There are only 45,000 Jews in Italy compared to, say, 2.7 million Muslims. They are naturally suspicious of its new leader, Giorgia Meloni, who is described as “far-right” — ergo fascist — by the global media and who won such a convincing victory in last Sunday’s general election.

She and her party identify as conservatives. They have no plans, as far as we know, to diminish or destroy democracy and their political programme proposes nothing that can honestly be called fascist.

Their principal targets are illegal and uncontrolled immigration, Islamic extremists and woke ideology. They seem to have nothing against Jews. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud is an affiliated member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the EU Parliament, of which Meloni is president. Unlike many on the left, they are robust supporters of Israel.

The world’s media also calls Meloni and her party, Brothers of Italy, the “heirs to Mussolini”, Italy’s fascist dictator, who introduced antisemitic laws in 1938 and was Hitler’s ally.

It is true that Brothers of Italy, which she founded in 2012 as a conservative party, has the fiamma tricolore, or three-coloured flame, as its logo, which was also the symbol of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) that was founded in 1946. Opponents claim that this proves that their relationship with fascism is at best ambiguous.

Liliana Segre, an Auschwitz survivor and senator, said recently: “To Giorgia Meloni I say this: ‘Start by taking off the fiamma from the logo of your party’.”

But the fiamma itself is not a fascist symbol. As Meloni told me when I interviewed her in Rome before she was elected: “The flame in the Brothers of Italy logo has got nothing to do with fascism but is the recognition of the journey made by the democratic right through the history of our republic. And we’re proud of it.” Her point was that the fiamma represented the right, not fascism. The right existed before fascism, as it will exist after it.

The MSI renounced dictatorship and antisemitism, and supported Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. The PCI, Italy’s Communist Party, the largest in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc, supported the Arabs.

As a teenager, Meloni, 45, was a member of MSI. But in 1995, it became Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and renounced fascism. Its then-leader served in successive Berlusconi governments. On a visit to Jerusalem, he described the fascist antisemitic laws as “absolute evil”.

In her best-selling 2021 biography I Am Giorgia (already in its 15th edition), Meloni describes Mussolini’s 1938 antisemitic laws as “detestable”. And in a video message in three languages at the start of the election campaign, she said: “The Italian right consigned fascism to history decades ago, condemning without ambiguity the suppression of democracy and the shameful laws against the Jews.”

In her book, however, she says virtually nothing about fascism. “It’s something that does not belong to me,” she told me. “If I were fascist, I would say that I am fascist. Instead, I have never spoken of fascism because I am not fascist.”

She added: “In the DNA of Brothers of Italy there’s no nostalgia for fascism, racism or antisemitism. There is instead a rejection of every dictatorship, past, present and future.”

Clearly, Brothers of Italy does attract fascists in the same way as the Republican Party in America attracts white supremacists. What about those times, I asked her, when members of her party have been filmed doing the fascist salute?

“They are a tiny minority. I’ve always told my party bosses, even in memos, to exercise maximum severity with any manifestation of imbecilic nostalgia because those who are nostalgic for fascism are no use to us. They are only the useful idiots of the left,” she told me.

Emanuele Fiano, a Jewish MP with the post-communist Partito Democratico, who lost his seat in Milan to a Brothers of Italy candidate (who happens to be the daughter of one of the founders of the MSI), was asked if Meloni’s triumph would mean a return of fascism.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But there’s no doubt that their value system is undoubtedly very dangerous for individual freedoms in our country.” Meloni supports Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, he noted.

Yet she also supports NATO’s arms-to-Ukraine programme, more so in fact than either French President Emanuel Macron or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

While non-Italians often brand Meloni and Brothers of Italy “far-right”, the Italian media are much more careful with their words, instead using the term centrodestra, or “centre-right”.
This is not because they are far-right themselves, or complacent about the movement’s dangers. Far from it. Italy’s media is generally left-leaning. Rather, they pick their words carefully because Italians know about fascism from first-hand experience, forcing Italian journalists to be more accurate.

Italian fascism was not antisemitic until Mussolini formed his fatal alliance with Hitler in the late 1930s. Mussolini’s main mistress until the early 1930s was a Venetian Jew, Margherita Sarfatti, and many senior fascists were Jews.

The Hitler-inspired antisemitism of Italian fascism, though despicable, was not immediately murderous. No Jews were rounded up or deported to the Nazi death camps until after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943.

The Italian military and fascist officials saved thousands of Jews from arrest and deportation, most notably in southeast France, which they occupied from November 1942 until September 1943; they saved the Jews not from the Nazis but from the Vichy French.

From 1943-45, in Italy, the Nazis, helped by die-hard fascists, rounded up and deported 8,500 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz.

Italian fascism’s antisemitism was absolute evil. But as unpalatable as she may be to some, it is difficult to cast Giorgia Meloni in the same mould.

Nicholas Farrell is author of ‘Mussolini: A New Life’ (Weidenfeld& Nicolson / Orion Phoenix)