Full text of DOI:10.1093/pa/53.3.469

Italy: The Extreme Right Comes in from the Cold
BY JAMES L. NEWELL
The single most significant development on the extreme right of Italian
politics in the last ten years has been the Italian Social Movement’s
(MSI’s) emergence from the political ghetto to which it had been
confined since it was founded in 1946. In other words, having long
been regarded by most other significant actors within the Italian party
system as a pariah with which they would have nothing to do, the main
party of the far-right has since late 1993 acquired the status of
acceptable coalition partner. The new legitimacy, or what is often
quaintly referred to as the ‘customs clearance’ (sdoganamento) accorded
to the party, has been bound up on its part with serious efforts,
including a change of name to National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale),
to present a more moderate face to the world. Yet there remain fears
that this more moderate face is just that—and that behind it there
continue to lurk more radical anti-system tendencies and aspirations.
And one of the most significant consequences of the sdoganamento has
been that it has spawned a small, but potentially disruptive, new party
of the extreme right, the Tricoloured Flame (FiammaTricolore). This
article considers how these changes have come about and what their
implications are for the Italian political system as a whole.
Dilemmas of the Italian Social Movement
Fears that Italian neo-fascism’s apparent shift to mainstream politics
may hide a more radical agenda reflect the shifting and ambiguous
character of the MSI’s official pronouncements on the Fascist experience
and on Italy’s postwar political institutions which had always been
typical of the party. This, in turn, had been due to the fact that,
throughout its history, the party’s leadership faced a fundamental
strategic dilemma. On the one hand, it was founded by survivors of
Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic who wished to keep alive the
political traditions deriving from the Fascist experience. In effect, party
membership represented one of two possible choices for these people,
given that epurazione in the war’s immediate aftermath and the consti-
tutional ban on reviving the Fascist party later made it impossible to
operate ‘in the light of day’. Under the circumstances, they could either
opt for clandestinity or adopt a more or less heavy disguise and wait
for better times. Therefore, the MSI had built into its genetic code
opposition to liberal democracy in general and to the liberal-democratic
institutions which had put the seal on Fascism’s destruction in particu-
Ą Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government 2000
Parliamentary Affairs (2000), 53, 469–485

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lar. This, however, ensured that it would continue to be denied legiti-
macy by the other actors in the postwar political system and thus find
it extremely difficult to extend its bases of support beyond the fringes
to what might otherwise have been its natural constituency of the
conservative middle class. On the other hand, since the party was a
vehicle for perpetuating the fascist political tradition, and since this
tradition would remain alive whatever the choices of the MSI’s leaders
(as was clearly shown in the aftermath of the 1976 election: see below),
any attempt at representing its choice to operate according to the rules
of liberal democracy as more than a purely pragmatic commitment was
liable to mean its being abandoned for more reliable far-right vehicles
by those who would see it as having lost its raison d’ eˆ tre. So the history
of the party can to a significant degree be viewed as a history of
oscillations between attempts to overcome its isolation by de-emphasis-
ing its anti-system ambitions and phases of re-radicalisation, the failures
of each providing the catalysts for the swing back to the other.
Initially, circumstances seemed rather favourable to the fledgling
party. With the expulsion of the Communists from the postwar anti-
fascist coalition government in May 1947, just five months after the
MSI was founded; with the rapid onset of the Cold War, and with
relations between the two largest parties, the Communists and the
Christian Democrats, increasingly bitter (forcefully symbolised in the
1948 ‘Christ versus Communism’ elections), there seemed to be the
possibility that the MSI could avoid isolation through acceptance as an
ally of the Christian Democrats in an anti-communist crusade. This
idea had sympathisers in the Vatican; cooperation between the two
parties was taking place here and there at local level, and the MSI was
acquiring authority from its modest but not insignificant electoral
performances: 2% and 6% at the general elections of 1948 and 1953
respectively, with even better performances at local level. These results
enhanced the party’s prospects. Indicating the size of the following it
could command, they removed once and for all the risk that the
authorities might move to shut it down. Showing that its voting support
was concentrated in the South, they increased the influence within the
party of those most in favour of the attempt to make the MSI an
attractive ally through a strategy of moderation: the fascism that
appealed in the (strongly traditional and hierarchical) South was not
the ‘fascism-as-movement’ of social reform, revolution and anti-capital-
ism but the ‘fascism-as-regime’ of order, authority and conservatism.
Attempts during the 1950s to gain acceptance as a legitimate political
interlocutor became known as ‘the long march through the institutions’,
a march whose progress came to an abrupt halt in 1960. It began in
1
950 with the proposal launched by party secretary De Marsanich for
a unity-of-action pact of parties of the right. The Monarchists were
happy to take up the offer, but they were a declining force (from 7% in
1953, their share of the Chamber of Deputies vote fell to 2% at the

