IS ITALY GOING FASCIST? A Letter from Rome

The following article was written specially for DIRELAND by this blog's Rome correspondent, veteran expat journalist Judy Harris:

ROME – If you had to describe the regime running Italy for the past two months, how would you do it? For that matter, is it a “regime” at all, or something else? Even such careful news organizations as the BBC had an in-house debate about over whether the government of Silvio Berlusconi (left) is to be defined as “Center-right” or “Right” (“Right” won). A London monthly defined Rome’s new mayor Gianni Alemanno as a “fascist posing as a respectable politician” and his faction within Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale as right-wing “extremist.”

It is true that a few on the far right assume that the Right’s sweeping victory at the polls in April gives them a passport to extremism, including do-it-yourself justice, which is to say injustice. Racism is on the rise, with immigrants blamed for petty crime to a degree refuted by statistics. Roma (gypsy) encampments have been fire bombed, and vigilante groups roam in North Italy. Nasty attacks on gay individuals have followed, though to lesser degree.

So is this Fascism? Mayor Alemanno (left) was put to the test a week ago when the organizers of the annual Gay Pride Parade requested the obligatory permit for a march through downtown Rome. Alemanno said he opposed the parade as too embarrassingly colorful. Mara Carfagna (right), the sexy  calendar star chosen by Berlusconi to be his Equal Opportunity Minister, chimed in, declaring that in any case there was no reason to hold the parade, Italy having no anti-gay discrimination.

But just when it seemed no permit would be given, it was. Not only was the march a fantastic success—we ourselves marched in it a few minutes at Piazza Navona—but the great fun was that a few of the trans queens went dressed as, guess who, Minister Carfagna. How could anyone accuse a cabinet minister clone of excess?

“Come on, this is just business as usual,” opined an old Italian hand, revisiting Rome. “Hasn’t it always been thus?”

The answer is no, it has not. But then, if Alemanno is not exactly a Fascist, if Carfagna is an embarrassing joke, if Rome has not yet found a new Duce in Berlusconi, what is going on?

Fausto Bertinotti (left), former trade union leader, former president (that is, speaker) of the Chamber of Deputies and the leader of Rifondazione Comunista, calls it the advent of a “New Right.” Rifondazione had backed the center-left government led by Romano Prodi, whose flop was also Bertinotti’s. Rifondazione did not win a single seat in Parliament, and its supporters have been holding agitated meetings to ask why the dismal collapse, but with more tears than explanations. Now Bertinotti himself is offering some answers, in an essay in the magazine Alternative per il socialismo. 

Bertinotti’s view is that it is impossible to understand the shellacking the left took without analyzing the nature of the New Right, whose strength and vitality demonstrated that, more than any other political parties, they were the first in Italy to grasp the sea change consequent to the belated modernization of Italy. Italian society has been “de-ideologized” by modernization, resulting in “a new kind of crisis” for the Italian institutions. Ably exploiting this crisis, the New Right is “not Fascist, even as it uses elements of that culture and its vestiges, while exploiting an aggressive aversion to every kind of diversity when insecurity is transformed into fear—and then the figure of the scapegoat re-emerges from the shadows as a shield from fear.”

Bertinotti calls this “a-fascism,” as in apolitical, or without fascism. And from this he deduces that if you don’t have fascism you are also “a-anti-Fascism, in a Republic without roots and without history,” meaning you can’t be anti-Fascist if you don’t have Fascism to oppose. Parliament itself is weaker, for governability matters more than honest confrontation in a debate, he concluded.

Put more simply, the tragedies Mussolini (right) meant for Italy have been  forgotten, but so have the values of the Resistance—the roots and history Bertinotti mentions—which have been a guarantee for a democracy born in 1947 and functioning, however imperfectly, for the past sixty years.

There can be no doubt that this third round of Berlusconi government, in which Berlusconi himself seems puzzled, is different from those that went before.

It foreshadows a different Italy for the future—an Italy that is ill prepared: by its schools that do not train young people for work, by cynicism in the professional classes, by a collapse of the political parties that held the country together for over half a century, and by a collapse in values.

Whether this is or is not re-emergent Fascism,  we are witnessing the re-emergence of the scapegoat. Just as it was for Hitler, fear of the outsider is a useful political glue for building what political scientists call a negative coalition.

It is far harder to rally people toward a common goal than to rally them against a commonly perceived enemy, be he Jew or Gypsy. For this reason the perceived wave of terror, which ordinary people here are accepting as real in their fear of petty crime, is of deep concern, even as the same people overlook the blatant misdeeds on the grand scale of Italian governments—national, regional, local—which have made and continue to make common cause with businessmen and organized crime bosses.

Ironically, at the same time that Italians are blaming petty crime on Foreign and Other Devils, Premier Silvio Berlusconi is promoting legislation that would shield corruption in business and politics, by making it illegal for police to have wiretaps unless for crimes that command a minimum of a ten-year sentence; significantly, a conviction for corruption means only eight years in the jug, if and when such a trial is held at all.

If Berlusconi has his way, phone taps cannot legally be authorized when corruption is suspected, according to former magistrate Giuseppe D’Avanzo.

DIRELAND's Rome correspondent, Judy Harris (left), is a veteran ex-pat journalist who used to write from Italy for TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for ArtNews. She's the author of the recently-published book, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery. You can visit her website by clicking here.

Read Judy's previous recent dispatches for DIRELAND: "Prodi's Contradictions," February 26, 2007; "Rome's Anti-Gay Family Day," May 12, 2007; "An Agenda for Bush's Italian Visit," June 8, 2007; "Rome's Gay Kiss-in Protests Arrests," August 3, 2007; "Italy's New Left Party, Old Divisions," October 23, 2007; "Pope Charged With Heresy by Rome University," January 17, 2008; "The Ghosts That Haunt Italy's Elections," March 16, 2008; "Aldo Moro, the Ouija Board, and Romano Prodi: New Revelations About Italy's Most Significant Political Assassination," March 26, 2008; "Italy's Elections: Viagra for the Doldrums?" April 4, 2008; "Rome Turns Right," April 28, 2008