò republic. FN has strong influence in the fascistic anti-abortion group ProVita, which was a sponsor of the 2017 World Congress of Families where Meloni gave a speech denouncing “gender ideology.” In 2018 after FN and Casa Pound demonstrated in support of the racist thug (a Lega candidate) who carried out an armed attack on African immigrants in Macerata,¹ Meloni declared that “CasaPound and Forza Nuova are not xenophobic parties.”²

During the 2022 election, the Fratelli d’Italia leader and soon-to-be prime minister criticized “operetta nostalgics” – i.e., those who look back fondly to Benito Mussolini’s rule – saying they “serve the interests of the left.”³Yet at the same time, Meloni ostentatiously uses Mussolini-era slogans, with big banners proclaiming “God, Fatherland, Family.” The leader of Fratelli claims disingenuously  that this triad is “not a political slogan” but “the most beautiful manifesto of love through the centuries,” going back to Cicero’s “For hearth and home.” Others attribute it to 19th-century republican leader Giuseppe Mazzini, although he added “humanity.”

But, in fact, “God, Fatherland, Family” was coined as a political slogan by the head of the National Fascist Party, Giovanni Giuriati, in 1931. As journalist Paolo Berizzi noted, it was to call youth to sacrifice for the Patria, and Il Duce. It included “criminalization of homosexuality, attachment to homeland and identity, blood, soil, in the lexicon of xenophobia.”⁴ In 2022 Meloni, the keeper of the MSI flame stridently proclaimed at a meeting of the xenophobic Spanish Vox party: “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology.” But for moderates, “Donna” Giorgia preaches the “balsam” of love.

As for those nostalgic for Italy’s fascist dictatorship, the fact that Meloni took office as prenmier on the centenary, practically to the day, of Benito Mussolini’s October 1922 March on Rome was fortuitous. On 28 October 2022, 2,000+ fascists caelebrated in Mussolini’s home town, Predappio, and marched, without police interference, to the cemetery where his crypt is located. There 2,000+ gave fascist straight-arm salutes. Meanwhile, the new government shut down a dance party rave in Modena. Predappio is a fiefdom of Fd’I, whose mayor celebrated the reopening of the ornate mausoleum with Alessandra Mussolini, saying it was good for tourism.

From “Camerati” to “Patrioti”: The Matrix Is Fascism

As noted above, the formation of Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 was in reaction to the prior abandoning of attachments to the fascist MSI. That year, the Fd’I mayor of Afile, a small municipality near Rome, erected a mausoleum honoring the fascist war criminal Rodolfo Grazian. He interned 100,000 Libyans in concentration camps in 1930-31, used mustard gas in the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-36, and as defense minister for the German puppet Salò republic, decreed the death penalty for draft resisters. After a firestorm of protest, the mayor was convicted of promoting fascism, but an appeals court overturned it saying that “commemoration” is not “exaltation.”

At its second congress, in December 2017, Fratelli d’Italia passed extensive programmatic theses. Although various academics have argued that these are of a “modern” right-wing populist character, they are distinctly fascist. Beginning with announcing its “Appeal to Patriots” from Trieste, “the most Italian of cities.” Why is that? Because Trieste was “returned” from the shadow of the “Iron Curtain,” wrested from “communist” Yugoslavia. This was a throwback to the irredentism⁵ of the ultra-nationalist fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who led military bands into the territory in 1920, and Mussolini, who in 1924 annexed “italianissima” Trieste.

The “Trieste Theses” tell a tale of national identity under siege from “radical universalism,” and fighting aginst an “abstract multiculturalist principal” that negates the “classical Judeo-Christian roots” of Europe. It claims Italy is beset by “indiscriminate and uncontrolled” immigration of “persons from other continents in numbers that portend a bona fide ethnic replacement.” The Fd’I’s embrace of this fascist “Great Replacement” thesis came soon after torch-bearing Nazis, KKKers and other fascists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and “You will not replace us” – and the next day murdered an anti-fascist protester.

Prime Minister Meloni claims that Fratelli’s condemning antisemitism and Mussolini’s 1938 Racial Laws are proof that it is not fascist. Not at all. The Fd’I’s “defense of Christian roots” and opposition to “Islamisation of Europe,” serves the same purpose as the Nazi-fascist demonization of Jews: fanning nationalist hysteria against Muslims as “outsiders,” and “the enemy within.” This identitarian exaltation of “italianità” (Italianness) and Islamophobia goes together with calls for militarization of society, to use the army to combat “criminality” in the cities and for police/military patrols on the highway. Ultranationalism has always been a hallmark of fascism.

