cent in national elections; atrocities like the 2 August 1980 bombing of Bologna station, killing eighty-five people, also illustrated the violent threat from more militant neofascist circles around the edges of the MSI. In the 1990s, however, with the demise of the DC, the old camerati moved to adopt its positions as their own. At a party congress in 1987, MSI leader Gianfranco Fini had declared himself a ‘fascist for the 2000s’; by the time of the 1994 election, he had become the self-proclaimed ‘conservative’ leader of the new AN.
The ignominious collapse of the DC, combined with the lack of any mass party of the right, presented the space in which longtime fascists could reinvent themselves as a traditional conservative ally of the more ‘free-marketeer’ Forza Italia. Fini’s AN sought closer ties with the small ex-DC factions that had entered the right-wing coalition and also adopted more liberal positions regarding both the European project and immigration (which were now each accepted, but conditionally). This was a break from the MSI’s tradition – after all, its roots in the wartime Salò Republic and Mussolini’s rearguard struggle against both the Resistance and the US Army had imbued the party with a foundational hostility to the First Republic, and some currents within its ranks such as that led by Pino Rauti had maintained an ‘anti-systemic’ stance against NATO and European integration. In the 1990s, the AN however eschewed this ‘militant’ past, creating a socially conservative and pro-European party akin to Spain’s post-Franco Partido Popular.
With Berlusconi ready to admit that ‘Mussolini did good things, too’, the MSI’s leaders could wind down their obsession with Il Duce without having to repudiate their own roots entirely. The example of former MSI youth chief Gianni Alemanno, a key architect of the new centre-right, was telling. In 1986, the young fascist had been arrested for attempting to disrupt a ceremony in Nettuno, at which Ronald Reagan honoured the US troops who fell on Italian soil in World War II. Yet, by the time he was elected mayor of the capital in 2008, Alemanno was embarrassed to find his victory greeted by fascist-saluting skinheads outside city hall. He responded with an apparent gesture of contrition, paying a visit to Rome’s synagogue in which he extolled the ‘universal’ values of the fight against Nazism. Yet this was also a means to paint the anti-fascist element of the partisan war as a form of sectarianism: Alemanno decried the ‘crimes committed by both sides’ in the ‘civil war’ among Italians.
This relativist offensive against anti-fascist norms made progress in an era in which ‘politics’ had become a dirty word and in which the Resistance generation were ever less central to public life. There had always been revisionist narratives of Italy’s wartime history, seeking to put partisans and fascists on a more equal footing: but only after the fall of the First Republic did they became part of the common sense. This was particularly notable in the success of such works as the novelised ‘histories’ written by journalist Giampaolo Pansa. His series of works, beginning at the turn of the millennium invoked the ‘memory of the defeated’ – the silenced and calumnied defenders of Salò – as against the mythology with which the First Republic had garlanded itself.12 More broadly, revisionist narratives focused on the killings of Italian citizens by Yugoslav partisans, in the so-called foibe massacres; interest in this neighbouring country did not however extend to the far-greater numbers of Yugoslavs slaughtered by Italian troops. The purpose was a domestic, political one, in the bid to undermine anti-fascists’ claims to superior moral and democratic standing.
It seemed that the collapse of the old party order had brought a sudden rewriting of its origin story. Indeed, this offensive especially exploited the discredit into which the parties of the Resistance had now fallen. As il manifesto’s Lucio Magri put it, after the Bribesville scandal, the democratic republic born of 1945 was no longer bathed in heroism but damned ‘as the home of bribes and a party regime that had excluded citizens’; the largest Resistance party, the PCI, was remembered only as ‘Moscow’s fifth column’ therein.13 This narrative was even taken up by many who had long laboured in its own ranks. Exemplary was Giorgio Napolitano, who joined the PCI in December 1945 and embraced Stalinist orthodoxy before becoming a key leader of the party’s most moderate migliorista (gradualist) wing. In the 1990s, he sharply repudiated the party’s record, which he recast as a regime of lies unable to face up to its own essential criminality. As president from 2006, Napolitano went so far as to commemorate the Communist partisans’ victims in the foibe of north-eastern Italy, including known fascists.
The Lega Nord
Some anti-fascists did remain mobilised, unwilling to swallow the more flagrant misrepresentations of the republic’s founding values. This was visible as early as 25 April 1994, in the commemorations which marked the traditional anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Nazi–Fascist rule. When Lega leader Umberto Bossi attempted to join the Liberation Day march in Milan, just four weeks after he had helped elect the most right-wing government in decades, he was quickly driven away by protestors. The Lega Nord was not itself of Mussolinian origin: rooted in the Northern regions where the Resistance was strongest, it expressed a sometimes virulent hostility to Fini’s ex-MSI, refusing to seal any direct electoral alliance with the postfascists even when both parties were joined to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. The Lega Nord leader later received a suspended jail sentence after an outburst when he suggested that his members might go ‘door to door’ and deal with the fascists ‘like the partisans did’. Yet Bossi’s initial promise that he would ‘never’ join a government that included postfascists proved short-lived.
Bossi’s ability to shift on such a profound question of political identity points to the highly contradictory and opportunistic character of the party he created, as volatile as the political times in which it came to prominence. Its origins lay in the late 1970s, when, spurred by the creation of regional governments, new parties took form in the wealthiest parts of Italy to demand more funds for their own regions. In the 1987 general election, Bossi was elected senator for the Lega Lombarda – a force active in the region surrounding Milan – and, in 1989, it merged with similar groups that had arisen in five other regions, united by a common decentralising agenda. A breakthrough in the 1990 local elections (where the Lega came second-place across Lombardy) showed that it was a force to be reckoned with, and in particular its ability to break through the class binary which had done so much to structure the First Republic’s political system. In 1991, the various leagues formed a single party, though, in some contexts, they also maintained their own regional names.
The leagues had made their first advances in regions that had once loyally voted for the DC. Key was a first breakthrough in Veneto, a strongly Catholic region of particular cultural idiosyncrasies, which had long enjoyed an outsized representation in DC cabinets. In the 1950s, this agricultural northeastern region was as poor as southern Italy and marked by similarly high emigration, but its rapid industrialisation over subsequent decades transformed it into the richest part of Italy.14 Yet as Veneto raced ahead, the local DC led by Antonio Bisaglia was accused of channelling the region’s taxes toward an overbearing central state, making local firms pay for its handouts in the less successful south. Where Bisaglia toyed with the notion of creating an autonomous party akin to Bavaria’s Christlich-Soziale Union, some local DC cadres went further, in 1979 forming the regionalist Liga Veneta. Building its profile over the 1980s, the Liga would soon exploit the crisis of the First Republic, coming second to the DC in Veneto in the 1992 general election.
Indeed, if the decline of the First Republic presented a vacuum, some ‘outsider’ forces caught the mood of the time better than others. In an insightful article remarking on the Lega’s early breakthroughs, Ilvo Diamanti highlights its capacities as a ‘political entrepreneur’ – a force which captures and mobilises the disillusionment with some other party, before using this base to conquer a broader popular hegemony.15 Both the Liga Veneta and Bossi’s Lega Lombarda at first saw particular success in areas long held by the Christian-Democrats but where the social glue provided by the Catholic Church was undermined by secularisation. This, however, also corresponded to a changing approach to public life, less defined by unifying cultural visions or even collective material demands, as by a transactional relationship between the
