The ideology of the new extreme right that in all probability will govern Italy after the elections does not come from far away: its fascist roots, never completely severed, were strengthened in the years between the nineties and the two thousand precisely by the democrats which should have opposed the entire neo-fascist culture. Many in the democratic and progressive field have to do a MEA culpa.
After the end of the first republic there was a large political initiative that on the one hand welcomed the neo and post-fascists into the democratic framework with guilty naivety (the famous inaugural speech in the chamber of Luciano Violante which quoted the boys of Salò, in 1996, was a point of no return) and on the other hand he sought in a new presumably democratic nationalism a system of values suitable for post-ideological times.
The failure of this double palingenetic hypothesis of the democratic political field is today blatant. And it is also necessary to recognize the responsibilities of the main proponent of this project, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who made mistakes during his seven-year period (1999-2006) that today are irremediable.
The rhetoric of the fatherland, heralded during his presidency – in speeches, in the reintroduction of the parade of June 2, in the national anthem at school – has not led to a new widespread sensibility of civic engagement for one’s own national community, but has only legitimized the neo-fascist regurgitations.
After Ciampi’s seven-year period, many rites have been lost from the civic religion of anti-fascism as a social glue. But there are no gaps in politics. Thus it was easy for a party born in an anti-national key like the League to recycle itself instead as a nationalist party, and to disguise its genetic racism in a new course of supremacism; and it was just as easy for an avowedly neo-fascist party like the Brothers of Italy to get rid of even the ideological hesitations that had pushed Gianfranco Fini to transform the Italian Social Movement (MSI) into a National Alliance (An, in Fiuggi in 1995) and be considered a force constitutional even hegemonic.
The narratives on the chosen homelands always lead to this, to awaken reactionary identitarianisms. But it is a lesson that is not yet learned among progressives and democrats: in this electoral campaign, a nationalistic framework is now shared on the left and anti-fascism seems a cultural relic.