Extreme Right in Italy
471
general election ten years later, and after 1972 they disappeared alto-
gether) and in any event joint action with them gave rise to dissent
within the MSI because of the King’s role in bringing down Mussolini
in 1943. The Liberals refused the offer. They were a party which
combined an aggressive espousal of free-market principles in economics,
with authoritarianism in politics. But although the Liberals had
attempted to compromise with Fascism (before being suppressed by it),
and although many of the high bourgeois circles with which the Liberals
had links had collaborated with Fascism, the party had nothing to gain
from a deal with the MSI. Anti-fascism was too central a part of Italy’s
postwar political consensus for a small, governing-oriented party like
the Liberals to be able safely to reach any kind of agreement on their
own with fascism’s heirs. Greater headway seemed at first to be made
through overtures to the Christian Democrats after Michelini became
party secretary in 1954. Although no formal agreement emerged, the
MSI was accorded some of the legitimacy it wanted when the Christian
Democrats agreed to accept its parliamentary votes to confirm the Zoli
government in 1957. This was mainly because of the predominance
within the Christian Democratic party of those who felt that the threat
posed by the MSI to its right flank was best dealt with by a slow process
of integration. They believed that drawing the MSI into the game of
parliamentary power-broking, offering it a role in making and unmak-
ing coalitions, could make the MSI respectable. By thus robbing the
MSI of its distinct identity, the Christian Democrats might weaken it
organisationally and electorally. But in 1960 this strategy came to an
end as the MSI fell victim to a more complex power game. In March a
Christian Democratic government under Tambroni took office thanks
to the support of an MSI whose votes were decisive. The government
then authorised the MSI to hold its national congress in Genoa, a city
that had been a centre of Resistance activity. Serious rioting broke out,
forcing the government to resign. It also confirmed that Christian
Democratic reliance on the MSI to sustain it in office was politically
unfeasible, thereby strengthening those who argued for an alternative
solution to the Christian Democrats’ retention of power, namely
through an opening to the Socialists. The MSI, thereby, was
unceremoniously chased back into its political ghetto.
Not surprisingly, this failure of ‘insertionism’ meant that the sub-
sequent period in the party’s history was marked by internal dissent
and the revival of more radical influences. For the followers of Michel-
ini, the MSI had decided to confine itself to parliamentary methods of
struggle by the very act of establishing itself as a political party in 1946;
for followers of the ‘fascism-as-movement’ tendency, a belief in democ-
racy was ‘not in accordance with the will and could not be in accor-
1
dance with the style of the party’. To activists who identified with ‘the
great historical experience of fascism’, ‘insertionism’ had clearly failed
to provide any rewards and so, as might be expected, the MSI began to

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lose its hegemony over the world of the far-right. This manifested itself
in several ways. First, for many, the failure of ‘insertionism’ demon-
strated the MSI’s inability to act as any kind of spearhead of national
revival; meanwhile, the forces of communism were growing in strength
—
both internationally and at home (advent of the first centre-left
government in 1963). What was required was an attempt to interest the
armed forces in the idea of a generalised counter-offensive, and it was
against this background that plans were drawn up for a coup to be led
by Commander-in-Chief of the Carabinieri, General Giovanni De Lor-
enzo. In June 1964 the Socialists, who had joined the government for
the first time the previous December, brought the government down
because of its lack of progress in social reform. As part of the series of
discussions for the formation of a new government which the President
is required to hold in such circumstances, Antonio Segni took the
unusual step of summoning De Lorenzo to the presidential palace. It
later emerged that the general had drawn up lists of persons considered
a threat to public security and to be arrested in the event of an attack
on the institutions of the republic. The significance of the President’s
meeting with De Lorenzo was not lost on the Socialists who quickly
rejoined the government on terms dictated by the Christian Democrats.
Second, the 1960s began to see the emergence of quasi-paramilitary
groupings of the far-right (notably National Vanguard, Avanguardia
Nazionale in 1960) designed for those, especially young males, who
wanted an active part in the struggle against the regime and the ‘reds’
but who were alienated by the sterile compromises and unexciting
routines of work within the MSI.
By the end of the 1960s, then, it was clear that the MSI was caught
on the horns of a dilemma. In the 1968 election it registered its worst
performance (4%) at a general election since 1948. When Giorgio
Almirante took over from Michelini as party secretary the following
year, he tried to cut through the dilemma by a two-pronged approach.
On the one hand, the party was to reassert its hegemony over the far-
right by adopting a higher profile ‘on the street’: every street-action of
the communists would be met by a counter-mobilisation spearheaded
by the MSI. On the other hand, there was to be a change in language
and choreography, with less emphasis on nostalgia for the fascist past
and more on the tasks of the present, in particular, the task of defending
Italy against the Christian Democrats’ supposed ‘concessions to left-
wing subversion’. The party might then hope (a) to offer representation
to all those frightened by the late 1960s waves of protest; thus (b) to
monopolise the Right, both moderate and radical; and hence (c) to
convince the Christian Democrats once more to take it seriously as a
potential political ally. In the short term, the strategy seemed to be
successful: at the beginning of the 1970s the MSI was able to persuade
a range of more moderate right-wing forces beyond its ranks to join its
electoral lists in a new National Right (Destra Nazionale). This enabled

