Italian Social Movement
The Italian Social Movement (Italian: Movimento Sociale Italiano, abbreviated MSI), later renamed Italian Social Movement- National Right, was an Italian political party of neo-fascist or post-fascist ideology. Formed in 1946 by followers of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and above all from the experience of the Italian Social Republic, the party became the fourth party in Italy by the 1960s. The MSI gave local and occasionally national support to Christian Democracy in the 1940s and 1950s. In the early 1960s, the party gradually lost relevance in Italian politics, only to gain it again. partly new in the 1980s.
The party finally became the Alianza Nacional (AN) in 1995; A small minority, in disagreement with this refounding, then split and created the Tricolor Flame Social Movement.
Background
MSI derived its name and ideals from the Italian Social Republic (RSI), created by Benito Mussolini in 1943, under the protection of Nazi Germany; its dominant party, the Republican Fascist Party (PFR), inspired the creation of the MSI, which is also seen as a successor to the PRF and the National Fascist Party (PNF). The MSI was formed by veterans and leaders of Fascist Italy. The party however tried to modernize and revise the fascist doctrine in a more moderate and sophisticated direction.
History
Early years (1946-1954)
MSI was created by a group of fascist veterans on December 26, 1946 in Rome, and former fascist government official Giorgio Almirante became the party's first leader. The party's three initial goals were mainly to revive Mussolini's fascism, attack Italian democracy, and fight against communism. However, due to the Italian post-war Constitution and the agreements with the allied forces, he advocated that the return to fascism be done discreetly. Despite conforming to democratic norms, his ideology was manifestly and clearly contrary to liberal democracy.
MSI initially gained financial support from wealthy businessmen and landowners due to their fears of a possible communist Italy. In the first democratic general elections, in 1948, the party obtained seven deputies and one senator. Internal conflicts soon arose between conservatives who sought to join NATO and ally with the royalists and Christian Democrats, and hardliners who wanted an anti-American, anti-establishment party. Almirante was replaced in the leadership of the party due to his adamant anti-NATO position of 1950. He was replaced by the conservative Augusto De Marsanich, under whose leadership the party achieved strong electoral growth.
Arturo Michelini (1954-1969)
Four years later, in 1954, De Marsanich was succeeded by Arturo Michelini. Conservative elements dominated the party in the 1950s and 1960s, maintaining a fairly moderate discourse compared to earlier stages. However, as before, he continued to demand the banning of the Italian Communist Party. By the 1950s, the MSI had become the fourth largest political force in Italy, and the Italian party system was unique in Europe to have a significant and continuous neo-fascist presence since the end of World War II. Michelini established the strategy of inserimento (insertion) during his leadership of the party, that is, gaining acceptance through cooperation with other parties. Unhappy with the MSI's focus on parliamentarism and attempts to establish an image of democratic respectability, the party's radicals abandoned it and established several separate groups. Pino Rauti founded the Ordine Nuovo party in 1956, while Stefano Delle Chiaie founded Avanguardia Nazionale.
As far back as the 1940s, Christian Democrats half-heartedly and quietly accepted MSI support to keep communists out of Rome's city government. Christian Democrats also accepted party endorsement (along with royalists and liberals) to prop up their minority governments in the late 1950s. In 1960, MSI even became the only minority government endorser in DC, which had enormous political implications. At the 1960 MSI national congress in Genoa, protests broke out by anti-fascist militants over left-wing concerns over the party's growing role in Italian politics. These protests spread to other Italian cities, leading to violent clashes with the police, which led the government to ban the MSI congress from taking place. The government itself resigned after a few days, which relegated the MSI to the background, beginning the decline of the party. This event marked the failed end of the inserimento strategy.
In the early 1960s, riots between MSI supporters and radical leftists became common. After the victory of a center-left government in 1963, Democracia Cristiana no longer needed the parliamentary support of the MSI. The party was marginalized by all the other parties, making it their main objective to get back into the political game.
