Italy​ is often thought of as a political laboratory, anticipating events in other countries: fascism in the 1920s; the showman-businessman turned politician in the 1990s; populism in the 2010s. Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of pundits and, increasingly, politicians, it suggests that the far right can become more moderate when in power. Both views are misleading. While Meloni has proved to be shrewd on the national and the international stage, she is also operating in a country where the normalisation of the far right has been advancing for decades.

Italy after the Second World War had a unique political landscape. It was home to both the most powerful communist party in Western Europe and the most successful right-wing parties that openly identified with a fascist forebear. Communists were always excluded from power at national level, but the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), formed in 1946, was also outside the arco costituzionale. (In fact, a capacious reading of the 1948 constitution, which prohibited the refounding of the Fascist Party, could have resulted in the MSI being banned.) It brought together Italians nostalgic for fascism – whether for the early days of fighting or the paternalist modernisation drives of the 1930s – as well as those mourning the abolition of the monarchy following a referendum in 1946. The party’s flame symbol was widely understood as referring to the eternal fiamma above Mussolini’s sarcophagus in his home town of Predappio. The letters MSI could be read as M for Mussolini followed by ‘sì!’, as an abbreviation of his name, or as an allusion to the puppet regime set up by the Nazis after 1943 and nominally led by him: the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, better known as the Republic of Salò. The MSI’s founder, Giorgio Almirante, was a veteran of Salò and editorial secretary of Difesa della Razza during the ventennio, the twenty dark years of fascism.

In the 1950s MSI leaders, pursuing the strategy of inserimento, tried to present the movement as a legitimate partner for other parties. The Christian Democrats, who were in government continuously from 1948 until the early 1990s, relied on its support only once, in 1960, prompting widespread protests that forced the resignation of the prime minister, Fernando Tambroni. The postwar anti-fascist consensus seemed to hold across the major political divides, but the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s led to the collapse of what is now called the First Republic. The only parties left untainted were those that had been excluded from government: the MSI and the successors to the Communist Party, which had been dissolved in 1991. By that time, a dapper young man, Gianfranco Fini, had replaced Almirante as leader of the MSI. Fini promised to rejuvenate ‘fascism for the year 2000’, which didn’t stop Berlusconi from endorsing him when he ran for mayor of Rome in 1993. This was the first and, in retrospect, decisive stage in the normalisation of the Italian far right. Berlusconi soon decided to form his own party, Forza Italia, conceived by his companies’ marketing departments and modelled on a football supporters’ club – a move motivated, above all, by his desire to use public office to keep himself out of prison.

An unlikely alliance brought Berlusconi to power in 1994. In the north he partnered with the secessionist Lega Nord, whose founder, Umberto Bossi, said that it was ‘the party of those seeking to continue the partisans’ struggle of liberation against the partitocracy. Never with the fascists!’ In the south he partnered with the MSI, the fascists Bossi condemned. Berlusconi’s government lasted just eight months, but the missini had been brought into the system for good. In 1995 they renamed themselves the Alleanza Nazionale. The AN’s strategy was to distance itself from the ventennio while simultaneously trying to discredit the postwar anti-fascist consensus (as so often, the right portrayed itself as a victim – in this instance of self-righteous communists, or what Meloni today calls the ‘anti-Italian left’). Fini was still prone to making occasional statements such as ‘Berlusconi will have to work hard to prove that he can make history like Mussolini.’ But he stopped addressing people as camerata and announced that his party was not neofascist, but post-fascist – like all Italians, he said, since fascism constituted their collective heritage.