Is Fascism really back in Italy?

Abstract

Italy was the homeland of Fascism (proper noun). From 1922 until 1943, a self-described Fascist regime ruled the country. As a result of the national election on 25 September 2022, a political party with its roots in that Fascism became the dominant partner in a far-right coalition national government. Does this signify the full-fledged return of the past for Italy's future or does it represent something else again? As Umberto Eco once claimed, Fascism was an unstable cocktail of beliefs and practices associated increasingly with the whims of one man: Benito Mussolini. From this perspective, unlike Nazism, which can be plausibly defined neatly in terms of its central obsessions with biological races and anti-semitism, Fascism has lent itself to multiple interpretations. Hence, fascism (common noun) has become a term used in a myriad of ways to describe a range of political ideologies, albeit all anchored to the singular significance of national identities at the expense of much else. I challenge Eco's claim that Fascism had no elemental ideological core and then trace the history of Fascism in Italy and how its memory lived on after the demise of the regime most intimately connected to it. I then turn to recent Italian politics and what the changed historical-geographical context of the times suggests about which elements, if any, of the original Fascism can be expected to re-emerge under the new regime. I end with the conclusion that whatever “fascism” does presently emerge in Italy will be unlike the original version. In fact, most of the core of what branded the original Fascism looks mostly irreproducible in contemporary Italy.

28 October 2022 marked the centennial of the March on Rome by Benito Mussolini's Fascist militia. On that day, the militant movement it represented moved from an electoral approach to achieving power to the imminent threat of physical takeover of Italy's government. This takeover then happened, albeit with the connivance of conservative groupings, such as northern businesses worried about the spread of socialism, many “liberal” politicians, and the King of Italy. Italy had only been an entirely unified polity since 1871, with a monarchical and hyper-centralized government that met with considerable resistance or indifference in many parts of the country. Its legitimacy was never firmly established. Arguably, Fascism was the outcome of Italian participation in the First World War and its failure to deliver the promised territorial gains. It also arose from opposition to the rise of internationalist socialism in northern industrial centers and in some rural areas, and as a result of the nationalist militancy of some war veterans whose local identities had been transformed into a singular national one by the mixing of men from across Italy in the wartime trenches.

The centennial of the March on Rome now has a double significance. With the 25 September 2022 national election, Italy has for the first time since the demise of the old Fascist regime in 1943 acquired an Italian government dominated by a party that stands in succession to the various parties in the postwar period that saw themselves as continuations of the spirit and practices of the pre-war regime. “Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini's regime” (Eco, 1995). In the 2022 election, the Brothers of Italy led by Giorgia Meloni received 26% of the nationwide vote and is now the dominant partner in a right-wing government along with the Matteo Salvini's League (9%) and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (8%) (Improta et al., 2022). Of course, well beyond Italy, there is a sense of a reversion to the 1930s with the joint impact of nostalgia for a past when the “right” people racially and ethnically were in charge and a “cultural dementia” (Andress, 2018) in which the terrible outcomes of nationalist competition and mercantilist economics from 1914 to 1945 have been lost to collective memory.

So, does just what has happened in Italy augur a simple return to the past, with that country once again taking the lead in a trend that will be followed elsewhere? Umberto Eco's (1995) analysis of Ur-fascism suggests that we should not expect to see a complete facsimile of what happened in the 1920s and 1930s today, not even in Italy: “Historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word Fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism.… There was only one Nazism … But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” But it also tells us that fascism can come in various forms and need not always be packaged neatly under the same covers: “Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist” (Eco, 1995). This ideological incoherence was certainly true of Italian Fascism over its 20-year span of ruling Italy. If it initially had a modernist moment, with even strains of anti-clericalism and socialism at its outset, it eventually succumbed to a rapid adaptation to the powers that be, both capitalist and religious, and developed a mystical personality cult in the person of Mussolini with an emphasis on reviving the Roman Empire by invading what was left of non-colonized Africa.

