Premier Giorgia Meloni said Thursday that the postwar neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) party, from which her conservative Brothers of Italy (FdI) party is descended, had an important role in Italian history.
However, she stressed that she has since forged her own path and has been clear in her condemnation of anti-Semitism.
"I believe that the MSI had a role in the Republican history of ferrying towards democracy millions of Italians who emerged defeated from the (Second World) War," said Meloni, adding that "it was a party of the Republican right, it took part in elections for the Italian presidency, it was fully present in democratic dynamics and it arrived in government before the (1995) congress that turned it into the (post-Fascist) National Alliance (the FdI's more iemmediate predecessor).
"You can agree or not, but it was a party of the democratic right, of democratic and republican Italy".
Italian Jews on Tuesday protested the commemoration of the founding of the MSI by former MSI bigwig and current Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, the second highest Italian official after President Sergio Mattarella, saying the neofascist party was a continuation of a government of Fascist diehards who helped the Nazis take Italian Jews to their death camps.
On Monday La Russa marked the 76th anniversary of the MSI's founding on December 26 1946 by members of the Fascist WWII Italian Social Republic (RSI), a puppet State of the Nazis. La Russa, who collects Fascist memorabilia, said on Instagram he was doing so in the memory of his father, one of the founders of the Sicilian branch of the MSI.
La Russa is a leading member of Meloni's conservative FdI party.
Italy's first woman premier, shortly before she was voted in, once more condemned Fascism for its suspension of democracy and its "odious" racial laws against the Jews.
She has rejected attempts to over-emphasize FdI's lineage from to the MSI, while also rejecting calls to remove the MSI's Tricolor Flame from the party logo, a flame originally representing the one burning over Mussolini's tomb.
The president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), Noemi Di Segni, said Tuesday that it was "grave" that high-ranking institutional figures like La Russa, whom she did not name, had marked the anniversary of the MSI's founding, "legitimising nostalgic sentiments".
She said that this was all the more regrettable since Tuesday marked the 75th anniversary of the promulgation of Italy's postwar anti-fascist Constitution.
"Today we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the primulgation of the Republican Constitution, the affirmation of our antifascist democracy," said Di Segni.
"And yet there are those who have decided to hail another anniversary, that of the foundation of the MSI, a party which, after the fall of the Fascist regime, placed itself in ideological and political continuity with the RSI, a government of Fascist diehards which actively collaborated in the deportation of Italian Jews.
"(It is) grave that it is the bearers of high institutional posts that reaffirms this, legitimising those nostalgic sentiments".
The centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) called for La Russa to resign saying he had "reneged on" the historic break with the MSI's heritage made by former MSI leader and head of its main former heir, the National Alliance, former deputy premier and foreign minister Gianfranco Fini, at a landmark conference at Fiuggi south of Rome in January 1995.
La Russa's spokesman said the PD was trying to twist his words.
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