The far-right coalition of Italian election winner Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party has already started today with difficulties. Tensions between the various coalition parties already surfaced during the first parliamentary session on Thursday.
Although Meloni’s post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia took 26% of the vote, it is working with Matteo Salvini’s Lega party and Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing Forza Italia to gain the majority. But the division of the ministerial posts of the future government has already created tensions and divides among the elected coalition.
For example, Brothers of Italy's Ignazio La Russa, former Defence Minister was elected as the president of the Senate, but did not get all the votes of the far-right bloc.
Several senators refused to vote with the remaining votes needed for his election coming from the opposition.
Before the vote, there was also a heated exchange of words between La Russa and Berlusconi, with longstanding reports that the former PM had been hopeful to be elected the President of Senate. Some reports suggested that Berlusconi had sworn at the Brothers of Italy MP.
In a twist of fate, the symbolic Senate President for Life Liliana Segre, a 92 year-old holocaust survivor, who handed over the role to a neofascist.
Before the elections, Segre had called for Brothers of Italy to remove the tricolour flame from its logo given it is a well-known fascist symbol. New president La Russa, of all people, was the one to reject the call.
A fascist heads the Italian Senate
The new 75-year-old Senate President La Russa has been at the centre of multiple controversies because of his ties to neofascism. He was born in 1947 in Sicily, two years after the defeat of fascism, and has Benito as his middle name.
He may not have chosen his own middle name, but the man does have has a statue of the former Italian dictator Mussolini in his living room. If that was not enough, he called on during the Covid-19 crisis not to shake hands, but to do the Roman salute instead, a gesture coopted by fascism and then nazism in the 1930s.
The election of Meloni's colleague La Russa is a success for Meloni. At the same time, it proves how much the party and its members, which emerged from a neofascist movement, still cling to the dark and never-consistently settled past.
Moreover, according to Berlusconi, the coalition is still arguing about the allocation of the various ministries.
He expressed “great dissatisfaction with the vetoes of recent days over the formation of the government” and called for “loyal and effective cooperation to quickly give the country a government.”