Giorgio Admiral (1969-1987)
Michelini was the party's leader until his death in 1969, when Almirante, the party's first leader, regained the general secretaryship. He tried to revitalize the party through the return of the anti-communist message and the application of an aggressive policy against the left-wing student uprisings inspired by May 1968; These circumstances practically made the youth of the party disappear from the student world. In the aftermath of Michelini's failed inserimento strategy, Almirante presented a double strategy, with a harsh anti-establishment discourse combined with the creation of a broader project of "National Right" (Destra Nazionale), adopting the name of Italian Social Movement–National Right (Movimento Sociale Italiano–Destra Nazionale). The party regained support among both conservatives and radicals, began to cooperate with the Partido Nacional Monárquico, and reinstated Pino Rauti and other radicals into the party.
In November 1970, the MSI held its IX Congress, in which it abandoned the black shirt and the fascist salute and accepted democracy. The party grew strongly in the 1970s, nearly doubling its support in the 1972 general election, after running a joint list with the royalists. The MSI claimed to have 420,000 members in 1973, but its support receded in the 1976 general election, and many Conservatives left the party, leaving it with 279,000 members that year. The moderates formed National Democracy, but despite taking with them half of the MSI's parliamentary representation and almost all of its public finances, the new party disappeared in the following general elections.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, a second wave of terrorism by right-wing groups in Italy led some members of the MSI to become radicalized, with some leaving the party to form new groups. Little by little, the MSI became more tolerated by the majority parties, while its insistent condemnations of violence were gaining credibility.
In 1983 the MSI published a Manifesto addressed to the Italians in which it declared itself in favor of the democratic system, although without reviewing the past or condemning fascism. In fact, it was not until its XIV congress that it fully integrated into parliamentary work. That same year, after Bettino Craxi, of the Italian Socialist Party, became prime minister, he met with MSI leaders, and his office later issued a statement expressing his regret for the "ghettoisation" # 3. 4; of the party In 1984, high-level representatives of the Christian Democrats, the Italian Liberal Party and the Italian Democratic Socialist Party attended the party congress for the first time. The following year, he was granted a position on the board of directors of Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).
Gianfranco Fini (1987-1995)
Gianfranco Fini took over the leadership of the party in 1987, as a successor and candidate supported by the party's old guard. However, after the death of the Admiral the following year, Fini was left without his protector. Fini was then seen as a weak leader, unable to reverse the decadence and isolation of the party, adopting a series of aggressive decisions against the internal opposition. The disappearance of the USSR, corruption and the deaths of Almirante and Romualdi divided the MSI into moderates, grouped around Gianfranco Fini, and continuistas (followers of Rauti).
In 1990 Rauti briefly became secretary general, and seeking in vain the vote of the left, he transformed anti-communism into attacks on the liberal, parliamentary and capitalist system; This caused the party to lose more sympathizers and that year, in the municipal elections, it only obtained 4% of the vote. Rauti resigned in 1991 and Fini recovered the leadership of the party.
Este now tried to downplay the fascist origins of the MSI, further dividing the party; transformed the MSI into the more moderate National Alliance (AN), moving away from the strategy of the "National Right" Admiral of the 1970s. Fini was soon seen as a skilled political leader, winning the support of the majority of the party.
In the early '90s the scandal of the Manos Limpias process broke out, a group of judges uncovering a widespread system of corruption in all major parties, and many important politicians being put on trial. The scandals were devastating for the main parties and led to their dissolution. As the so-called "First Republic" collapsed, the MSI survived by not being involved in the scandals due to not having taken part in Italian political life. However, a radical transformation took place as he broke with his fascist heritage; at the same time, the end of the Cold War contributed to the moderation of Italian politics. Corruption scandals led politics in Italy to be highly personalist, and in 1993 Fini and Alessandra Mussolini surprisingly garnered unprecedentedly large support for their mayoral bids in Rome and Naples, respectively. Although they lost the elections, each one obtained close to 45% of the votes.
The AN project was devised in 1993, presenting itself to the general elections of 1994; finally in January 1995 MSI dissolved and was replaced by AN. Rauti and other radicals tried to reconstitute the MSI as the Tricolor Flame, without achieving the success of its predecessor. Fini, in turn, went on to direct AN, with great electoral growth compared to the MSI, within the coalition of the Polo del Buen Gobierno with the recently created Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi, subsequently forming part of his government. In just a few years, Fini led the MSI from a stagnant position to participate in the governing coalition. Although the resurgence of the party cannot be attributed solely to this fact, it could be said that it would not have taken place without the effects of the scandals of the Clean Hands process.
