by ALEX LANTIER
Seventy-seven years after fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was shot by partisans as he tried to flee to Switzerland, Mussolini’s political heirs are back in power in Italy for the first time since the end of World War II. It is a historical milestone in the European bourgeoisie’s legitimization of fascism.
In Sunday’s election, the Brothers of Italy (FdI) received the largest single vote of any party, with 26 percent, as the social-democratic Democratic Party (PD) collapsed to 19 percent. Amid record abstention that left participation at only 63 percent, the FdI-led far-right coalition won an absolute majority in both houses of parliament. The FdI is the successor of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by top fascists who benefited from the blanket amnesty for fascist crimes in Italy approved by the Allied powers and signed by Stalinist Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti in 1946.
Italy was the country that, after World War II, had the most powerful Communist Party in Western Europe. The mass strikes and armed insurrections against fascist rule in cities from Naples to Rome, Turin and Milan were recalled for decades as great struggles of the workers movement. Yet with the FdI now in power, Mussolini’s legacy is firmly entrenched in the Italian political establishment.
This development is, moreover, not Italian but international. In France, neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen won 45 percent of the vote in this year’s presidential run-off against Emmanuel Macron; she is a possible winner in 2027. New far-right parties, like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) or Vox in Spain, have rapidly become central to the official promotion of militarism, inaction on COVID-19 and mass detention of migrants.
Moreover, FdI leader Georgia Meloni has longstanding ties to Steve Bannon, the adviser of far-right former US President Donald Trump, who on January 6, 2021 launched a far-right coup in Washington D.C. to try to steal the 2020 elections and set up a dictatorship in the United States.
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