With the “March on Rome” 100 years ago, Mussolini seized power in Italy. And right now a party in the wake of Mussolini’s fascists is about to take over the government in Rome.
Italy could have a new government early next week. President Sergio Mattarella began consultations on Thursday and received the party leaders of the right-centre alliance. Already today he could commission Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia, to form a government.
It is not yet clear when the new government will be sworn in. In no case should it be October 28th. This date stands for the “March on Rome” by thousands of camicie nere, the black shirt militia of the later dictator Benito Mussolini. 100 years ago, on October 28, 1922, the fascists’ march on Rome began, with which the “Duce”, the Italian “leader”, staged his seizure of power.
It is not only the anniversary, but also the election result that casts a historic shadow on last September’s general election. This was also felt when the newly elected senators met for the first time last week to elect the president of their chamber. Speeches on the day began with 92-year-old Senator for Life Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis. Senator Ignazio Benito Maria La Russa, an influential fellow party member from Melonis Fratelli d’Italia, gave the final word. He had previously been elected chairman of the Senate – the first time a politician with a neo-fascist past has held this office.
Segre, the senior president of the inaugural session, gave a composed but deeply touching speech in which she recalled Italy’s recent past and her personal history. “In this month of October, which marks the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome and the seizure of power by the fascists, it behooves someone like me to assume the current presidency of the Senate of the Republic, that temple of democracy.”
This moment is even more symbolic for her, Segre continued, when she thinks back to October 1938 and to herself, a disturbed and desperate eight-year-old girl. At the time, the school year started in October, but race laws prohibited her from going back to school. Instead, she was given the opportunity to “sit the most prestigious chair in the Senate”. What a fateful coincidence.
After the presidential election, it was up to La Russa to make a speech. The 75-year-old is one of the founders of Fratelli d’Italia and the son of a convinced fascist. He has lived in Milan since childhood; older Milanese still remember the picchiatore, the racket La Russa. In the 1970s, when there were regular violent confrontations between left and right-wing radicals in Milan and there were deaths on both sides, he was part of the leadership of a neo-fascist youth organization. In his speech, La Russa commemorated both the neo-fascist and radical left victims and assured that he would “defend the rights of the majority and those of the opposition in the same unyielding way”.
Despite his middle name, La Russa may mean that promise. That doesn’t make a statement he made just a few weeks ago any less outrageous. Then he said in front of the cameras: “We are all heirs of the Duce, if heritage means the Italy of our fathers and grandfathers.” The fact that he completely ignored the partisans with this statement certainly did not happen unconsciously. And then there’s his older brother Romano, who did the Roman salute at a funeral procession a week ago.
La Russa tried to dismiss the gesture as a trifle. But the questions are obvious: How much of the old fascism is in today’s post-fascists? And, more urgently, are there parallels between the 1920s and the current decade?
Of course, there are no longer any blackshirts that frightened the population and destroyed the headquarters of political opponents. In Italy, as everywhere in Europe, the pandemic, lockdowns and compulsory vaccinations have mobilized thousands of dissatisfied people, including many right-wing extremists. In Italy, the wave of protests reached its peak a year ago, on October 9, when a mob of neo-fascists and anti-vaccination militants stormed and destroyed the CGIL union headquarters.
And then there is the political parallel. In his Harvard lectures on the rise of the fascists in the early 1940s, the historian Gaetano Salvemini, who had fled Italy, explained how politics had reached an impasse in the years before the March on Rome. “Politics means making compromises,” writes Salvemini, but that just didn’t work. The Catholic People’s Party did not want to cooperate with the socialist Bolsheviks, the socialists with the bourgeois and capitalist Catholics. “And so the system could only get stuck.” The politicians of the time would have simply waited for the black wave to subside again.
Even today, Italian politics is stuck in a dead end. The roots lie in the end of the Cold War and the Tangentopoli corruption scandal that followed a few years later, which swept away the old party system. Italian politics became more and more of a one-man show, starting with Berlusconi. Instead of setting the course for the future of the country, the respective ego was and is cultivated to this day. After the “Cavaliere” came the “Rottamatore”, the “scrapper” Matteo Renzi. He was followed by Matteo Salvini, the “Capitano” of the national-populist League, and the comedian Beppe Grillo, founder of the anti-system movement Five Stars. Each of them was seen as the savior of the nation for a time. But as they came, so they went.
Now it’s Giorgia Meloni. She is committed to NATO, but at the same time maintains contacts with Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National in France, as well as advocates of “illiberal democracy” such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Polish PiS party. She assured the right-wing extremists of the Spanish party Vox of her full support and recently congratulated the Sweden Democrats, who come from the same political milieu, on their electoral success.
Anyone who would like to know more about the March on Rome should read Emilio Lussu’s contemporary witness book “March on Rome and Surroundings” from 1931, the German version of which has just been published again. His account is fascinating because it describes the frustration of ordinary people, the anger of soldiers who returned from World War I and found themselves penniless and unemployed. He describes how ardent anti-fascists turned into ardent fascists. Despite everything, the book ends with hope: “The world goes neither to the right nor to the left. It revolves around itself, as ever, with regular solar and lunar eclipses.”