Extreme Right in Italy
473
it to reach its pinnacle of 9% of the vote at the election of 1972 and,
immediately thereafter, to absorb the remaining Monarchists. In the
longer term, however, it could not paper over the contradiction at the
heart of its politics. If it played down the language of fascist nostalgia
in an endeavour to appeal to the Christian Democrats, its attempt to
remain in touch with the extra-parliamentary right by its tolerance of
acts of violence meant that its moderation was not believed. Con-
sequently, despite the MSI’s being able to count on 81 parliamentarians
after 1972, the Christian Democrats still refused to have anything to do
with it.
One of the reasons the Christian Democrats could do this was
because Italian politics in the 1970s was marked by a rising spiral of
left and right-wing violence and terrorism in general. Whether directly
involved in any given episode or not, a shadow of suspicion would
inevitably be cast over the MSI, with a negative impact on its image
among the conservative sector of the electorate which it was courting.
This allowed the Christian Democrats to isolate the MSI by themselves
posing as the party of order against the opposing extremes of left and
right, while MSI spokespersons were forced to condemn publicly given
acts of violence that occurred and to admit, in effect, that the party had
lost control of its more hot-headed activists.
By the mid-1970s, then, it was clear that the party’s conniving with
the subversive right had rebounded on it and that it remained without
any tangible political successes to show for its efforts. At the 1976
general election, it took just 6% of the vote (a loss of a third of the
support it had enjoyed in 1972). Perhaps not surprisingly, this was the
catalyst for a major party split, with over half its parliamentarians and
a sizeable chunk of its representatives at regional and local levels
departing to form the more moderate National Democracy Democrazia
Nazionale). The latter turned out to be a set of generals without an
army—unable to take a single party federation with it, it won just 0.6%
of the vote at the 1979 general election and then disappeared—so it did
not damage the MSI in the long term. It did, however, place the party’s
basic problem in particularly sharp relief. Its exponents recognised that
as politicians of the far-right the MSI’s leaders faced a choice which
was ultimately inescapable. If they wanted an acknowledged place
within the political system, their acceptance of democracy and the
postwar constitution would have to be principled not pragmatic, ideo-
logical not just linguistic. And that meant they would have to repudiate
their party’s founding ideology. If they were not prepared to do that,
then they would have to accept continued isolation.
Following the departure of National Democracy then, in the 1980s
the party took what was the only option left to it. Attempting to cut a
figure for itself as ‘the party of protest’, it indicated acceptance of its
isolation and, indeed, that it was exalting in it. Paradoxically, this
actually benefited the party to some extent because of the change in the

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political climate. During the 1980s, there was a marked cooling of the
ideological passions of the previous decade. The Communist party had
attempted to overcome its own isolation by the policy of ‘historic
compromise’ whereby it would seek to govern only through building
political alliances to include the Christian Democrats: failure to do so,
its leaders believed, might well result in a stable alliance of the centre
and right and a reactionary victory. In fact, a message that could be
drawn from this analysis was that in order to achieve the accommoda-
tion with the Christian Democrats, the ideological sacrifices the Com-
munists were willing to make were unlimited (how far the Christian
Democrats had to move before compromise could be struck was never
spelled out and there is nothing in the documents of this phase to
2
indicate that the Communist leadership had any answers ). So commun-
ism no longer appeared to be the threat that it once was and the MSI’s
traditional posture as hammer of the ‘reds’ came to seem the more
anachronistic with the decline of terrorism and the general ‘demobilisa-
tion’ of the previously politically active in the 1980s, with its wide-
3
spread ‘return to the private sphere’. However, these trends were also
accompanied by signs of a growing disenchantment with the perform-
ance of the main political parties that seemed to affect all sections of
the electorate. Therefore, less compromised than in the past by an
association (real or assumed) with violence and terrorism, the MSI was
also able to gain by shifting its interpretation of its ‘anti-system’ stance:
from defender of a conservative electorate against communist subver-
sion to defender of the entire electorate against the parties in general
(
and especially against their increasingly obvious corruption and ineffi-
ciency). Hence, at the 1983 general election it took 7% of the vote, its
second best performance ever.
Notwithstanding this good result, and notwithstanding the fact that
the MSI appeared at last to have found a stable, if less than satisfac-
tory, political role for itself, by the early 1990s, it was clearly in
difficulties again. At the 1987 general election its vote declined to 6%,
and in 1992 it retreated to 5%. At the regional elections of 1990 it
even touched a low of 4%. Its basic difficulty was that if it wanted to
act as ‘the party of protest’, then there were of course other ways of
expressing protest apart from voting for the MSI. Studies of voting
behaviour suggested that, apart from a hard core of voters for whom
the party’s fascist image was positively attractive, the MSI vote was
rather ‘soft’, with shifts to and from it involving primarily other parties
4
of protest or else non-voting, or voting for the Christian Democrats.
And as the pool of available protest voters grew during the 1980s (as
seen in rising rates of abstention and the decline in the combined share
of the vote taken by the larger, established parties such as the Christian
Democrats, the Communists and the Socialists), the MSI had to com-
pete with a number of new parties such as the Radicals, the Greens
and later the Northern League—contenders that had an advantage

Extreme Right in Italy
475
over the MSI in not having an image tainted by an association with
fascism. By the 1992 election, it could be said that the party faced
essentially the same dilemma deriving from the nature of its founding
ideology that it had always faced, and was thus no less marginalised
than it had always been. Yet in the space of just two years, it almost
tripled its vote, emerged from its ghetto and placed a number of
ministers in government. The next section examines how this extra-
ordinary turn-around came about.
The MSI comes in from the cold
The change in the MSI’s fortunes owed very little to changes in the
party itself and far more to the change that took place in its external
environment at this time, namely the transformation of the Italian
party system as a whole. This transformation could in turn be
explained as the culmination of three broad sets of factors: the spread
of corruption and the explosion of the ‘Bribe City’ (Tangentopoli)
scandal in 1992, change in voting patterns and in the electoral system
itself.
Political corruption had been a salient feature of Italian politics for
most of the postwar period, and its spread was facilitated by the nature
of the party system. Its tripolar format, based on a continuous hold on
office of the Christian Democrats and their allies through permanent
exclusion from government of the left and right extremes, meant that
policy competition was notable only for its absence. Such absence was
necessary to maintain the ideological consensus required to exclude left
and right extremes in the first place. Unable, therefore, to compete on
the terrain of ideology or policies, the governing parties tried to outdo
each other as providers of resources through the politics of clientelism.
It became standard practice for them to divide up the machinery of
state into respective spheres of influence, to be used for patronage
through a process known as lottizzazione (‘sharing out’). In this way
the Italian polity became a partitocrazia, a polity in which ‘influential
personages within the political parties, rather than an executive
5
accountable to parliament, are the primary basis of rule’. ‘Partito-
cratic’-based clientelism facilitated the spread of corruption by itself not
being bound by accepted rules; by thus undermining confidence in the
impartial exercise of power; and by thus undermining incentives to
remain within the confines of what was lawful. Individuals and groups
within the parties increasingly depended on illegal financing during the
1970s and 1980s. As money increasingly became the key to positions
of power within the parties, competition (encouraged by factionalism
and Italy’s system of preference voting) created an inflationary dynamic
with unremitting pressure to obtain ever higher illicit sums. In this way,
corruption eventually became systemic. Hence, when Tangentopoli
broke in 1992, it led to the parties’ rapid disintegration, not only
through its impact on their electoral followings, but also because it cut

