Italian Rightist Steps on Mine Called Mussolini

Just as Easter reflection brought momentary respite to the tumult of Italy’s born-again political system, Gianfranco Fini stepped on an old mine named Mussolini.

In context, fresh fireworks and deepening uncertainty Saturday were hardly surprising after the most revolutionary political week in Italy for decades.

Corruption-weary voters abruptly transferred power to an untried alliance of right-wing parties that have a mandate but no cohesion, reformist ideas but no common program.

The search for a new government will quicken at inter-party negotiations this week, but there are still many doors to slam, many arias to sing. In the wings are national anxiety and potential unrest among left-leaning labor unions unhappy with the election results. This was signaled by a wave of strikes Saturday by restaurant and hotel workers as 20 million Italians and hordes of foreign tourists headed for Easter weekend celebrations.

Still, it is startling that the first victim-in-victory should be the articulate and telegenic Fini, leader of Italy’s resurgent neo-fascists. At 42, he is by far the most polished politician in the power-bound triumvirate that also includes brittle billionaire Silvio Berlusconi and abrasive regionalist Umberto Bossi.

Speaking in a post-election interview with the Turin newspaper La Stampa, Fini paid tribute to former dictator Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism and a figure not remembered fondly by Americans, their World War II allies--or most Italians.

“I would say he was the greatest statesman of the century,” Fini told La Stampa. “Berlusconi would have to pedal hard to show he belongs to history like Mussolini. Two identical men are not born in a year and not even in a century.”

Bad timing. Fini made the same historical judgment of Mussolini publicly in October, 1992, La Stampa pointed out Saturday, but that was before last week’s big-bang elections. Fini was not as prominent then--and neither was his party claiming a share of power for the first time.

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Fini calls his party “post-fascist,” supports Berlusconi for prime minister and is demanding strong Cabinet representation. He respects Mussolini the man, Fini says, but rejects many of his policies. And he rejects critics who charge that he is the stalking-horse for the rebirth of a disgraced past.

“A dozen kids giving the Roman (fascist) salute in the Piazza Venezia is not grounds to talk about a resurgence of fascism,” Fini said. The authoritarian Mussolini--who took Italy into disastrous war as an ally of Adolf Hitler, imposed racial laws, deported Jews, invaded African countries in chimerical pursuit of empire, suppressed civil rights and made the trains run on time in a corporate state--was killed by partisans in 1945, to national applause. The Fascist Party was outlawed after the war.

Since becoming their leader in 1987, though, Fini has transformed Italian neo-fascists from untouchables into respectables. He breathed new life and fresh votes into the Italian Social Movement, which typically got 5% to 6% of the national vote, nearly all of it in the south.

In the elections last week that toppled centrists from power for the first time since the war and rejected a leftist alliance’s bid to replace them, Fini’s party ran as the National Alliance, a new name aimed at recasting the movement’s jackboot image.

When the votes were counted, neo-fascists had more than doubled their usual showing, claiming 106 of the right wing’s 366 seats in the new 630-member Chamber of Deputies that takes office April 15.

During the campaign, Fini took pains to portray the alliance as a modern party moving away from yesterday’s right and toward a new center, and along the way he attracted substantial support from disenchanted former supporters of the scandal-racked centrist Christian Democrats.

Thus, Fini’s eulogistic remarks on Mussolini brought a quick domestic backlash, just as the sight of a few youths giving the old fascist salute at Fini’s victory celebration raised foreign hackles.

Praising the old dictator shows Fini “still regards Mussolini as a model for the future. We all know what the state of liberty was in this country when ‘the greatest statesman of the century’ was in power,” charged Claudio Petruccioli, a spokesman for the former Italian Communist Party. The party anchored the defeated leftist coalition and is respected by millions more Italians than vote for it because of its courageous opposition to Mussolini.

Fini says his party has no links with the right in France or Germany and disavows skinheads who regularly attend his rallies. He has denounced such Mussolini initiatives as the racial laws that foreshadowed the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps, calling them “an error that led to a horror.”

“When the National Alliance was born (in January) we consigned the judgment on fascism and anti-fascism to history. . . . That means looking to the future without being prisoners of the contradictions of the past,” Fini told La Stampa.

In the campaign, the National Alliance called for stricter controls against immigration, institution of the death penalty for certain crimes and negotiations to recover Adriatic coastal areas ceded to Yugoslavia in 1947. It also demands great economic help for the south, a strong central authority and electoral reform to allow direct elections of a president and prime minister. Both are now chosen by Parliament.

As junior partner on the right, Fini has thus far taken a back seat in negotiations for a government between prime minister-wannabe Berlusconi and Bossi, whose Northern League claims 122 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, or lower house.

Bossi, who apparently has backed away from a refusal to participate in any government with neo-fascists, espouses the flip side of many Fini policies. Bossi despises Roman central authority, believes the north is being impoverished to enrich a corrupt south and demands a federalist Italy of three self-governing regions.

Fini says his time will come when negotiations resume Wednesday to transform an electoral alliance into a government.

“Berlusconi and Bossi know perfectly well nothing can be decided unless all three of us are there,” Fini said.