Following on from his brilliant account of the way the term fascist has a persistent relevance because of its very lack of doctrinal clarity, Eco goes on to identify the various features of the guises in which it can appear: a cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, fear of difference, appeal to frustrated middle classes, obsession with international plots, life is permanent warfare, foreigners are both strong and weak because they are strong, machismo, contempt for the weak, every man is a hero, selective populism, and impoverished political vocabulary, more or less in order of importance. He does not clearly identify pro-natalism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia, as separable features, perhaps because he subsumes them under the other features, particularly selective populism and fear of difference. Neither does he raise the plausible role of economic austerity policies in clearing the ground for fascist takeovers. He also does not make much of the fascist obsession with uniforms and violence or the roles of irredentism and a fixation on national borders in stimulating the concern with defending “the people” from foreigners. More importantly, he underplays the role of the Great Leader as the one who can solve all problems when this seems to represent continuity across all sorts of fascisms, while having at the outset of his article made much of Mussolini's role in his own childhood memories of Fascism.

What this all comes down to, then, is that, rather like pornography, as US courts have decided, you know fascism when you see it. It cannot be expected to be exactly the same thing today in Italy or elsewhere as it was in the past. While finding much of value in Eco's argument, I would differ on his account of the core ideas of the original Fascism. Fascism (proper noun) did have a somewhat distinctive ideological core in a number of respects: its hostility to electoral competition among political parties, belief in a national mission to liberate all Italians from foreign rule, a statist understanding of economic policy, and an elemental machismo in the person of Mussolini (e.g., Cassese, 2010; Finchelstein, 2017). Eco overstates its incoherence. So, what then of the apparent second coming in the shape of the Brothers of Italy?

To make my case, I first say a little about Italian Fascism as it was, before moving to a brief discussion of how central it was to Italian politics from the 1940s until the 1990s largely as a focus for mobilization against what it had represented. Since the 1990s, this focus has been lost with a redefinition of what Fascism signified alongside a revival of nationalist sovereigntism (“Taking Back Control,” in the vernacular of Brexit) in various guises. This largely involves a mix of anti-immigrant sentiment and Euroskepticism (hostility not just to the European Union but also to international cooperation in general, except for those with similar views elsewhere like Putin, Orban, or Trump for Salvini and Berlusconi). These are perhaps the true signs of an emerging fascism today. So was the 2022 vote a vote for Fascism? The evidence so far suggests not. The new right-wing populist government faces both internal divisions and external constraints that arguably should contain anything like the establishment of a singular Fascist regime like the original one in contemporary Italy.

What was Italian Fascism?

Fascism was the Italian face of a nationalism born in the face of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (e.g., Bosworth, 2005; De Grand, 1991; Mack Smith, 1976; Roberts, 2007). A former socialist, Mussolini, the leader of the precursor to the National Fascist Party he founded in 1921, was both pro-war and anti-Bolshevik. His focus was on creating a stronger Italian national identity rather than pursuing the interests of specific social groups or classes per se. Quickly, though, he became an ally of domestic capitalists worried about the growth of socialism and looking for both foreign resources and outlets for investment. Beyond this, he believed that only a ruthless and energetic dictator could make a “clean sweep” of Italy and restore its presumed greatness from the distant past. Mussolini exploited the sense that the war was a “mutilated victory” for Italy because the Treaty of Versailles had shortchanged the country territorially. He created a paramilitary movement (the Italian Fasces of Combat or Blackshirts) by mobilizing war veterans to intimidate his political opponents. After doing miserably in his first election he cultivated groups at odds with the socialists (and communists) who were now his primary enemies: industrialists, rural landowners, and all those fearful of socialism. The Blackshirts were now unleashed in 1920 across northern and central Italy in particular terrorizing towns by beating and killing labor leaders and in places taking over local authority. The then Italian government did little to stem the tide of violence.