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off a major source of funding and because, venality having almost
entirely displaced policy as the main motive for party membership,
corruption fatally undermined activists’ reserves of party loyalty.
Electoral change had been apparent from the mid-1970s onwards as,
with generational turnover, the electorate was increasingly made up of
cohorts whose political outlooks had been most affected by the dra-
matic social changes of the 1950s and 1960s: growing secularisation;
higher levels of geographical and social mobility; an expansion of
education and the mass media; rising standards of living. The effect was
a decline in the hold of the territorially-based Catholic and Marxist
subcultures which rested on hegemonic levels of support for the Chris-
tian Democrats and the Communists in the north east and the central
regions respectively, and growing electoral instability as fewer and
fewer voters cast what has been called a ‘voto di appartenenza’ (a ‘vote
of belonging’) and more and more a ‘voto d’opinione’ (a ‘vote express-
6
ive of an opinion’). Given this weakening of political loyalties, voter
dissatisfaction with the performances of the parties was now reflected
in declining turnout, growing fragmentation and increasing aggregate
volatility. The split in the Communist party, following the late-1989
decision of its leaders to transform the party into a non-communist
organisation with a new name (the Democratic Party of the Left) added
to the erosion of political loyalties—not only among former Commun-
ist-party voters, but also among Christian Democratic voters who had
even less reason to support a party whose traditional claim to be the
main bulwark against communism was now undermined.
Finally, the new electoral system ushered in by the referendum of
April 1993 created an altered set of institutional opportunities and
constraints for both parties and voters. In place of the old list-system of
proportional representation, three-quarters of the seats in the Chamber
of Deputies and the Senate were to be distributed on a single-member,
simple plurality basis, and only a quarter proportionally. Moreover,
there was to be a national 4% threshold for a share of the proportion-
ally distributed Chamber seats. Like-minded parties would have to form
electoral coalitions by reaching stand-down arrangements with one
another if they were to maximise their combined share of seats and
minimise the risk of hostile parties taking seats at their joint expense as
a result of their vote being split. The referendum itself had been
promoted by a range of cross-party organisations led by the dissident
Christian Democrat Mario Segni. Their expectation was that a move
towards a predominantly single-member, simple plurality system would
improve the quality of Italian government. By reducing voters’ realistic
choices to the two front-runners in each constituency, it would force
parties to reach agreements before voting took place and make likely
the emergence of two strong coalitions, one of the left, the other of the
right, each capable of governing alone. Competition for office would
oblige them to offer, and attempt to implement, alternative policy

Extreme Right in Italy
477
packages and would reduce clientelism and corruption in the political
system.
Initially, the new law seemed likely to weaken the MSI considerably.
As a party at the right end of the left-right spectrum, and without allies,
its chances of winning any of the seats distributed according to the
plurality formula seemed very small, and it seemed in danger, too, of
failing to clear the 4% threshold for the seats distributed proportionally.
But this threat was removed, and the new law turned into a positive
advantage for the MSI because the traditional parties of government
were disintegrating at the same time. Crucial in this regard was a series
of mayoral contests held in large cities in November and December
1993. These were conducted according to the double-ballot system,
with run-offs between the two best-placed candidates if none won an
absolute majority on the first ballot. With the Christian Democrats and
the other governing parties in full retreat, the MSI was able to enter a
number of high-profile run-offs as the only remaining viable represent-
ative for voters on the centre-right. Such contests showed the MSI as a
force to be reckoned with when it came to working out the electoral
coalitions for the next parliamentary elections. The victory of candi-
dates representing the parties of the centre-left in a number of major
cities also raised the spectre of a left-wing victory at the next parliamen-
tary elections unless the forces of the centre-right could coalesce effec-
tively. This, more than anything else, was responsible for the MSI’s
sdoganamento. In what became a much quoted public statement, the
media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi, announced that were he an elector in
Rome (one of the cities where the contests were taking place) he would
have no problem in voting for Gianfranco Fini, the MSI’s leader and
candidate for mayor of the city in the run-off ballot against the Green
Party’s Francesco Rutelli. Berlusconi then proceeded to launch a new
party, Forza Italia (‘Go Italy!’), and to ally it with the Northern League
and a number of minor formations of the centre-right as well as with
the MSI in an electoral coalition that became known as the ‘Freedom
Alliance’.
The MSI was therefore able to throw-off its isolation essentially
because the terms of political competition had changed. In the old
party-system with its tripolar format, the Christian Democrats, as a
dominant centre party, had had to isolate the far-right. For, having
made anti-communism and exclusion from government of the Commu-
nists the categorical imperative of its politics, the Christian Democrats
had to withhold legitimacy from the far-right too in order to avoid the
risk of the anti-communist appeal allowing the far-right to eat into its
7
own support. In the new party-system, with its predominantly bipolar
format, lacking a strong centre party, and with a non-communist left
pole, the MSI was given a unique opportunity to assert a claim to joint
leadership, together with Forza Italia, of the forces of the right pole.
Whether the MSI would be able to take full advantage of this