Virulent national chauvinism is also behind the Fd’I’s misogyny and homophobia. “A people that doesn’t make children is a people destined to disappear,” the Trieste Theses declare, saying that as “Patriots” they demand “boosting the birthrate as the national priority.” So Fratelli says it is the patriotic duty of Italian women to have more Italian babies . . . to be raised by the “natural family,” which is threatened by “gender ideology.” While Meloni said during the 2022 election campaign that she would not touch Law 194, Italy’s extremely limited abortion law,⁶ Fd’I local and regional governments have for years done everything possible to make abortion inaccessible.

The fascism of Fratelli d’Italia is not only in its program, but in its internal culture. Dramatic videos by an undercover reporter of the online news site Fanpage⁷showedhow, when they thought themselves away from prying media eyes (“tra noi”), everyone from top Fd’I politicians to rank-and-file members reveled in fascist talk. Calling each other “patrioti” rather than “camerati,”⁸ greeting each other with “gladiator” forearm handshakes, Fd’I Eurodeputy Carlo Fidanza, accompanied by the “Black Baron” Roberto Jonghi (who ran for parliament for the Fd’I in 2018), gives a “Roman” salute and appeals for “black” (illicit) funds for an Fd’I  candidate.

Amid the scandal, Fidanza briefly “suspended” himself from Fd’I, Meloni tsk-tsked and a judicial inquiry was begun (which went nowhere). A couple of years earlier, he had spoken at meeting of Lealtà Azione, a fascist social center of skinheads and football hooligans in Milan. And when in 2019 Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, running for Eurodeputy for the Fd’I, was slated to give an after-dinner talk on “The Doctrine of Fascism” written by his great-grandfather, a table was reserved for the leader of the Veneto Fronte Skinheads (which specializes in attacking gay pride events), who had just joined Fratelli. It’s all one big fascist family.

It’s the same with the fascists who carry out terror attacks. In the case of the former Lega candidate who in February 2018 drove through Macerata in the Marche region shooting at black people in the street, wounding a number of African immigrants, and the subsequent provocation by CasaPound and Forza Nuova justifying the shooter (“driven to despair”) Meloni’s response was not only to declare that CasaPound and FN were “not xenophobic parties.” She told TV news that “in Italy there is a plan for ethnic replacement” and denounced the anti-fascist mobilization of tens of thousands in Macerata for “creating another rift in the country.”⁹

And when on 9 October 2021, a mob of no-vaxxers led by Roberto Fiore (national leader of Forza Nuova), Giuliano Castellino (capo of FN’s Rome section) and Luca Castellini (leader of Verona football ultras and FN deputy leader) assaulted and sacked the offices of CGIL, Italy’s largest union federation, Meloni wouldn’t take a position on the FN. She said she “didn’t know the matrix,” or what was behind the attacks, but “whether it was fascist or if it was not fascist is not the point.”¹⁰ Only a few weeks earlier, it turns out, the Fondazione Alleanza Nazionale, controlled by the Fd’I, gave a grant of 33,000 € (euros) to the FN’s Fiore.¹¹

Paoli Berizzi, the courageous journalist for La Repubblica who has exposed the deep fascist heritage and complicity of Fratelli d’Italia, for which he has received death threats, wrote in his recent book, Il ritorno della Bestia (The Return of the Beast):

“Zones of contiguity. Acronyms that intertwine. Plans that overlap even with formal – rather than substantive – differences. The Italian far right … has a thousand different facets. Some very obvious, others less so…. [T]he rise of a former MSI member to the Chigi Palace [the prime minister’s offices] and the growth of her political franchise has been welcomed from CasaPound to Forza Nuova. Although Meloni’s electorate is far broader and also embraces moderate political sectores, Fd’I has offered the Italian right that identifies with the flame designed by [MSI founder and longtime leader Giorgio] Almirante a new home….”

Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Nuova, CasaPound, Veneto skinheads, etc.: they’re all camerati, even though some now euphemistically call themselves “patrioti.” The “matrix” is fascism. Those who claim that the Fd’I is not fascist may be in for a rude awakening.

“Mainstream” Bourgeoisie Moves Right

In the 2013 parliamentary elections, the first after its formation, Fratelli d’Italia received under 2% of the vote, increasing to 4% (1.4 million votes) in 2018. In both cases it won seats solely as part of a right-wing (Forza Italia-Lega-Fd’I) coalition. In the 2019 elections for the European parliament, it got 6.5%. And then in the 2022 parliamentary elections Fratelli’s vote share shot up to 26% (7.3 million votes), making it the largest party and enabling it to form a coalition government with Gioria Meloni as premier. Meanwhile, the overall share of the right-wing vote for parliament increased from 31% in 2013 to 37% in 2018 and 44% in 2022.