In fact, Mussolini only controlled a faction of the militia but he became the public face of the movement through his use of rallies and bombastic rhetoric. In 1921, he won a seat in Parliament and was even offered a ministerial position by Prime Minister Giolitti in the hope that he would rein in the Blackshirts. But between 1920 and 1921, Mussolini had transformed his movement of about 30,000 into a membership of 320,000 and set about taking over the main population centers in northern Italy. He had no interest in joining the government. He wanted to overthrow it. In the summer of 1922, he saw his opportunity. Socialist-affiliated unions had called a general strike to protest the inaction of the government in the face of Fascist violence. Mussolini denounced this as evidence of the weakness of the government. With new “law and order” supporters now on his side, even though it was he who was responsible for most of the violence of the previous 2 years, he decided it was time to seize power. The symbolically important March on Rome followed and the government capitulated.

Over the next 20 years, Mussolini institutionalized his rule over Italy by eventually banning all political parties other than his own, imprisoning or sentencing to internal exile all manner of opponents, reorganizing the economy along corporatist lines that favored big business and joint private–public ventures, building up the police and military, coming to terms with a Catholic Church that had hitherto effectively not recognized the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Italy, and increasingly pursued a foreign policy in which Italy would further expand the modest empire it acquired under the previous liberal regime, this time mainly in East Africa. The motif of building a new Roman Empire was increasingly important in the 1930s. This even translated into attempts at making over Rome as a revitalized capital. Increasingly, however, the flaws in the fabric of the regime became apparent. Many Italians remained attached to local and regional identities. Mussolini used the monarchy and the Catholic Church as masks for his designs but in turn, these provided alternative foci of attachment than Il Duce himself. The regime was also internally divided among factions favoring different initiatives, as Eco (1995) says, and, most importantly, Mussolini himself became increasingly erratic and unpredictable, particularly following his turn to Hitler and Nazism in 1938.

How did the memory of Fascism evolve?

The Second World War, which Italy entered on the side of Germany (and Japan), turned out to be a disaster for Italy. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily and southern Italy in 1943 by July of that year, many of Mussolini's closest collaborators, including King Victor Emmanuel III, turned against him. He was arrested and imprisoned. A new government sued for peace. Mussolini was dramatically rescued from prison by his German allies and fled to northern Italy where he formed a puppet-state under German auspices. On 28 April 1945, as Allied victory came close, Mussolini attempted to flee Italy for Switzerland. He was intercepted on his way by anti-Fascist partisans and shot: Il Duce was dead.

But Mussolini's legacy has long haunted Italy. Arguably, the Italian Communist Party built its reputation from the late 1940s until the 1980s partly on its anti-Fascist credentials, particularly its central role in defeating Mussolini's puppet-state between 1943 and 1945. This was important in making the claim that Italians not foreigners had liberated Italy from Fascism. It was also important in trying to portray the 20 years of Fascism as an interregnum in national development rather than a symptom of something pathological in the Italian body politic. Unlike in West Germany, however, there was little or no attempt to either publicly address the Fascist era or cleanse public offices of former Fascists. By the 1980s, not only was the Fascist past largely painted over in favor of an image of Italians as a joyful almost innocent people, as in the phrase Brava Gente (Good People), there was an increasing rehabilitation of the era as one of the benign achievements and national self-respect. So, the invasion and occupation of Ethiopia from 1936 to 1943 received little or no public attention, to use just one example (Del Boca, 2005). Rather, the degree of popular consensus around Fascism was played up and the dictatorship of Mussolini played down, except for a relatively small continuing personality cult associated with the Dead Leader. Mussolini's “big mistake,” in this popular story, was allying with Hitler. Perhaps the propaganda films that Mussolini sponsored had done their work long after he was gone. I think more significant is the line that because Italians are basically Brava Gente, how could Fascism be so bad if they approved of it? (Corner, 2022).