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opportunity would depend very much on its ability to overcome voters’
diffidence towards it. After all, it was only because of the poverty of
the alternatives on offer that moderate and conservative voters had
turned to the extreme right at the end of 1993 and there was nothing
to suggest that such exceptional circumstances would be repeated on
8
other occasions. The MSI’s response was to attempt to divert atten-
tion from the negative aspects of its image by launching what was
supposedly a new organisation, the National Alliance (Alleanza
Nazionale). The National Alliance was similar in conception to the
National Right of 1972. For it included, besides the MSI, a number of
other individuals and groups. Although in practice no more than the
MSI in another guise (it was almost completely dominated by the MSI
and its ‘National Coordinator’ was none other than the MSI’s leader,
Gianfranco Fini), it made it possible for the MSI to claim that the
National Alliance was a different entity to the party. This was politi-
cally very clever, for on the one hand it allowed the party leaders to
reassure activists that, since the National Alliance was something dif-
ferent, no ideological and policy sacrifices by the MSI itself were being
made, while simultaneously suggesting to voters that the National
Alliance represented a fundamental transformation, in a moderate
direction, of the MSI. The result was seen at the general election of
1994 when the party registered its best performance ever, taking 13%
of the Chamber proportional vote and, thanks to the alliance with
Berlusconi, electing 109 Deputies in total.
The culmination of the process of the MSI’s sdoganamento came a
year later in January 1995. By then, five of its spokespersons had acted
as ministers in the Berlusconi government and the term ‘Second Repub-
lic’ had become common currency. The latter referred to the expectation
that, though no formal constitutional changes had taken place, the
passing of the parties which had so profoundly affected the earlier
functioning of the Italian political system would amount, in practice, to
the establishment of a new system of government. And if the ‘First
Republic’ had been built on an ideology of anti-fascism and thus on the
MSI’s marginalisation, it seemed likely that the ideology of the ‘Second
Republic’, having been born of the death or transformation of the anti-
fascist parties, would give anti-fascism a less central place: thus the
‘Second Republic’ would itself constitute a less inhospitable environ-
ment for the MSI. The party therefore needed to consolidate its new
position of strength. It sought to do so by formally winding itself up
and merging its identity entirely with that of the National Alliance.
That this operation took place without major internal convulsions was
due, first, to the success of the leadership in convincing potential
dissidents that the National Alliance represented a further stage in the
evolution of the MSI rather than a break with its traditions, and due,
second, to the fundamental change in the party’s fortunes that had
taken place over the previous two years. As long as the party was

Extreme Right in Italy
479
successful, few among activists would be willing to criticise the initia-
tives of its leaders.
Wider significance
What, then, are the implications of the far-right’s new role for Italian
politics generally and for its own future prospects? The question is best
answered by considering, first of all, the issue much discussed by
commentators, both journalist and academic, of how far the MSI’s
metamorphosis into the National Alliance does represent a break with
its traditions—how far it has undergone a transformation of identity
such that it can now be safely regarded as a pro-system party with a
principled, not just pragmatic, commitment to the tenets of liberal
democracy. The issue has tended to be addressed by reference to two
types of evidence: examining authoritative outputs (e.g. policy docu-
ments and speeches of the party’s leaders), or research into the opinions
of party activists. The first set of indicators is useful in providing
insights into the identity of a party, if for no other reason than that
such outputs represent its ‘official’ voice. The second set arguably
provides more robust insights since these attitudes and beliefs of activ-
ists constitute a ‘party culture’ which leaders must take into account if
they want to preserve activists’ support and, ultimately, the party itself.
Despite numerous claims by the party’s leaders about its bona fides,
most observers have so far been sceptical about a genuine transforma-
tion. This is understandable. On the one hand, the period since 1994
has seen a number of high-profile declarations of faith designed to
reassure public opinion of the party’s democratic credentials—for
example, Fini’s assertion during the parliamentary debate on the
appointment of the Berlusconi government, that the struggle against
fascism had been historically essential for the return to Italy of the
values of democracy. On the other hand, such declarations have not so
far been accompanied by any explicit condemnation of the Fascist
regime or of fascist ideology which has not been in some way qualified.
This testifies to the persistence, within the party, of a large element of
‘fascist nostalgia’ whose existence is confirmed by attitude surveys.
Among delegates to the 1995 congress, for instance, 69% saw the
Mussolini Fascist regime in positive terms, judging it to be either ‘the
best regime possible’ or ‘a good regime’; among delegates to the 1998
9
congress the corresponding proportion was still 60%. There appears
so far then not to have been any genuine transformation of the party’s
identity. Had it been genuine rather than superficial, observers say, it
would have been accompanied by considerable internal convulsions
testifying to its authenticity.
But this creates something of a puzzle. If the party’s change is entirely
superficial, how does one explain the recognition accorded to the
National Alliance as a legitimate political actor by the other major
parties? In the case of Forza Italia and its centre-right allies, the puzzle

