The triumph of the right?
Silvio Berlusconi has swept back into the presidential palace, the far right have won Rome's mayoral election - no wonder many Italians are worried their country is slipping back into its dark past. But are comparisons between the new right and Mussolini's fascists accurate, wonders Tobias Jones
Tobias Jones
The Guardian,
Friday May 2 2008
Article history
About this article
This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday May 02 2008 on p4 of the Comment & features section. It was last updated at 00:01 on May 02 2008.
The images of voters celebrating the recent election results in Italy were as eloquent as they were alarming: amid the sea of tricolour flags were hundreds of people raising their right arms to the skies, their fingers tense and straight. Everywhere you could see the old fascist salute. It is back in fashion and many are now wondering if the boot-boys themselves are back in power.
It is never easy to understand what is happening in Italian politics, but the past fortnight has been uncharacteristically clear. Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate, has been swept back to power, winning convincing majorities in both upper and lower houses. This week there have been regional and mayoral elections. The story has been the same almost everywhere: overwhelming victories for the right. They even won the mayoral contest in Rome, where the left had assumed it had a divine right to rule.
Many in Italy are deeply worried by the results. Berlusconi's coalition, they say, wasn't an ordinary rightwing movement, but instead an assortment of far-right extremists and dangerous, deluded rabble-rousers. The Popolo della Libertà coalition, for example, includes Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of you-know-who. It includes the rump of the so-called post-fascist party, the National Alliance. Its leader, Gianfranco Fini, once said that Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the 20th century.
Fini has just been elected speaker of the lower house. One of his colleagues, Ignazio La Russa, grandly kissed Alessandra Mussolini as the election results came in, saying loudly, "I love you and I love your grandfather."
Perhaps most worrying of all is that the Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, won 8% of the national vote. For a party that only wins votes in the north, it was an astonishing result. The Northern League is renowned for
its inflammatory language. Its politicians frequently try to out-do their colleagues by displaying their xenophobic instincts: one recently suggested that foreigners should be forced to use separate train carriages; Bossi himself has, in the past, urged the Italian navy to use live rounds against the thousands of immigrants arriving on Italian shores.
The Northern League likes fighting talk. Its symbol, after all, is the Carroccio, the wheel of the war-chariot used in the middle ages. Bossi's comments since the election have not exactly reassured those worried that Italy is sliding back towards political extremism: he has said the rifles are still warm and that he has 300,000 martyrs ready if the leftwing tries to get in his way.
It may all be hot air, something never in short supply in Italian politics. It may be just bluster or qualunquismo ("whateverism" or meandering populism). But some of Europe's most authoritative voices have been warning of this trend for years. Serious academics and commentators such as Alexander Stille, Paul Ginsborg and David Lane have all written at length about the worrying trend towards a post-democratic world in which a sort of Italian Rupert Murdoch presides over a cabinet of far-right footsoldiers. The Nobel prize-winning playwright Dario Fo warned in Le Monde in 2002 that a new kind of fascism was on its way, and two years ago Martin Jacques wrote in these pages that Berlusconi "represents an incipient fascism, a fascism born of the conditions of our age rather than the interwar period. I choose my words carefully, without hyperbole."
In many ways, of course, talk of a return of fascism sounds precisely that: hyperbolic. Italy is a democratic country at the heart of the European Union. Leaders such as Fini have visited Israel and made great shows of renouncing any vestiges of antisemitism. Indeed, in his acceptance speech this week, he spoke of April 25, the day that marks Italy's liberation from fascism, as a date which "should be honoured, and a value which should be shared".
If you talk to many rightwing commentators in Italy, they are amused by the hysteria surrounding the rightwing election victory. Comparing 2008 to 1922 is, they say, "pathetic", "completely alarmist", "ridiculous". "Every time the left loses an election they say it's because the other side is undemocratic", laughed one rightwing journalist I spoke to.
But what has changed in recent years is the cultural backdrop to Italian politics. Rather than being demonised, Mussolini has been reconsidered and rehabilitated. The motivations behind that are many and some are even noble. In an attempt to heal the deep scars of Italy's subterranean civil war between right and left, many Italian historians have recognised that Italian fascists were fighting for their country just as much as the antifascists were, and they have recognised that both sides committed atrocities in the dirty warfare of 1943-45.
