Is Fascism really back in Italy?

Abstract

Italy was the homeland of Fascism (proper noun). From 1922 until 1943, a self-described Fascist regime ruled the country. As a result of the national election on 25 September 2022, a political party with its roots in that Fascism became the dominant partner in a far-right coalition national government. Does this signify the full-fledged return of the past for Italy's future or does it represent something else again? As Umberto Eco once claimed, Fascism was an unstable cocktail of beliefs and practices associated increasingly with the whims of one man: Benito Mussolini. From this perspective, unlike Nazism, which can be plausibly defined neatly in terms of its central obsessions with biological races and anti-semitism, Fascism has lent itself to multiple interpretations. Hence, fascism (common noun) has become a term used in a myriad of ways to describe a range of political ideologies, albeit all anchored to the singular significance of national identities at the expense of much else. I challenge Eco's claim that Fascism had no elemental ideological core and then trace the history of Fascism in Italy and how its memory lived on after the demise of the regime most intimately connected to it. I then turn to recent Italian politics and what the changed historical-geographical context of the times suggests about which elements, if any, of the original Fascism can be expected to re-emerge under the new regime. I end with the conclusion that whatever “fascism” does presently emerge in Italy will be unlike the original version. In fact, most of the core of what branded the original Fascism looks mostly irreproducible in contemporary Italy.