Benito Mussolini is once again the poster boy of Italian politics, says
robert fox |
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Against a background of economic delusion and concern about immigration, there is a new shift towards populism in European politics. In Denmark, the only party of the ruling coalition to actually gain a seat in November's election was the Denmark People's Party, which campaigns on immigration control. Elsewhere in Scandinavia and the Benelux countries, racist parties are gaining ground. In Germany, the neo-Nazi NPD party is winning increasing support in poor rural areas.
But it is in Italy, always one of the great laboratories of European politics, where populism has become the new rallying cry.
A poster has appeared for Forza Nuova - a right-wing party shamelessly cashing in on the martial imagery of Mussolini's Fascism - which uses a photo montage of Amanda Knox and Rudy Hermann Guede, the two foreigners
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The polls say the next election will be a shoo-in for Berlusconi and no doubt for some unsavoury allies to the right |
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being held by police over the recent murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, to sell the line 'Against all drugs'.
The FN calls for a return to the old values of 'God, Fatherland and Family' and an end to distinctions between hard and soft drugs. It disapproves of inter-racial sex and demands the "immediate repatriation by force of every foreigner who is not in Italy for work useful to our nation". The echoes of the old regime are obvious.
Forza Nuova doesn't yet have a great draw at the polls - though it does have plenty of adherents prepared to use violence on Italy's football terraces - but two mainstream parties have been launched in Italy in the past six weeks that are also making populist appeals. Both are borrowing the slogans and appeals to fear of the more extremist parties, though dressing them up with greater subtlety - the great trick of Mussolini, who knew how to press the populist buttons and maintain the illusion of democracy.
The new Democratic Party is an amalgamation of the two leading parties at  |
Europe's modern Fascists
The Fascist focus of the Islamo-phobes
