COLUMN ONE : A Rightful Heir of Mussolini? : Meet his granddaughter. She’s a former starlet who’s following in his fascist footsteps--right into Italy’s Parliament amid a disturbing rebirth of nationalist sentiment.

He invented fascist rule 70 years ago this autumn, and for two decades he ran Italy at the head of a black-shirted regime that ruthlessly silenced opponents--and made the trains run on time. The world last saw Benito Mussolini as a reviled corpse, strung up by the feet after being executed, to national applause, near the end of World War II.

Democratic Italy has been trying to forget the embarrassment of Il Duce ever since, but yesterday’s dictator is a living presence for his granddaughter, Alessandra. She keeps a bust of Benito at the foot of her bed and keeps his nationalist and populist ideas swirling through the Italian Parliament.

Alessandra Mussolini is the showstopper of a new right that is showing signs of life here at a time of stinging political and economic crisis. Last month, she delighted that small but vociferous minority of Italians nostalgic for ironfisted law and order with demonstrations to mark the 70th anniversary of her grandfather’s rise to power.

“Once again Italy needs a strong man,” she said in an interview. “With my grandfather, at least there was a stand, a sense of responsibility, common sense and a love for Italy which is no more.”

Mussolini, a rookie member of Parliament, is a figure of more spectacle than substance, but she is by now prominent enough to have galvanized Italian national opinion. As mainstream parties grapple with vexing national dilemmas, Mussolini and the new right may prove an improbable harbinger of change, tangential players whose contentious presence helps focus debate.

No one is neutral about 29-year-old Alessandra Mussolini: To detractors, she is a vacuous blond bimba trading on her surname and her figure. To supporters, she symbolizes Italy’s historical greatness at a moment when its national fortunes have ebbed.

On the right, neo-fascists vie with upstart northern-based populists for preeminence in a national search for a political system to replace Italy’s postwar proportional democracy. A procession of democratic governments since the war have achieved key goals of banishing fascism and keeping the West’s largest Communist Party from power. But now Italian democracy has run out of gas, mired in a 16-party tangle of corruption and paralysis.

Amid national demand for reform, the former Communists are in disarray. But the country’s relative handful of neo-fascists and populists of a new movement headed by a senator named Umberto Bossi are loudly heard.

The echoes are familiar, and they are stirring widespread alarm. “Italy is full of people who are asking themselves if history is about to repeat itself,” observed the left-wing news weekly L’Espresso.

One recent weekend, nearly 50,000 young Italians marched under a stone balcony in Rome’s historic Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini used to harangue his crowds. “Duce, Duce!” they chanted, raising their arms in the stiff fascist salute--which, like fascism itself, is illegal in modern Italy.

It was Alessandra Mussolini’s first big street demonstration, carried out by militant young supporters of her grandfather’s memory. Watching the marchers from a platform with other admiring officials of Italy’s neo-fascist political party, she was thrilled.

“It was wonderful. The people have remained faithful and are rediscovering ideals that can never die,” Mussolini said in an interview a few days later. “People thought our party was dead and buried. Instead, they saw a big rally, and some were even frightened.

“Why are they afraid of the young people who have discovered their country and their flag and the outstretched arm salute? This is not nostalgia but regrets for bygone days that have taught much about ideals and honesty and even about morality.”

In the election of a new Parliament last spring, Mussolini benefited from a national protest vote against the network of Establishment parties that have parceled out perks and power in Italy for more than four decades.

Representing the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, known by the initials MSI, she easily won election to the Chamber of Deputies from Naples. The party, headed by the ambitious 40-year-old Gianfranco Fini, got only 5.4% of the vote nationwide, but that was enough in Italy’s fractured political universe to give it 34 seats in Parliament. Bossi’s Lega Nord (Northern League) party sprang from nowhere to win nearly 9%, giving the Italian right about one voter in six.

The spring election was the first public indication of support for a Mussolini in five decades. The stiff-necked Il Duce--still remembered fondly by a few Italians--ruled from 1922 until 1943, when he was toppled from power but rescued from angry Italians by his friend Adolf Hitler. As the war ended, Mussolini was captured and executed by anti-fascist Italian guerrillas as he tried to flee the country.

Today, from her new national platform, Alessandra Mussolini is more pungent than polished: “Italy’s principal problem is how to get back the money all the government parties have stolen,” she said in the interview at her parliamentary office in central Rome.

“When my grandfather asked for gold for the nation, people gave everything, even their wedding rings. Ask now for gold and taxes and see how people answer: They’ll answer by throwing nuts and screws in the face of those who ask.”

