A banner emblazoned with the words
MILAN — A banner emblazoned with the words “Honor to Mussolini,” unfurled just steps from the Milan piazza where the fascist dictator’s body was hung upside down after his 1945 execution. One-armed salutes and fascist slogans shouted at protests. Italy’s right-wing interior minister skipping commemorations for the 74th anniversary of the country’s liberation from Nazi occupation.
Fascist symbols, rhetoric and salutes — long a public taboo — have made their way out of the hooligan sections of soccer stadiums and into Italian streets in the run-up to this week’s European Parliament elections.
The leader of the right-wing party leading in the Italian polls, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, has faced criticism for perceived complacency toward neo-fascist extremists in his bid to see his once regionally based League party finish No. 1 in Italy, and perhaps Europe, when Italians vote Sunday.
Salvini, who has attracted the admiration of European far-right leaders for his anti-immigrant, anti-Islam stances, makes a show of dismissing extremist labels and the existence of fascist ideology on the Italian political spectrum.
“In this piazza, there are no extremists. There are no racists. There are no fascists,” Salvini declared to a crowd of thousands gathered last weekend for a campaign rally of European populists, including far-right leaders from France and Germany.
But his words belie the resurgence of neo-fascist groups emboldened on the sidelines of a European election campaign that is shaping up into a contest between Europe’s traditional political powerhouses and euroskeptic right-wing populists campaigning to restore control over a range of issues to the EU’s 28 member states. And many are putting at least part of the blame on Salvini for underplaying or even appearing to encourage Italy’s fringe extremist parties and their antics.
Salvini drew criticism last month when he skipped April 25 Liberation Day commemorations in Rome marking Italy’s 1945 liberation from the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini, who spent the last two years of World War II overseeing a puppet republic in Nazi-occupied northern Italy.
Just a day earlier, Salvini had dismissed the unfurling of the “Honor Mussolini” banner in Milan by dozens of “ultra” fans from Rome’s Lazio soccer team — known for their neo-fascist allegiances — as just the work of “idiots.
