Italian Partisans group ANPI on Monday urged Premier Giorgia Meloni to disassociate herself from Fascism after allegedly faling to do so since she became premier in September and not issuing a statement on the October anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome, amid a row involving Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa's controversial criticism of a Partisan attack in Rome that triggered the Ardeatine Caves reprisal massacre, his more recent statement that the postwar Constitution does not contain the word 'antifascism' and his equally controversial decision to spend most of Liberation Fay Tuesday commemorating anti-Communist hero Jan Palach in Prague instead of visiting Nazi atrocity sites in Italy.
In her election campaign for the September 25 general election in which she became Italy's first woman premier and its most rightwing postwar leader of government, Meloni unequivocally condemned Fascism and its "odious" laws against the Jews.
But ANPI President Gianfranco Pagliarulo told ANSA on the phone Monday: "We are in a surreal situation where the Senate Speaker said what he said first on (the partisan attack in) Via Rasella (when La Russa mistakenly said the German-Italians killed were not Nazis) and then on the Constitution, to which we can add the non-statements on Fascism by Premier Giorgia Meloni since she was installed.
Pagilarulo said Meloni and her government "should carry out a clear and irreversible disassociation from the history and political culture of the 'Ventennio' (20-year period of Fascist rule), which caused huge damage to Italy." In Pagliarulo's opinion, "it is clear that there are reservations" by representatives of Meloni and La Russa's rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, which has roots in a postwar neofascist party, about speaking about these issues.
Pagliarulo said FdI members "come from a political history linked directly or indirectly to the Italian Social Movement (MSI, the neofascist party set up by Mussolini diehards)."
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