Premier Giorgia Meloni said after undercover news group Fanpage's exposé on alleged antisemitic, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi sentiments in the youth wing of her rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party that she was ready to kick out of the party anyone who wanted to turn the clock back to the past.
The footage of some members of National Youth (GN) hailing Mussolini and chanting Duce and Sieg Heil as well as voicing allegedly antisemitic views has rocked Meloni, who has worked hard to moderate FdI and move it away from its neoFascist roots.
"Our task is too great for those who have not understood its scope to be allowed to ruin it," she said in a letter to party leaders.
"I do not have and we do not have time to waste with those who are unable to understand what Brothers of Italy is and what the great historical challenges of our time are.
"I don't have and we don't have time to waste with those who want to turn us back, or with those who turn us into a puppet.
"I do not have and we do not have time to waste with those who, unknowingly or not, become a tool in the hands of the adversary.
"Those who are not able to understand this, those who have not understood this path, those who are not in a position to keep up, cannot be part of Brothers of Italy".
Meloni went on to reiterate, after doing so on several previous occasions, that the Italian Right had long buried Fascism and consigned it to the dustbin heap of history.
"I have said and repeated it dozens of times, but just in case we need to repeat it: there is no room in Fratelli d'Italia for racist or anti-Semitic positions, just as there is no room for nostalgics of 20th century totalitarianism, or for any manifestation of stupid folklore.
"The right-wing parties from which many of us come from have already come to terms with the past and with the twenty-year fascist period several decades ago, and this is all the more true for a young political movement like ours, which since its foundation has moreover made the choice to open up to political cultures compatible with ours, welcoming people who also came from political paths different from that of the historical right".
Meloni describes FdI as a conservative party like Britain's Conservatives, the US Republicans or Israel's Likud and says that if she were British she would be a Tory.
She leads the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR) which includes Spain's Vox, Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS), which may however be poised to leave it, and the Sweden Democrats, and is a friend and ally of Viktor Orban of Hungary and Marine Le Pen of France.
Her party's flame logo allegedly refers to the one on Mussolini's tomb.
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