Fascism Gets A Face Lift In Italy As Party Sheds Image But Nostalgia For The Movement’s Neo-Fascist Heritage Runs High

Italy’s onetime neo-fascist party began life in the mainstream Saturday, blessed by leading politicians a day after erasing Benito Mussolini’s legacy.

A blaze of laser lights inscribed the party’s new name, Alleanza Nazionale - National Alliance - on a huge backdrop during a congress in Fiuggi, a spa town east of Rome.

Silvio Berlusconi, the former premier and media tycoon, clapped along with other emissaries from across the political spectrum in the midnight-blue convention tent. “Italia, Italia,” chanted the nearly 2,500 delegates.

“Today the long, interminable post-war period is over,” said party leader Gianfranco Fini. “The popular right is born.”

Also attending the day’s session were political rivals: a delegation from the Democratic Party of the Left; Rocco Buttiglione, leader of the centrist Popular Party; and former President Francesco Cossiga.

The old neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, founded by Mussolini’s followers in 1946, formally became the National Alliance on Friday. Fini had started the transformation shortly before March elections that gave it a share of national power for the first time.

During the congress, the new party jettisoned fascist principles such as the corporatist system of central economic control and a call in the old party charter for “continuity” with the Fascist period. It condemned antiSemitism and praised anti-fascism as a necessary step toward Italian democracy.

But a few hardliners have promised to leave the alliance, and nostalgia among the rank-and-file for the movement’s neo-fascist heritage runs high. Some commentators are skeptical about just how much the party is changing.

One shouldn’t overlook “decades of a nostalgic and militant cult for the Fascist period or the contempt for democratic institutions professed by the neo-fascists,” said Tullia Zevi, leader of Italy’s Jewish community.

Fini’s party was Berlusconi’s chief ally in a coalition that won the March elections and governed for eight months before falling in December, when the populist and regionalist Northern League left.

Berlusconi’s rise, the National Alliance’s surge in popularity and its simultaneous reconfiguration are part of the recent transformation of the Italian political landscape.

The 3-year-old “Tangentopoli” (Kickback City) scandal brought down the Christian Democrats, who controlled Italy with the Socialists and other small allies for nearly five decades.

The ex-Christian Democrats are now the muchreduced Popular Party. The Liberals, Republicans and Social Democrats disappeared and the once-venerable Socialists split into insignificant slivers.

The Communist Party already had become the Democratic Party of the Left after the fall of the Berlin Wall.