With the far right set to gain in European elections, is the extreme becoming mainstream in Italy?

They line up in military-like formation: a thousand strong, most dressed in black, some with tattoos on shaved scalps.

At the spot in Milan where Sergio Ramelli, a far-right student, was killed almost 50 years ago by anti-fascists, a leader summons his battalion of loyalists to attention. He shouts “camerata”, or “brother-in-arms”, and Ramelli’s name, as if delivering a roll-call. And then it comes: stiff right arms outstretched and raised, palms facing down, the fascist salute in the heart of Italy’s second city, and the crowd reply on the dead man’s behalf with a roar: “Present! Present! Present!”

It’s 2024, but this has frightening echoes of a century ago. While it may seem extraordinary to an outsider – and it was staggering to me, watching it close up – it is not out of the ordinary in Italy, where commemorations of this type take place every year.

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    5 months ago

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    In 2008, Mr Berlusconi appointed her a government minister.Ms Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party bears the same three-coloured flame logo adopted by neo-fascist groupings after the war, but she has progressively shifted her movement away from the far right.Her previous rhetoric against “ethnic substitution” of Italians by migrants, and a supposed “LGBT lobby”, has softened since her election as Prime Minister in 2022.

    Demonstrators smashed windows and tried to force themselves into the building in a move reminiscent of Mussolini’s era, when the unions were attacked by his blackshirt mobs.Forza Nuova, which has been around for more than a quarter of a century, is much further to the right than Ms Meloni’s party, advocating a total halt to immigration, and leaving NATO and the EU.

    The birthday of another official was celebrated with a cake decorated by a swastika and the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil”.Forza Nuova’s founder, Roberto Fiore, tells me the party attacked CGIL because the union had backed mandatory Covid vaccination certificates for all workers.

    At Forza Nuova’s local headquarters in the northern city of Verona, the walls are draped in racist and extremist symbols, from the US Confederate flag, to those of the self-declared pro-Russian Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, along with scarves bearing the words “White Power” and “We are fascists - a call to arms”.

    If, as is expected, her grouping of European right-wingers makes resounding gains in the vote, she will entrench her political dominance in Italy and her position as a figurehead for other right-wing and far-right politicians aiming to lead their own countries.Her critics point to the fact that she has never directly called herself an “anti-fascist”.

    But being anti-fascist during democracy has sometimes meant violence, and a lot of young students killed," he says, referring to often bloody clashes between extremist groups, and murders carried out in Italy’s post-war decades.He insists she’s always condemned fascism - but hits out at what he calls “an obsession” with the term, which he claims is whipped up by the left to scaremonger before elections.That’s vigorously denied by opponents in places like Bologna, historically the heart of anti-fascism.

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