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might be explained quite simply by their opposition to the left and the
party system’s bipolar format. But this would be to leave out of
consideration the parties of the centre-left—which have also been
willing to put aside the hostilities of the past. Does this mean that they
have somehow been taken in by the party’s claims about itself and that
the National Alliance is, perhaps, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? A far more
convincing explanation suggests itself when it is recognised that a
party’s traditions and ideology may have less relevance for its policies
and actions in the present than for cohesion among the party’s mem-
bers. That is, a party’s traditions and ideology may primarily be a way
for party members and activists to recognise themselves as belonging to
a collective ‘community of the faithful’, and thus may not be interpreted
by rival parties as implying an actual threat of actions subversive of the
1
0
democratic system.
In the case of the National Alliance, such an interpretation would be
understandable. For its predecessor, the MSI, was created by those who
wished to keep alive the fascist tradition but who were also aware that
the war and its attendant suffering had made the fascist agenda imprac-
tical. The MSI’s founders were thus esuli in patria (‘exiles in their own
1
1
country’), that is, supporters of a regime and an ideology that had
been bankrupted by the war but who felt excluded by a post-war regime
whose basic features had been designed with an explicitly anti-fascist
intent. Hence for them, and for subsequent generations of party mem-
bers, embracing fascism was, and is, less about advancing a realistic
programme of political action for the here and now than about the
pride involved in remaining true to a tradition and to an identity (which
for many will have involved friends and family). That is why party
activists who evaluate the Fascist regime positively, nevertheless also
show majority support for such mainstream positions as extending
measures of social protection to immigrants, the right of public-sector
12
workers to strike, or Italy’s constitutional ban on the death penalty.
Moreover, as a party engaged in electoral competition, the National
Alliance’s goals are not limited to articulating the preferences of its
members but also include vote-maximising and office-seeking. In order
to fulfil these goals, it is obliged to de-emphasise, or draw attention
away from, its tradition. It is these conflicting goals, then, that explain
the ambiguities and contradictions of the party—for example, such
equivocal assertions as Fini’s that ‘it is time to consign fascism to the
serene judgement of history’ or the fact that positive evaluations of the
Fascist regime can coexist with the adoption of a range of positions
(
support for European integration, privatisation, opposition to racism
and anti-Semitism) far removed from the traditional ideological baggage
of the extreme right. AN thus expresses a duplicity, though it is highly
unlikely that this is the duplicity of a party that in some crude sense
pretends to be a pro-system party while all the time intending to
overthrow the system at the first available opportunity. It seems much

Extreme Right in Italy
481
more to be the duplicity of a party whose leaders, in response to the
vote-maximising and office-seeking imperatives, see its future as lying
beyond the ideological coordinates of the past, but wish to reach that
future without losing supporters along the way.
The most plausible explanation of the centre-left’s attitude towards
the National Alliance, then, is that it does not regard the party’s anti-
democratic heritage as leading inevitably to anti-democratic actions and
believes that recognising it as a legitimate actor will help it complete its
ideological journey in a pro-system direction. The centre-left, and
especially its main component, the Left Democrats (Democratici di
13
Sinistra), have every reason for this because it will help to consolidate
the bipolar logic of the party system. In turn, it will help secure the
future of both parties: For, as two parties which were marginalised for
the first half-century of republican Italy by a large centre party, both
the Left Democrats and the National Alliance have, since the transfor-
mation of the Italian party system, had a common interest in ensuring
that centre-inclined parties remain weak and in preventing the re-
emergence of anything resembling a new Christian Democratic party—
1
4
which would inevitably take votes from both. As long as the favour is
reciprocated, each has an incentive to assist in the continuing legitimacy
of the other. This explains why, unlike Berlusconi and Forza Italia, the
leaderships of the two parties have gone out of their way, in political
contests, to avoid the old battle-cries of ‘anti-communism’ and ‘anti-
fascism’ (which, after all, might otherwise have been expected to have
a residual echo with voters in view of the origins and heritage of the
two parties). From this point of view, the failure in June 1998 of
Parliament’s all-party Bicameral Commission for Constitutional Reform
represented a not inconsiderable defeat for the two parties. It had been
established at the beginning of 1997 to underpin the transition from a
‘first’ to a ‘second’ republic by proposals for wholesale constitutional
reform. It collapsed after Berlusconi and Forza Italia withdrew their
support, since without Berlusconi the proposals would not have had a
sufficiently wide base of support. This was a considerable blow for both
the Left Democrats and the National Alliance which had reasonably
expected to render their legitimacy irrevocable through the status of
founding parties of the ‘Second Republic’ which success of the Commis-
sion would have conferred on them.
Whether the National Alliance manages to consolidate its legitimacy
or is marginalised once more depends very much on the consolidation
or otherwise of the party system’s bipolarity. And if this in turn depends
significantly on the attitudes of the centre-left, it depends, to at least the
same extent, on relations between the National Alliance and its princi-
pal ally, Forza Italia. Such relations do not always run smoothly. On
the one hand, avoiding the risk of remarginalisation requires the
National Alliance to place a very high value on remaining on good
terms with Berlusconi. On the other hand, Berlusconi needs the relation-