So why did Fratelli’s vote more than quintuple between 2018 and 2022? At the parliamentary level there was Lega leader Matteo Salvini’s spectacularly failed bid to win full powers in 2019 by bringing down the government of which he was deputy premier. Then came the implosion of the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) after the two governments of Giuseppe Conte flip-flopped from “center-right” to “center-left,” and their disastrous handling of the 2020-21 COVID crisis. Most important was the fact that the Fd’I was the only opposition to the “national unity” austerity government of former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi.

It’s hardly accidental that of all the countries of West Europe, Italy is where fascist forces have grown the most in the past decade. A key factor is that, uniquely in the European Union (EU), real wages in Italy fell sharply (-13%) between the onset of the world capitalist crisis in 2008 and 2022. The decline in living standards affected not only the working class but also the petty bourgeoisie, the stronghold of the right. Italy was also the first and hardest-hit European country in the COVID-19 slaughter, where almost 200,000 people died amid apocalyptic scenes in understaffed, overcrowded hospitals, the result of years of cutbacks and privatization.

Fratelli d’Italia and its Lega and Forza Italia coalition partners managed to blame immigrants for unemployment and falling wages, when in fact these were the result of employers driving up the rate of exploitation and of the austerity policies of one government after another. The near-collapse of the public health system, in turn, was used by the fascists to take the lead in fanning anti-vaccine hysteria, and to attack the left and labor movements. The Fd’ I was able to turn desperation into monumentally false consciousness due to decaying capitalism’s inability to provide even the most basic protection of the health and welfare of the population it exploits.

During the 2022 election campaign, as it was evident that Fd’I would come out on top, there was nervousness among Western media and leaders about the fascist background of the likely victors. So Meloni went on a media offensive, giving reassuring interviews and statements (while carefully omitting the distancing from fascism in Italian versions). But at the same time she delivered an anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, homophobic rant, vituperating against “leftist secularism” and “gender ideology” at a meeting of the xenophobic Vox party in Spain, heirs of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia have not “moderated” their politics and program. What has happened is that their reactionary policies have been increasingly adopted by “mainstream” bourgeois sectors. Almost all right-wing leaders have said that “Mussolini also did good things” (Berlusconi); that one can’t “deny the works, the reclamations, the grand stations” built by Il Duce (Salvini); it would be hard to have “a negative overall judgement on fascism” up until “the minute before the signing of the Racial Laws” in 1938 (Fini), etc. Meloni herself has not repudiated her youthful praise of Mussolini as a “good politician,” better than all who followed.

Berizzi talks of a “fascistization of everyday thinking resulting from a policy based on the instrumentalization of fear” and appeals to “the most retrograde, reactionary, obscurantist, intolerant and nostalgic underbelly of Italians.” Broder notes how Fratelli “have become increasingly successful at shaping public history to their liking.” But while both refer to the Fd’I as “postfascist,” the identity and “the symbol [it] jealously and proudly preserves,” as Berizzi puts it, is the flame of the postwar fascist MSI. And “The Idea” that Meloni and “the old  and new camerati – who today call themselves patrioti” refer to elliptically “is fascism.”

One of Meloni’s mantras during the 2022 election campaign was referring to “people who have had to keep their heads down for so many years” who now “can say what they think.” What people might those be? And when, in her speech to the Chamber of Deputies asking for a vote of confidence she vowed “we will not betray,” who or what was she referring to? She was pledging, as she has done repeatedly, to be true to the electorate and politics of the fascist MSI, and to its leader, the racist former Mussolini lieutenant Almirante, who spoke of “pass[ing] on the baton” to the youth, “before it falls from [our] hands.”

Buttressing the description of Fratelli d’Italia as “postfascist,” Broder writes, “Meloni’s party is not rallying Blackshirted militias, will not form a one-party state and is not creating a fascist order.” In the same vein, Berizzi comments, “the fascistization of the prevailing mentality does not, of course, mean that we are faced with a repetition of historical fascism – the dictatorial regime of [torture by] castor oil and truncheons, of the black shirts” which are “inapplicable today.” Still, there were the more than 2,000 who gathered in black shirts at Mussolini’s crypt on 29 October 2022 to celebrate the Fd’I victory and the centenary of the March on Rome.