That subtle shift in the historiography (still hotly debated) allowed a sort of equivalenza to emerge: partisans and fascists were both legitimate combatants. Both sides came to be seen as Italian patriots caught up in a national tragedy. It was against that backdrop that Berlusconi was able to ally himself firmly with the descendants of the fascist tradition. The last time he was prime minister he pointedly avoided any April 25 celebrations, and in an infamous interview with the Spectator opined that Mussolini's habit of sending political prisoners to the border was like accompanying them to a holiday camp.
According to Richard Bosworth, author of Mussolini's Italy, "quite a cunning job has been done on the past. Fini has admitted that the era of fascism is over, he has apologised for antisemitism in 1938, apologised for wicked German bits of fascism, but there has been no apology for entering aggressive wars, for the killing of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians."
In part, the rehabilitation was possible because the mainstream representations of fascism during the First Republic were so superficial. The archetypal images of a fascist in the postwar period were created by Bertolucci and Pasolini (in their films 1900 and Salò respectively). Fascists were perverted, murderous pederasts with Germanic names and overlords. Because antifascists used such caricatures, post-fascists had a very easy time reinventing themselves. But once the genie was out of the bottle, it became apparent just how many people had been rubbing the lamp. People who felt they had been politically neutered by the postwar alliance between Christian Democracy and communism "came out" and found there was a national resurgence of nostalgici. In the early 1990s, the MSI, the flame-carrier of fascism, renamed itself the National Alliance and suddenly found itself a party of government.
Now, 15 years after the rehabilitation began, it is very obvious that Mussolini's mystique still survives. You can buy endless magazines about him in the little newsagent-boutiques. In Predappio, his home town, there is a cottage industry selling Mussolini busts and fascist paraphernalia. The mausoleum there is a place of pilgrimage and there is always a queue of pilgrims. The graffiti adorning the walls of many Italian cities will be a Celtic (encircled) cross, the contemporary equivalent of the swastika. The new mayor of Rome allegedly wears one around his neck.
Sometimes, as you travel the country, you sense that many have itchy right arms that are just dying to go up unashamedly and hail il Duce. Paolo Di Canio, the former West Ham footballer, did just that while playing for Lazio a few years ago. In front of fans who are known for their rightwing sympathies, Di Canio gave the Roman salute. The crowd went wild, a scandal ensued, and Di Canio sort of excused himself by saying, "It's something that's stronger than I am."
If you travel an hour north of Rome you will come to a mountain called Monte Giano, near Antrodoco. There, at the summit, is a forest planted in the late 1930s. It is just reaching maturity and has recently been tidied up with public money. From the road below you can see the familiar DVX logo, the Latin name for Duce. The forest is an eloquent symbol of the country's enduring fascination with its long-lost leader.
A story that perfectly illustrates the continuum between Mussolini and the present emerged in Bari this month. For the 30th anniversary of the murder of Aldo Moro, the former prime minister who was killed by the Red Brigades, the rector of the university decided to rename it in his honour. But that would have meant cancelling the official name of the university which was still, on paper, Università Benito Mussolini. You might have thought that the academics would have preferred association with a devout Christian Democrat to the Fascist leader, but no, the Law Department voted against the change.
It remains, at time of writing, Università Benito Mussolini.
Beyond the rehabilitation of Mussolini, the other cultural shift which began in the 1990s was immigration. Unlike Britain, Italy had witnessed negligible immigration prior to 1990. It had almost no colonies and thus the new arrivals were almost entirely unfamiliar with the language and culture of the "mother country". Italy has found the unprecedented levels of immigration traumatic and bewildering, particularly because any kidnap, theft or murder by foreigners receives much more press coverage than a boring one by the locals. There is no doubt that many millions of Italians feel besieged in their own homeland and turn to the National Alliance and the Northern League as a bulwark against immigration. The electoral poster for the Northern League might be crude, but it touched a nerve. Using an image of a melancholic native American, the slogan went: "He let in the immigrants and now he lives on a reservation."
Even those who are sceptical about drawing a comparison with Mussolini recognise that Italy is now likely to see more authoritarian calls against immigrants and a greater flirtation with emblems of nationalism. The Rage and Pride, by the late Oriana Fallaci, is the sacred text of the anti-immigration movement, and the rhetoric against foreigners (or, more specifically, against extracomunitari, those outside the EU) is now relentless.