A more active support also lived on in a number of postwar political movements from the Italian Social Movement through the National Alliance and down to the Brothers of Italy today. Until 2022, none of these received more than 4–10% of the vote in national elections. Even though that often made them the fourth largest party (e.g., Ferraresi, 1988), they also were largely marginalized in terms of joining governing coalitions until Berlusconi brought the National Alliance into his governments beginning in the 1990s. Interestingly, most of the electoral support for this far right was in Rome and southern Italy, partly because of inheritance from the monarchist movement and of votes for local notables who just happened to be neo-fascists. Clearly, however, there has been a confluence among several political movements not directly drawing inspiration from pre-war Fascism but attracted to some of the features of fascism that Eco (1995) and others have identified. These would be the League (formerly Northern League) and Forza Italia. Arguably, they have helped pave the way for the resurrection of the more directly Fascist-inspired Brothers of Italy with whom they are now share national office.

What are the signs of fascism in Italy today?

Since the collapse of the postwar Italian party system in 1992, and particularly since the financial crisis of 2008, Italian electoral politics has become even more volatile than previously (Agnew and Shin, 2020). Between elections since 2013, major swings among parties that did not even exist as such before have marked the outcomes. Thus, in 2018, the internet-based and populist Five Star Movement came out of nowhere to become along with the League the two major vote-getters. Now the Brothers of Italy forms the core of the new right-wing government, having become the first party in votes accrued across much of northern Italy in particular. The Five Star Movement has maintained a major presence in the South and the Democratic Party still hangs on in central Italy, but absent some alliance between the latter two, the right now seems in ascendance in Italy as a whole.

Its appeal rests largely on three legs, all of which relate in one way or another to repatriation of powers and an affirmation of Italian national identity. The first is a desire to see a reassertion of Italian territorial sovereignty in relation to a wide range of issues, from immigration and economic policy to cultural and demographic norms. The second is a strongman, take-no-prisoners view of political leadership. Berlusconi and Salvini have both cultivated this image. Whether Giorgia Meloni, as a woman, can compete on this score is as yet an open question. The third is an ethnic-genealogical conception of who belongs in Italy. This leads easily into a desire to resuscitate the birthrate of native Italians, limit immigration, re-establish a traditional household gender division of labor, and enforce traditional norms relating to families, marriage, and social order. Of course, this is much of what is now labeled as right-wing populism worldwide (e.g., Agnew and Shin, 2020; Anselmi, 2017). But is it truly Fascist?

Was there a Fascist vote in 2022?

Pundits seem to agree that the increase in the Brothers of Italy vote in 2022 has as much to do with that party being the only one not in recent government, having remained in opposition, as much as anything positive about the party itself. So, it was more about punishing the others, particularly the Five Star Movement, than anything else. Electoral turnout was down about 9% from 2018 to a record post-Second World War low of 63.9% indicating a possible disillusionment from a segment of the electorate with all of the parties on offer. The center-left, if we can include the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party under that label for present purposes, also presented a fragmented array of disparate parties rather than a plausible alliance of parties available for government to the national electorate. It committed electoral suicide. A far-right party led by a woman who has consistently been around Italian politics since the 1990s and who is still in her 40s could also be seen as a factor in upping the vote for the Brothers, forgiving the irony implicit in the name. But there is still something “aspirational,” to use William Connolly's (2017) phrase about current right-wing populism, in the vote for a party that traces itself genealogically back to Mussolini. Surely, voters knew what they were voting for?