There are also Fratelli d’Italia’s youth groups, Gioventù Nazionale, and for secondary school students Azione Studentesca, which in their internal events revel in fascist symbology, training to be Spartan-like fighters and exalting the “courage of a choice in the service of the Idea” (see “The ‘Little Black Shirts’
of the Fratelli d’Italia Youth,” on page 26). What is behind this resurgence of fascism in Italy, where the republic was founded on the ashes of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship? Berizzi’s answer is that fascism is “in the belly of the country,” that “it was defeated militarily but not culturally,” and “like a virus that was never eradicated, it returns in a mutated form.”

Behind the definition of Fratelli d’Italia as “post-fascist” is an idealist, rather than a materialist, understanding of fascism. This leads Berizzi to contrast Italy with “Germany, a country that has come to terms with its past and blocks that past every time it tries to raise its head again.” Except the fascists are again growing in Germany, and the fascistic AfD is now the second-largest party. Fascism is not just an ideology of reactionary social demagogy, it is a movement mainly of enraged petty bourgeois (and others facing economic decline and ruin) enlisted in the service of capital in times of social crisis to crush the spectre of revolution.

In this period of advanced capitalist decay, as living standards fall and militarism rises, sections of the imperialist ruling class seek to fortify their state power to withstand waves of protest and upheaval by those they exploit and oppress. Fascists like Fratelli d’Italia can serve to lead that movement of preventive counterrevolution on a program of ultra-nationalist reaction. The task of revolutionary Marxists is to clearly identify the mortal threat that such movements represent, and to mobilize the power of the proletariat at the head of the exploited and oppressed on a transitional program pointing to international socialist revolution.

The Stoppable Rise of 21st Century Fascism

What Fratelli is aiming at is to spearhead a drive toward an authoritarian state based on a strengthened police and military and diminishing the role of the legislature. Thus the Fd’I’s constitutional amendment would guarantee a parliamentary majority to the party or coalition whose candidate for premier got the most votes. And if the head of government loses a vote of confidence, they could only be replaced by a member of the same “majority.” Under such a system, the government could enact any law it wished. Parliamentary debate would be a sham. No wonder Meloni said it would be a “revolution that would usher us into the Third Republic.”

It would, in fact, provide the framework for a bonapartist regime. But while the electoral “reform” has languished, the Meloni government proceeded with two other measures pointing to a police state. The first is the project to send asylum seekers to detention camps in Albania. This recalls the infamous lager (concentration camps) set up in Italy under the Nazis for Yugoslavs, Jews, Roma and leftists. The transit camp in Bolzano held thousands of Italians arrested by the Nazi puppet Salò republic (whose cadres later founded the fascist MSI, forerunner of Fratelli d’Italia). Plus the camps in Albania under the bloody 1939-43 Italian occupation.

Giorgia Meloni’s “reception” lager in Albania, designed to hold some 30,000 people in glorified containers surrounded by high barbed-wire fences, were “open for business” in October 2024 to warehouse refugees picked up at sea. However, Italian judges immediately ruled that it was not clear that they came from “safe” countries, and so all 16 of the original detainees were brought back to Italy. Now the government is trying to turn the empty camps into “repatriation” centers with migrants already slated for deportation. But the reason they have not already been deported is that no other country will take them, so they would languish there indefinitely.¹²

The other main initiative of the right-wing government was the draft “security” law known as DDL 1660, which was approved by the council of ministers at the end of September 2024. This measure included a hodge-podge of different clauses, which would  strengthen the repressive apparatus. In particular, it would make blocking of streets and highways, even by a single person, a crime (it is presently an administrative violation), and extend this to rail lines. This is to be used against climate protesters, antiwar demonstrators and striking workers, all of whom have frequently (and non-violently) sat down, marched or picketed in streets.

(On April 4, the Meloni government turned the draft “security” law into a decree-law, to be implemented immediately. See “For a Real General Strike to Stop the ‘Security’ Decree and Arms Build-Up!”)

In fact, all sectors of the Italian bourgeoisie have been pushing to fortify their state power for quite awhile. This reflects the fact that Italy is one of the economically weakest of the imperialist countries, with historically one of the most militant left and labor movements. We have written about this going back to the 1990s, in “Italian Capitalists Demand a ‘Strong State,’” Workers Vanguard No.554,26 June 1992;¹³ in a two-part article on “Italy: Popular Frontism and the Strong State” (Workers Vanguard Nos. 609/610, 26 October/11 November 1994), and in “Fascism, Bonapartism and Police Terror in Italy” (The Internationalist No. 13, May-June 2002)¹⁴ on the bloody suppression of the “anti-globalization” protests in Genova.