In that sense, Italy is no different to the Netherlands or Austria, where large swathes of the electorate have voted for parties which promise to put natives first. Where Italy is different is in having Berlusconi, who, like Mussolini, is a barrel-chested demagogue who enjoys boasting from balconies. And it is true that the last time Berlusconi was in power, there was an isolated outbreak of police brutality at the G8 at Genoa that turned many stomachs. It is telling that one of Berlusconi's former newspaper editors, Indro Montanelli, accused Berlusconi of using the manganello, the truncheon.
But while Berlusconi himself enjoys being compared to il Duce, in truth he is completely different. Mussolini's Italy was a bit like 1984; Berlusconi's is more Brave New World. He does not use a truncheon; he is more like a dispenser, through his TV channels and publishing empire, of ceaseless titillation and trivia. The ancient Romans used to say that the masses would be content as long as they had panem et circenses, bread and circuses. Berlusconi guarantees them the second. He provides the entertainment, he is the ringmaster of the teatrino, the "little theatre" that is Italian politics.
Against that backdrop, any weighty, considered political debate becomes impossible. Bosworth maintains that the superficial revisionism of fascism has happened because history has been reduced "to infotainment instead of a critical discipline". It has allowed "the more troubling side of the tyranny to be forgotten, meaning that only the fun bits, the dressage, remains". Dressage, of course, is one of Italy's favourite pastimes and is something fascism was rather good at.
In his 1946 preface to Brave New World, Huxley wrote: "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned ... to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and schoolteachers." That is the sense that one gets in Italy today: a feeling that Berlusconi's television is a sort of electronic babysitter that keeps the populace quiet while he goes off to cut a deal in another room. Ominously, one of the favourite topics for his politicians is the rewriting of certain history books and syllabuses.
That is why Roger Griffin, author of Modernism and Fascism, believes Berlusconi to be in some ways the opposite of Mussolini. "Berlusconi," he says, "is an illiberal manipulator of democracy, but he needs a democracy to manipulate, whereas true fascism wants to replace liberal democracy with a new order. Berlusconi struts around like a spider in the middle of a gargantuan web of power networks. His is a sort of crypto-government, and historically has more parallels with the corruption of state power under [Giovanni] Giolitti between 1900 and 1922 than with Mussolini's regime."
There are, at least, reasons to hope that the resurgence of the far right in Italy is not as worrying as it might appear. One resides in the Italian national character. Just as Italian communism was light years away from the gulags and Stalinism, so Italian fascism was - say its defenders - light years away from the Nazism with which it is so often confused. Mussolini had been in power for 16 years before, under German pressure, he passed the Race Laws. Italians are so humane, say the sanguine, that they present any -ism with a human face.
There are, paradoxically, also political reasons for optimism. Berlusconi's government is very far from a one-party state. Funnily enough, the rightwingers he has gathered around him are mutually self-contradictory. The National Alliance is a nationalistic party draped in the tricolour. The Northern League, the other major force in Berlusconi's coalition, abhors the very notion of the Italian state. It constantly invokes, instead, the country of Padania and its green and white flag (Padus was the Latin name for the river Po and so Padania implies the north of the country from Turin to Venice, the very top of the Italian boot). Add to that the fact that, in the south, Berlusconi relied on the support of the Movement for Autonomies, a sort of coalition of devolutionists. It is all a far cry from the fatherland as symbolised by a fascis, a bundle of birch rods and an axe wrapped in a ribbon. If anything, Bossi is desperately trying to undo the ribbon and chuck the sticks asunder.
Many Italians think that foreigners getting uppity about a return of fascism are missing the point. Mussolini, they say, has been Disneyfied. It might not be very tasteful, but the cottage industry surrounding the il mascellone (Big Jaw) is just that. It is small fry. To equate the survival of the DVX Duce forest north of Rome with living fascism is as absurd as a foreigner seeing the club-wielding Cerne Abbas giant and assuming that all Brits were cavemen. Architecture from the Ventennio, Mussolini's two-decade rule, is everywhere. It is simply a part of the topography, nothing more.
There was a rather beautiful cartoon published in the leftwing Liberazione newspaper a few days ago. It showed a woman draped in a tricolour walking around a ring. "Italy goes right" said the punchline, implying that Italy goes right so regularly that it actually just goes round in circles. It is not very optimistic, but it might be the best image of what is happening today in Italy.
· Tobias Jones is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy and of Utopian Dreams, both published by Faber & Faber