Interestingly, a case can be made that Meloni's party was to a significant degree the beneficiary of increasing dissatisfaction with that of Salvini. Much, if not all, of the vote she collected in 2022 was at the expense of the League and probably down to some right-wing former Five Star Movement supporters. Historically, most flows of votes in Italy between elections go between parties that are ideologically similar or in and out of the electorate (by death or failing to vote). So, arguably, the Brothers did well in 2022 because it had largely replaced the League as the vehicle for right-wing opinion. Since 2013, the League had transformed itself from a northern separatist party into a national neo-fascist one. I think that there is little doubt about that (e.g., Berizzi, 2021). But having been tainted by its participation in the recent government it was now outflanked by the “real thing.” The parties share views on matters as disparate as family policy (opposition to abortion and gay rights), anti-immigration sentiment, suspicion of the European Union and foreign alliances such as NATO, backing for strongman politicians in other countries, and support for small and medium business enterprises through tax cuts and favorable subsidies. They differ in terms of party origins and the greater consistency of the positions hitherto adopted by Meloni.

How times change?

In government, Meloni, Salvini, and Berlusconi will have to all get along if they wish to accomplish anything other than just “owning” their political adversaries. This, of course, is a major part of contemporary self-advertised right-wing populism, not doing much at all in office except attacking the “politically correct,” and generally inflaming public opinion on questions such as immigration and cultural change. The initial auguries for the coalition at coming into office have not been that good. Berlusconi immediately announced that he was still Putin's friend even in the face of Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine. He is also used to being the center of attention as a largely performative and self-serving politician (Shin and Agnew, 2008; Stille, 2006). Salvini immediately set about announcing policies relating to a flat tax and building a bridge over the Straits of Messina that had not been approved by the entire government. These men will both have difficulty taking orders from a younger woman.

In her first speech to Parliament as Prime Minister on 25 October 2022, Meloni denounced historical Fascism, particularly the racial law of 1938 and the overall criminality of the regime. She sounded more like a Catholic-inspired religious nationalist than anything else. There was no invocation of a mission to re-establish Italy as the seat of empire or even of much hostility to the EU or foreign financial capitalism. Meloni is also clearly on the record as supporting the EU and NATO on Ukraine policy. She has no armed militia, even if neo-Nazi and other violent groups lurking around the margins of the far right do. The street fights between the precursors to such groups and their left-wing opponents in the 1970s seem unlikely to return. Half of the government's ministers are recycled from the final pre-2011 Berlusconi government. With a few exceptions, they are mainly advocates of conventional neoliberal economic policies. Condono fiscale (conditional amnesty for tax evasion and illegal construction) looks as if it has already made a comeback notwithstanding much bad publicity. This is very much business as usual (Colombo, 2023). Italy's heavy national debt load, the highest of any EU country, inherited mainly from before 2008 when Berlusconi failed to reform the Italian economy (e.g., The Economist, 2008; Stille, 2006), and thereafter, because it suffered doubly from the financial recession and the Euro crisis, is a major constraint on government action.

There are thus real limits to new policy initiatives without spooking the sovereign-bond market. The example of what happened to Liz Truss in Britain is relevant here. Italy will need considerable support from the EU in managing both the aftermath of the pandemic and the potentially damaging effects of oil and natural gas price increases given national dependence for both on Russian sources that are in short supply as a result of sanctions following from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The early 20th-century era of inter-imperial rivalry in which Fascism emerged may well still be a Kremlin dream but that era's obsession with territorial expansion no longer matches very well the condition of globalization into which contemporary Italy is so intimately integrated (e.g., Agnew, 2022; Cassese, 2016; Green, 2017).

Right-wing culture warrior with nostalgia for the hierarchy and order of Mussolini's regime she may well be, but Giorgia Meloni and her government face political and economic circumstances starkly different in terms of government composition and external constraints than those at the time of 1922 March on Rome. Antonio Gramsci, one of Fascism's most astute observers and greatest victims, would have pinpointed why: history does not simply repeat itself; the “current reality” (realtà effetuale) is what matters in determining political outcomes (Agnew, 2019). Some elements of Ur-fascism may well be in the air, right-wing populism worldwide shares them, but simple repetition of the original thing, in terms of its central features as I would see them—thoroughly institutionalizing the territorial state fetish, endorsing the essential illegitimacy of open elections, buffoonish machismo, and so on—seems most unlikely, at least in Italy.