Electoralist Left Tranquilized by Fratelli d’Italia Fascists

Today, most of the left buys the tranquilizing story that Fratelli d’Italia is a “post-fascist” or merely right-wing conservative party. The Rete dei Comunisti (RdC) objects to “demonizing this political force which has been present in parliament for some time,” calling the Fd’I a “conservative right that doesn’t disdain its roots” (Contrapiano, 28 August 2022). The Federazione della Giovantù Comunista (FGC) and Fronte Comunista claim that the Meloni government, aside from the cosmetic aspects, is in substantial continuity with the policies of the various governments” in recent decades (Fronte Comunista, 28 October 2022).

The Partito Comunista Rivoluzionario (PCR)¹⁵ is even more explicit, saying “the Meloni government does not represent the rise of fascism, nor of bonapartism.” Not surprising, coming from the Italian section of the Revolutionary Communist International of Alan Woods, which claims that talk of a “supposed ‘fascist’ danger” is misleading because “mobilization of the enraged petty bourgeoisie as shock troops to destroy the workers’ organizations” is “ruled out by the changed balance of forces” from the 1930s.¹⁶ How very reassuring! But the PCR does call the thugs of the Fd’I’s Azione Studentesca that assaulted students in Firenze in 2022 fascists.

The Tendenza Internazionalista Rivoluzionaria (TIR), associated with the SI Cobas rank-and-file union, refers to “The Meloni Government of the Bosses,” and also “of the banks, of war and of lies.”¹⁷It is, of course, all of those things, but that is true of every Italian government in the history of the republic. So for the TIR and SI Cobas, the current fascist-led hard-right imperialist government is just one more bourgeois anti-worker racist government, like all its predecessors. Still, although the TIR fails to recognize the “matrix” from which it comes, they do say that DDL 1660, and now the “security” decree-law, is a “police-state law” and call to mobilize to stop it.

The question is how to do that, and more generally how to combat the ruling-class drive for a bonapartist “strong state.” Those on the left who see the Fd’I-led government as just more of the same, perhaps a little to the right of Berlusconi’s four times in office, respond in the same vein, forming different networks to hold “broad” protests. Among those who recognize and warn of the resurgence of fascism, the norm is to build popular-front coalitions on a program of class collaboration with “progressive” sectors of the bourgeoisie. But what is urgently necessary is, on the contrary, to organize powerful class-struggle actions of the working class and its allies.

As Leon Trotsky wrote in “The Lessons of Spain: Last Warning” (December 1937), “it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution.” Indeed, the only way to thoroughly root out fascism, to definitively eradicate the brown or black plague, is though international socialist revolution. To prepare that, mass strike action and workplace occupations against police attack are called for, along with defense committees based on the mass organizations of the working class to teach fascist thugs and strikebreakers a lesson in proletarian democracy.

There should be mass workers action to shut down fascist provocations, such as our American comrades did in 2017, mobilizing hundreds of trade-unionists and their supporters in Portland, Oregon days after a Nazi fanatic killed two anti-fascist youth defending Muslim girls.¹⁸ There should be workers action to stop deportations, as our comrades in the United States are doing today, building union-initiated committees to defend immigrants in schools, hospitals, warehouses and other workplaces. In Italy, laying the basis for factory committees and area-wide workers councils, including all unions as well as ununionized workers, would be appropriate.

As imperialist/Zionist wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza, with mounting militarization “at home,” as living standards are ground down and social gains of the past are rolled back, it is not possible to defend the rights of working people and the oppressed on the basis of “anti-fascist” bourgeois “democracy,” but only through building organs of struggle for proletarian rule. Above all, it was the absence of a genuinely Bolshevik party of the proletarian vanguard in Italy that made the rise of fascism possible after World War I, its continuation after World War II and its resurgence in the 21st century, due to the failure to fight for socialist revolution.

The crisis of revolutionary leadership remains the central issue of our day. The present fascist led government and increasingly dire situation in Italy, as well as throughout Europe and worldwide, underlines the unreformability of decaying capitalism and the urgent need to forge a genuinely communist party. This party can only be built by drawing the lessons of past struggles, including failures and betrayals, on a solid Leninist-Trotskyist program. The Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, section of the Lega per la Quarta Internazionale, are dedicated to the task of forging this party. ■