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ship less than the National Alliance does, and keeping it going often
requires the National Alliance to take positions that are uncongenial to
it in other ways. A good example is the way the National Alliance has
had to distance itself from the judicial investigators who have continued
the anti-corruption drive which began when the Tangentopoli scandal
exploded in 1992. Support for the judiciary would be an obvious
position to take for a party seeking to project the image of a modern
conservative party capable of attracting votes on ‘law-and-order’ and
similar issues. But the National Alliance has in effect been prevented
from doing so by Berlusconi’s own judicial problems (which include
accusations of false accounting, bribery and illegal party-funding) and
by his repeated claims that they are all part of a left-wing plot to
discredit him. On the other hand, the launching of Forza Italia had
been as much about the pursuit of its leader’s personal interests as
about the pursuit of a political programme, and alliance strategies
which exclude the National Alliance could at some stage turn out to be
more congenial to Berlusconi. For example, early 1998 saw the birth of
a new centre formation, the Democratic Union for the Republic (Unione
Democratica per la Repubblica) surrounding ex-President Francesco
Cossiga, whose purpose appeared to be to attempt to rebuild the
fortunes of the centre-right and to isolate the left by acting as a ‘pole of
attraction’ for ‘moderate’ forces within the governing centre-left ‘Olive
Tree’ coalition. The emergence of the Democratic Union for the Repub-
lic (which quickly won the allegiance of several Forza Italia parliamen-
tarians as well as that of several belonging to other Freedom-Alliance
parties) thus raised the possibility of a march backwards towards
tripolarity based on a significant grouping in the centre of the political
spectrum and an exclusion of left and right extremes. Hence, although
relations between the two later cooled, Berlusconi was willing to
consider Cossiga’s suggestion of joint electoral lists for the 1999 Euro-
pean elections and joint action ‘aimed at creating a moderate alliance
which, when necessary, distinguishes itself from a right-wing which is
changing but which is sometimes seduced by the flattery of an improper
legitimation and slow to translate into political action, its own process
15
of maturation’.
A final influence likely to have a significant bearing on the National
Alliance’s future arises from the emergence, at the beginning of 1995,
of Pino Rauti’s Fiamma Tricolore representing a number of those in the
MSI who were not willing to accept the party’s transformation into the
National Alliance. Although the split was welcomed by the National
Alliance’s leaders as providing a ‘certificate of authenticity’ of the MSI’s
transformation, the Fiamma’s presence on the National Alliance’s right
could jeopardise the completion of that transformation if it took
members and voters from the National Alliance in any numbers. And
although the Fiamma’s following remains small in absolute terms (it
only managed 2% of the vote at the 1999 European elections for

Extreme Right in Italy
483
example), the potential damage it can do is magnified by the reform of
the electoral system. This was apparent at the 1996 general election
where its intervention, by splitting the vote, was probably decisive in
delivering to the centre-left at least 29 single-member seats which might
otherwise have been won by the parties of the Freedom Alliance. The
possibility that it might attract voters wanting to protest against the
moderate turn taken by the National Alliance is suggested by the fact
that its vote for the seats distributed by the plurality formula (630,000)
was almost double the size of its vote for the seats distributed propor-
tionally (339,000). In the latter, voters were likely to have been dis-
suaded from voting for it by the low probability that the Fiamma would
clear the 4% threshold, whereas in each of the single-member districts,
voting for it was a potentially powerful means of punishing the National
Alliance. Because of this, the Freedom-Alliance parties have recently
reached local electoral arrangements with the Fiamma for the regional
elections to be held in April 2000. If this willingness to accommodate
extremism provokes a return, in election campaigning, to anti-fascist
battle cries on the part of the centre-left, then the temptation of the
National Alliance’s leaders to react defensively may be as great as the
wish to push on to complete their party’s ideological overhaul.
Conclusion
The main party of the far-right in Italy stands at a crossroads. On the
one hand, it has failed so far to engage in a process of critical reflection
upon its fascist heritage that would lead it to an unqualified rejection of
its founding ideology, tending, instead to avoid the issue. Both fascism
and anti-fascism belong to the past—its line appears to be—and there
is no point in raking over the past if one wishes to engage in a process
1
6
of ‘cooperative reconstruction’. On the other hand, at the program-
matic level, the old watchwords of ‘alternative to the system’, of going
beyond capitalism and communism, of a corporatist and social ‘third
way’, have all been forgotten. In their place has come unreserved praise
for the free market, for neglected values like freedom and democracy,
1
7
for opposition to ‘any form of racism and discrimination’. The
National Alliance therefore seems to have separated past and present,
leaving the two to coexist and hoping to avoid friction between them
18
because the spotlights on the first have been switched off. How the
conflict between the two will ultimately be resolved—whether in favour
of ‘past’ or of ‘present’—is likely to determine, and to be determined
by, the issue of whether in the longer term it consolidates its status as a
significant actor in a bipolar system or is marginalised once more.
For the time being, one can say that the National Alliance is an
unusual member of the family of extreme right-wing parties in Europe.
In general, the growth of these parties from the mid-to-late 1980s could
be attributed to the growth of a right-wing version of post-materialism
based on moral traditionalism and on citizens’ concerns about identity

