Antifascism no longer wins elections in Italy

A city and two biographies help to decipher the result of the last Italian elections.

Pino Rauti (Cardinale, 1926-Rome, 2012) was a leader of the fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI).

As that artifact seemed to him not very radical, he set up Ordine Nuovo, an extreme right-wing organization that ended up dissolved and for which he had to sit on the bench several times.

One of them, even, accused and acquitted for his possible relationship with the Piazza Fontana attack, which caused 17 deaths and 88 injuries on December 12, 1969 at a branch of the National Bank of Agriculture and in which a cell of Ordine participated. New.

His daughter, Isabella Rauti, was presenting herself in Sesto San Giovanni as a candidate for the Brothers of Italy in the September 25 elections.

Nedo Fiano (Florence, 1925-Milan, 2020) was a Jewish businessman and writer.

After Benito Mussolini promulgated the racial laws against the Jews in 1938, he suffered from social and economic exclusion.

He was then arrested by the fascist police and his whole family ended up deported to Auschwitz, where he was orphaned at 18 and was his only survivor.

His story illuminated anti-fascist memory in Italy for years.

His son, Emanuel Fiano, was also running in Sesto San Giovanni in these elections with the Democratic Party (PD).

The memory of these two worlds, whose wound is still open in Italy, clashed last Sunday in a city of 80,000 inhabitants of the

Milanese that for decades was nicknamed the Italian Stalingrad for being the great fiefdom of the left.

Brothers of Italy, who won the elections with 26% of the vote, decided to send a parliamentary expert as a paratrooper from Rome: Isabella Rauti.

The PD did the same with Emanuel Fiano, son of that survivor, called to awaken the old anti-fascist spirit of a city that was redder than any other.

And Rauti, who has declined to respond to this newspaper, lambasted him.

“He insisted on focusing his entire campaign on the issue of fascism, of the extreme right… But people are doing something else now.

He cares about the facts, the management, the price of energy… Not the story”, analyzes Michele Russo, local head of Giorgia Meloni's party in the municipality.

A portrait of Rauti Sr., a volunteer for the fascist Republic of Saló, the last frontier of fascism in 1943, presides over the new party headquarters.

“The future is in the roots”, reads the poster.

Rauti was an idealist, he believed that the MSI should recover the revolutionary and anti-bourgeois spirit that he had lost with Giorgio Almirante, his great opponent at the head of the party leadership.

He was a journalist and a great reader of Julius Evola, which inspired the magazine that he would found and call

and Rauti's idea of ​​fascism looked towards the street.

But his roots, as he would say, were planted in a political system that marked the tragic destiny of people like Nedo Fiano.

But all these issues have not had any kind of impact on elections, not even at the national level, which have been seen as a greater threat outside of Italy than in the country itself.

The PD leader, Enrico Letta, tried to ride that idea with a campaign of reds against blacks (literally), but also failed.

“It was a different climate.

Rauti responded to a certain time.

And those times have passed,” insists Russo.

Michele Russo, responsible for the Brothers of Italy in Sesto San Giovanni.Carlo Cozzoli

The small town, around which companies such as Pirelli, Campari or the giant Falk foundry were built, was losing population and has received in recent years a large number of immigrants from Arab countries (17% of the census).

In Sesto San Giovanni there are no more factories or workers.

But there was a time when the workers entered the factory at a military pace while the children paraded two by two to school, in the same industrial complex.

It was the time when Sesto San Giovanni was the manufacturing engine of Lombardy (northern Italy) and the headquarters of the left and its union branches.

The Italian Stalingrad, as it has always been called, resisted fascism more than anyone else and sparked the most notorious protests.

To speak of a red fiefdom would be an understatement.

But five years ago

for the first time since the end of World War II, the left lost the elections and left the municipality in the hands of the coalition formed by Forza Italia, Liga Norte and Hermanos de Italia.

A symbol, along with other places like Genoa, of the infiltration of the right in the Italian red belt.

It was just the beginning of a change heralding Sesto's lab.

Fiano himself has personally experienced this theory, which confirms the failure of anti-fascist rhetoric in these elections.

“A lot of time has passed and, as in all historical phases, the social and economic question prevails over principles.

People in the markets asked me about the bills, not about Rauti's father's fascism.

There is an economic crisis that prevails and hits the young generations.

And principles take a backseat,” he notes.

Fiano also suspects that Rauti's election as a candidate, two days after the PD handed over the lists, was no accident.

“They wanted to humiliate a territory that has been very left-wing for a while.

For me it was like a revenge, but I have a story impulse that is higher than reality.

The presence of my father's memory is stronger than the rational analysis of much of what happens.

Do I regret having introduced myself?

No. Someone has to defend certain values”, he claims.

The feeling in Italy is that nothing will really change.

Hardly anyone expects anything in politics to work: for better or for worse.

The ideological battle, furthermore, takes on less and less electoral meaning.

The historian and writer Ernesto Galli della Loggia believes that the left has abused the anti-fascist flag for years.

“Now it no longer has great electoral value, as has been seen.

Although that point of view continues to be underlined in the media.

For a long time the left has accused any rival further to the right of being fascist.

It even happened with the Christian Democracy: and in the end it is like the fable of Peter and the wolf”.

A man walks down a street in Sesto San Giovanni.Carlo Cozzoli

Sesto San Giovanni is also useful to know the profile of the voter of Brothers of Italy, a transversal party where 30% of its voters come from the working world and another 30% from the business world.

Antonio Noto, president of Noto Sondaggi and author of RAI's accurate electoral polls, believes that it is a de-ideologized vote and that issues such as the party's post-fascist heritage have had no weight.

“Only 6% of the vote received comes from that world.

The other 19% (the party has achieved 26%), comes from other orientations”, Noto points out.

Some come from the League electorate in the north;

another of the former voters of the 5 Star Movement and of those who did not go to vote in the last elections.

In addition, the voter of Brothers of Italy is between 34 and 60 years old, approximately.

The problem for Meloni's party, Noto believes,

is now to solidify all that vow.

“It is the challenge of the new parties.

It is a new electorate, still not very faithful.

Voters who want it all and right now.

And that is Meloni's bet, to satisfy his demands quickly.

They have not voted for it because of ideology, but because they think it can change the quality of life for Italians”, insists Noto.

The general elections have gone a step further than the last municipal ones.

And many League voters, as in most parts of northern Italy, have gone over to Meloni's party.

Also some of the left, like Aldo (he does not want to give his last name), a 51-year-old bus driver.

He lives in one of the peripheral areas of the municipality, plagued for years by unemployment, social conflicts due to poorly managed immigration and lack of maintenance.

“I voted for the PD, but they stopped representing me.

I didn't feel heard, they abandoned us.

And one day I listened to Meloni, and he impressed me.

She is sincere and does what she says.

far right?

Fascism?

I care about the facts, not a past that I didn't even live through."

A man, sitting on a street in Sesto San Giovanni.Carlo Cozzoli

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