The daughter of jazz musician Romano Mussolini, the dictator’s third son, and Sophia Loren’s sister, Maria, Alessandra Mussolini followed a circuitous path to politics.

She wanted to be an actress. In 1985, she lived in Los Angeles for six months, looking for work, and along the way picked up enough foreign-starlet English to appear on American TV talk shows.

Despite fitful help from Aunt Sophia, Mussolini managed only a few bit parts in movies and a hostess role on an Italian TV show. She abandoned the business and began to study medicine at the University of Rome, and in 1989 she married Mauro Floriani, a captain in the Italian tax police who is said to have rescued her from surfboard distress in the Mediterranean one summer’s day.

The wedding gave many Italians the first hint of Mussolini’s political ambition. She was married Oct. 28, 1989--67 years to the day after her grandfather took power--and the ceremony took place in the northern Italian town of Predappio, where Benito Mussolini was born and where he is buried. Her firstborn son, she promised wedding guests, would be named Benito.

Last February, Mussolini announced that she would run for Parliament. By then, medical school was as much history as acting and she was dabbling in journalism.

Columns under her byline now appear regularly in Italian newspapers. “With his gigantic personality, my grandfather burst onto the great political panorama of that era made up only of little men with little ideas,” read one of her recent columns. “He transformed a minor movement into a tide capable of washing away the fragile defenses of an obsolete system.”

Alessandra Mussolini was just a beautiful face with an evocative surname until she ran for Parliament from her native Naples. Her appearance on the national political stage triggered a hostile barrage from the strongly political Italian press: Just what magazines did she pose for? How was she clothed? Was she among those many students who were known to have bought the answers to university exams in 1985?

“Obviously, I pay for the fact I was an actress once. But it was a job like any other, because I never did anything scandalous,” she said. “People who should be ashamed of themselves are those parliamentarians who have really done damage to the people.”

In Parliament, Mussolini has become a spokeswoman and lightning rod for the new right--whose other major new face has become her nemesis.

The 51-year-old Bossi is a tousled, strident and often coarse populist who makes up with drive what he lacks in polish. He threatens the Italian state at every turn, calling for a tax revolt, a march on Rome, a freeze on buying government bonds. Bossi demands nothing short of a northern revolt against Rome, its bureaucracy and the Italian south in general, along with what he calls the degeneracy and corruption that rule there.

In campaigning for recent elections in the Italian north, exchanges between Mussolini and Bossi sounded more like a cat fight than political debate. Overflowing with sexual innuendoes in both directions, with nary a slick sound bite among them, the campaign was Italian populism at its most base. Bossi’s Lega Nord won the election, but Mussolini’s MSI won too, by maintaining its traditional share of the vote while government parties sagged.

“Lega’s protest is justified because it’s the people’s protest, but it’s done with the wrong criteria,” Mussolini averred. “Bossi’s objective is to create chaos, because the Lega can live in chaos. If the situation is resolved, the Lega will disappear.”

In the judgment of most political analysts, despite the popular attraction of Mussolini and MSI leader Fini, the future of neo-fascism in Italy is dim: Most Italians have been inoculated from the cradle against it and all its trappings.

Mussolini, however, argues that the MSI, standing for law and order, will profit from what she and party leaders foresee as Lega Nord’s collapse when voters tire of protest and begin seeking constructive solutions. Dominant parties also expect to benefit from positive resolution of the Italian flux.

The Christian Democrats, who have held the lion’s share of power since the war, and their Socialist allies are still the political Establishment, with the former Communists remaining as the cornerstone of the opposition.

Key to the future success of all the parties, though, are when and how the present proportional electoral system is changed.

“The current bicameral system doesn’t work,” said Mussolini in criticism of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, split among 16 political parties and broadly accused of sloth and partisan power-mongering.

“I work with the people in the piazza, where there is reality,” Mussolini said. “Here in Parliament, often there is a mystification of reality. They are not representatives of the people. They represent themselves and their own interests.”

In hopes of creating a modern electoral system, proponents are putting forth many reform schemes.

The Lega Nord, for its part, calls for dividing Italy into three federal states--north, central and south--with only vestigial authority remaining at the level of the central government in Rome.

A more likely scenario is one proposed by Christian Democratic maverick Mario Segni. Rather than assigning seats to parties proportionately on the basis of their vote totals, he wants U.S.-style winner-take-all races for Parliament.

What is not clear is whether Parliament will ordain reform or if reform will be forced on the politicians by voters in referendums engineered by Segni.

One way or another, big political change is coming to Italy. Perhaps predictably, its pace is too slow, its process too unwieldy to suit Italy’s latest Mussolini: “If my grandfather were here, we wouldn’t have reached this point of disarray.”