Ideology
MSI's political program was never very concrete, but always stressed traditional social values, law and order, and hostility towards social minorities and civil liberties. Syndicalism, corporate and vertical, state interventionism in the economy and education together with Catholic confessionalism completed his political proposal, which hardly reviews historical fascism. He advocated a centralized State without delegating powers to the regions, with a presidential form of government. The party followed a dual policy, combining anti-establishment discourse with a more practical electoral cooperation with the conventional right. Although it was long concerned with the fascism and anti-fascism debate, the party distanced itself from it in the early 1990s to focus more on contemporary issues in Italy. Likewise, the two main factions of the party agreed after the 1950s that fascism was dead, yet they continued to value certain aspects of fascism as a good thing to restore. When the party became the National Alliance, it openly rejected fascism, as well as "any kind of totalitarianism and racism." Unlike other far-right parties in Europe that gained strength in the late 1980s, the MSI decided not to campaign against immigration.
Regarding foreign policy, he had a strong nationalist stance; When Parliament voted for Italy to join NATO in 1949, he abstained, despite later expressing his support for NATO and the European Community. However, he rejected any product or idea of American origin. The party supported the inclusion of Italy in the European Monetary System in 1979, as well as the installation of US cruise missiles in Sicily in 1983. It also claimed Trieste and Istria within Italian territory.
International affiliation
In its first years of existence, it had the support of the World League for Freedom and Democracy, of which it was a member. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the MSI was the main point of reference for the European extreme right. At the initiative of the MSI, the European Social Movement was created after conferences in Rome in 1950 and Malmö in 1951. The conference in Malmö was attended by a hundred delegates from French, British, German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Swedish, with some notable figures such as Maurice Bardèche, Karl-Heinz Priester, Oswald Mosley or Per Engdahl. The MSI was also part of the New European Order (NEO) along with, among others, the Spanish Falange and the Reich Socialist Party; due to MSI support for continued Italian control over South Tyrol, the German delegates left NEO. Growing divisions and external competition meant that both organizations had virtually disappeared by 1957. At a conference in Venice in 1962, the National Party of Europe was created on the initiative of the MSI, the Deutsche Reichspartei, the Trade Union Movement, Jeune Europe, and the Mouvement d'Action Civique; this organization disappeared in 1966.
In response to the development of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, Almirante initiated the first conference of the Euroright in Rome in 1978. The meeting featured Franco's Fuerza Nueva, the French Party of New Forces (PFN) and parties from Belgium, Portugal and Greece; they failed to muster enough support to create a group of their own in the European Parliament after the 1979 elections. After the 1984 European elections, the MSI was finally able to establish a European Right parliamentary group, together with the French National Front and the Greek National Political Union. However, after the 1989 European elections, the MSI refused to join the group again due to the incorporation of Die Republikaner, which supported the incorporation of South Tyrol into Germany; the Flemish Bloc also supported the position of the German party.
As the MSI transformed into a National Alliance, it distanced itself more and more from far-right European parties such as France's National Front and Austria's Freedom Party.
Election results
a Within the Polo coalition of the Good Government.
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Organization
It had a solid organization with various associations and satellite groups, such as a youth section (Fronte della Gioventù), a women's section, a section for ex-combatants and a sports section (Fiamma), its own publications such as La Sfida, Il Picchio Verde and La Voce della Fogna, the Gioacchino Volpe Foundation, the Institute for Corporate Studies and the International Association for Western Culture, in addition to the newspapers Il Secolo d'Italia and Roma, the weeklies Candido and Il Borghese and several press agencies.
Literature
- Nicola Guerra: Il linguaggio politico di piazza della destra radicale e dei movimenti neofascisti negli Anni di PiomboMediterranean Language Review Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2020. [1]
- Nicola Guerra: Il linguaggio degli opposti estremismi negli anni di piombo. A comparative analysis of the lessico nelle manifestazioni di piazza, Italian Studies Taylor & Francis, London 2020. Internet
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