2023-09-11 21:13:44
An Italian mayor supported by the ultra-conservative coalition in power will give two streets in his town the name of a fascist leader and that of a communist leader in the name of “national pacification”.
Antonfrancesco Vivarelli Colonna, mayor of Grosseto, in Tuscany, received the green light from the prefecture on Monday to name a street after Giorgio Almirante, a fascist and anti-Semitic journalist under Benito Mussolini, and another after Enrico Berlinguer, former secretary general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1972 to 1984. A third path will be called “National Pacification”.
The “end of an ideological controversy”, says the mayor
The National Association of Italian partisans (resisting fascism and the German occupation during the Second World War, Anpi) plans to appeal to administrative justice. The project dates back to 2018 and was approved in May by the city council.
The councilor, elected in 2016 then reappointed in 2021 with the support of the parties making up the current right-wing and far-right government coalition, on the other hand welcomed the prefecture’s decision.
“This puts an end to an ideological controversy which was detrimental to the citizens of Grosseto,” he reacted. “It was not a question of winning or losing a battle but of overcoming the ideological conflicts which, for so many years, have conditioned the political life of our country and our territory”, he pleaded on his Facebook account.
“Historical revisionism”
Luana Zanella, president of the Alliance Verts-Gauche group in the Chamber of Deputies, denounced an act of “historic revisionism”. Giorgio Almirante (1914-1988) was, during the Fascist period, editor of the newspaper “Defense de la race”, the first issues of which coincide with the racial laws against the Jews voted in 1938.
In 1946 he created the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a post-war party heir to the fascist movement, and was elected eleven times as a deputy, from 1946 to 1987. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was herself an activist of the MSI youth movement. At the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013, she created the Fratelli d’Italia party whose emblem still bears the tricolor flame of the MSI today.
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