Europe finds room for a fascist leader?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen wielded great influence in national politics for a time, but he stood no more chance of becoming president or prime minister of France than Donald Duck.

The far right in Germany is completely marginalized politically, and in Britain it has not had a recognizable national leader since Enoch Powell in the 60s.

Populist ranters like Pat Buchanan take a run at the Republican presidential nomination in the U.S. once in a while, but the presidency is only open to orthodox right-wing figures like Ronald Reagan, George Bush and (if Bill Clinton happens to be kidnapped by space aliens before next November) Bob Dole.

Even in Russia, an open fascist like Vladimir Zhirinovsky hits an invisible vote ceiling at a level that gives him no hope of attaining the presidency. Russia has lots of stupid and self- destructive people, but not enough for that.

So why, in a reasonably prosperous and sophisticated country like Italy, are they likely to pick a neo-fascist for prime minister in the elections on April 21?

An Italian election is generally an event that combines mind- numbing complexity with utter meaninglessness. If even the Italians cannot manage to get excited about it, why should we? Answer: Gianfranco Fini.

Fini differs from Italy's first fascist leader, dictator Benito Mussolini, in several respects, the most obvious being that Fini has no chin at all whereas Mussolini had several. But Fini is on record as calling Mussolini "the greatest Italian in history". (He later claimed that he was quoted out of context.) And the party Fini leads, the National Alliance, is the direct descendant of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), Italy's post-war fascist party.

These are '90s fascists, of course: fascists with PR and good suits. No violence, no ranting (or not much, and certainly not from the mild-mannered leader himself), no corruption. And it is the lack of corruption that has put the wind in the National Alliance's sails, for practically all the other major parties have senior members implicated in the ever-widening corruption scandals.

Nevertheless, the bald fact is that one of the former Axis powers, half a century after their defeat in the world war they unleashed on mankind, is on the brink of bringing another fascist to power. Fini calls himself a `post-fascist', which is presumably intended to reassure, but how relaxed would you feel if somebody calling himself a `post-Nazi' was about to gain power in Germany?

All right, it isn't the same. Italy is not as serious a country as Germany. It wasn't seen as a serious contender in the Second World War, when allied propaganda kept forgetting to mention it, and it certainly isn't one now. Think of Adolph Hitler, and you see panzer divisions and death camps; think of Benito Mussolini, and you see a chubby man in a gaudy doorman's outfit giving a bombastic speech from a balcony.

Nevertheless, a fascist is a fascist, and Gianfranco Fini freely chose that label. He is strongly nationalist and authoritarian, and he would be a royal pain in the nether regions for his European Union partners if he became Italy's prime minister. He would also create a most unhappy precedent for the nastier sorts of fascists you find elsewhere in Europe.

How did this manage to sneak up on us? There have been no torch-lit parades, no territorial claims against Italy's neighbors, and no more attacks on immigrants than elsewhere in Europe, so the Italian fascists never claimed a major share of the world's attention. Besides, they never won more than 15 percent of the vote in a national election before now.

What makes the difference this time is primarily the context, not the fascists themselves. Italy finds itself stranded halfway through the reform process that began in 1992, with the old Cold War parties reformed beyond recognition or destroyed beyond recall, but not yet with any stable new political system.

The institutionalized corruption that maintained the old system for over 40 years left virtually no politician over the age of 30 untouched, and ongoing investigations by the `clean hands' magistrates continue to pick off leaders of the new parties that emerged from the wreckage of 1992.

And now, for no good reason except that the splintered parties could not agree on a government to complete the electoral reforms everyone agrees must be made, Italy is going into its third election in four years.

"A great and extraordinary opportunity has been lost for the future of the country," thundered prime minister-designate Antonio Maccanico in February when the last attempt at making a new government collapsed, but truthfully it didn't matter a bit. The old parliament was unlikely to pass the needed reforms, and neither is the new one.

But the happenstance of history has brought this election to a point where Fini has a shot at the prime ministership by default. The semi-reformed Italian system forces everybody to seek votes in two unwieldy coalitions, and the right-wing coalition was leading slightly at the end of March (47 percent to 44 percent) in the last poll permitted by Italian law before the election.

Within the right-wing coalition, Fini's National Alliance used to play third fiddle to media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the regionalist Northern League. But now Berlusconi is implicated in a trial for bribery and the Northern League is badly split -- so the National Alliance is likely to end up the largest single party in the new parliament.

It's not clear that Fini can parlay that into a term as prime minister, but he has a real chance. If he wins, Europe will get its first fascist leader since the death of Franco, and fascists elsewhere will be mightily encouraged. The Italians are admirable people, but their political class is a disgrace to Europe.