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and physical security. In Italy, however, the MSI faced competition
from the Northern League on much of this terrain and the National
Alliance has had to temper its pronouncements, particularly on matters
like immigration, as part of its quest for legitimacy. In all probability,
therefore, its growth in recent years has had less to do with these
European-wide phenomena than with the national-specific circum-
stances surrounding Italy’s party system transformation. Moreover, the
type of extreme-right party to which these Europe-wide phenomena
have given rise is a ‘post-industrial’ radical right party which, while
emphasising traditional morality and law and order as well as xenopho-
bic and anti-foreigner sentiments, has nevertheless disclaimed any fascist
leanings. The MSI-National Alliance, on the other hand, is a nostalgic
party of the traditional extreme right—a type which, in every other
European country, has almost completely disappeared.
Paradoxically, the National Alliance’s nostalgia makes it legitimate
to ask whether the party any longer belongs to the extreme right
category at all. It has been argued that to belong to this category a
1
9
party has to fulfil three conditions. It has to be an anti-system party;
it has to express an ideological linkage with fascist principles, and it
has to be the party located furthest to the right on the left-right
spectrum. With regard to the first condition, the concept of an ‘anti-
system party’ is, in the opinion of this author, problematic in the
extreme. Throwing doubt on the ‘democratic credentials’ of particular
parties is itself a partisan activity, while attempts by parties so labelled
to show that they do have the necessary credentials can always be
rejected by opponents as insincere. Does a party which expresses
distrust of the parliamentary system undermine democratic legitimacy
—
or reinforce it by virtue of providing representation for individuals
whose points of view would otherwise be represented by organisations
even more distrustful of parliamentarism? Leaving these problems aside,
it would still be difficult to regard the National Alliance as an anti-
system party, for the second criterion does not apply either—even
though it might do so again in the future. Notwithstanding its unwill-
ingness so far to engage in critical reflection on its nostalgia, the latter,
as argued here, has less relevance for the conduct of its representatives
in the present than for party members’ interpretations of the past. That
leaves the third criterion, and with regard to this the National Alliance
is now arguably outflanked by the Fiamma—a party which presumably
qualifies for relevance when it comes to deciding which Italian party is
located furthest to the right, as the Freedom Alliance has just seen fit to
form an electoral coalition with it. So the National Alliance must be
seen as being very much in mezzo al guado—both in terms of how it is
to be understood intellectually and in terms of its future prospects
within the Italian political system. The direction it takes out of the ford
will be one of the more interesting features of the way in which Italian
politics unfold over the coming years.

Extreme Right in Italy
485
1
2
G. Angioy, ‘Intervento’, Il Secolo d’Italia, 3.8.63.
P. Lange, ‘Crisis and Consent, Change and Compromise: Dilemmas of Italian Communism in the
970s’ in P. Lange and S. Tarrow (eds), Italy in Transition: Conflict and Consensus, Frank Cass, 1980,
1
p. 121.
3
4
P. Ignazi, Il Polo Escluso. Profilo Storico del Movimento Sociale Italiano, il Mulino 2e, 1998, p. 219.
P. Ignazi, ‘Il voto del MSI: Durevole ma Inquieto’ in M. Caciagli and A. Spreafico (eds), Venti’anni di
Elezioni in Italia 1968–1987, Liviana, 1990.
5
6
H. Partridge, Italian Politics Today, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 69.
A. Parisi and G. Pasquino (eds), Continuit a` e Mutamento Elettorale in Italia, il Mulino, 1977. They
define the ‘voto d’opinione’ as ‘above all the expression of a choice that accepts as a framework of
options, the programmatic aims espoused by the contending parties’, while those who cast a ‘voto di
appartenenza’ are voters who ‘give relatively little importance to a dispassionate consideration of a
series of programmatic alternatives. Rather, they see their vote above all as the affirmation of a
subjective identification with a political party that they regard as being organically linked to the social
group they belong to (rather than seeing the party as simply the institutional representative of that
group)’. The three-fold distinction between voto di appartenenza, voto d’opinione and voto di scambio
(
an ‘exchange vote’ given in return for a favour) became a standard conceptual framework in Italian
political science for understanding the social-psychological bases of voting.
R. Chiarini, Destra Italiana dall’Unit a` d’Italia a Alleanza Nazionale, Marsilio, 1995, p. 105.
Ignazi, 1998 op. cit., p. 437.
7
8
9
G. Baldini and R. Vignati, ‘Dal MSI ad AN: Una nuova Cultura Politica?, Polis, April 1996; R.
Chiarini, ‘La Lunga Marcia della Destra Italiana’, Nuova Storia Contemporanea, 5, 1999.
0 Chiarini, 1999, op. cit.
1
1
1
1
1
2
3
The reference is to M. Tarchi, Esuli in Patria. I Fascisti nell’Italia Repubblicana, Ugo Guanda, 1995.
See Baldini and Vignati, op. cit.
‘Democratici di Sinistra’ was the name which the Democratic Party of the Left took after February
1998 when it merged with four minor formations of the centre-left.
1
4
A. Carioti, ‘Dal Ghetto al Palazzo: l’Ascesa di Alleanza Nazionale’ in P. Ignazi and R.S. Katz, (eds),
Politica in Italia: I Fatti dell’Anno e le Interpretazioni, il Mulino, 1995, p. 89.
P. Di Caro, ‘Berlusconi: Oltre il Polo con i Moderati’, Corriere della Sera, 16.3.98.
That is, ‘uniti per ricostruire’: G. Fini, Corriere della Sera, 24.4.94.
R. Chiarini, ‘The Italian Far-Right: The Search for Legitimacy’ in L. Cheles, R. Ferguson and M.
Vaughan (eds), The Far-Right in Western and Eastern Europe, Longman 2e, 1995, p. 37.
Chiarini, 1999, op. cit., p. 92.
15
16
17
1
1
8
9
P. Ignazi, ‘The Extreme Right in Europe: A Survey’ in P.H. Merkl and L. Weinberg (eds), The Revival
of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties, Frank Cass, 1997.