[Analyse] Mit dem Zusammenschluss von Silvio Berlusconis neuer Partei ›Popolo della Libertà‹ (PdL) und der post-faschistischen ›Alleanza Nazionale‹ (AN) befasst sich Peter Popham am 20. März 2009 im britischen ›Independent‹. Dabei verweist er zunächst auf die große Bedeutung Berlusconis bei der Etablierung der AN im italienischen Politikbetrieb.
»The change has been a long time coming – 15 years and more. Mr Berlusconi broke the great taboo of Italian post-war politics after he won his first general election victory in 1994 and incorporating four members of the National Alliance into his coalition.«
Dabei attestiert er dem langjährigen AN-Parteichef Gianfranco Fini, die Partei seither geschickt auf einen neuen Kurs gebracht zu haben, der mit wesentlichen faschistischen Traditionslinien gebrochen zu haben scheint.
»The Alliance’s leader impressed the Eurocrats with his democratic credentials when he was brought in to lend a hand at drafting the EU’s new Constitution.
He leaned over backwards to break his party’s connection to anti-Semitism, paying repeated official visits to Israel where he was photographed in a skull cap at the Wailing Wall. On one visit, in 2003, he went so far as to condemn Mussolini and the race laws passed in 1938 which barred Jews from school and resulted in thousands being deported to the death camps.
›I’ve certainly changed my ideas about Mussolini,‹ he said at the time.«
Dennoch sei der Faschismus in Italien keineswegs überwunden. Im Gegenteil. Zum einen hätten sich in Opposition zu Finis Anpassungskurs radikale Gruppen abgespalten, die sich, wenngleich bei Parlamentswahlen relativ erfolglos, immerhin auf rund eine halbe Millionen Anhänger stützen könnten.
»But the puri e duri, the hardcore fascist elements, will not give up. ›The National Alliance dies, the Right lives!‹ declares a flyer scattered about by one of the hard-right parties, whose symbol sports an oversized flame. [...]
Black Bands, an investigative book into the hard right by Paolo Berizzi published in Italy this week, claims ›at least 150,000 young Italians under 30 live within the cults of Fascism and neo-Fascism. And not all but many in the myth of Hitler.‹ Five tiny registered parties account for 1.8 per cent of the national vote, between 450,000 and 480,000 voters. These are significant numbers, yet even combined they are not nearly enough to reach the 4 per cent threshold to break into parliament.«
Zum anderen verweist Popham auf die Integration (post-) faschistischen Denkens in die PdL, die die bevorstehende Fusion mit der AN mit sich bringe.
»According to Christopher Duggan, the British author of Force of Destiny, an acclaimed history of modern Italy, the fusion of the two parties does not mark the disappearance of Fascist ideas and practices but rather their triumphant insinuation. ›This is an alarming situation in many, many ways,‹ he says.
›The fusion of the parties signifies the absorption of the ideas of the post-Fascists into Berlusconi’s party … the tendency to see no moral and ultimately no political distinction between those who supported the Fascist regime and those who supported the Resistance. So the fact that Fascism was belligerent, racist and illiberal gets forgotten; there is a quiet chorus of public opinion saying that Fascism was not so bad.‹«
