Italian Social Movement
The Italian Social Movement was a neo-fascist political party in Italy. A far-right party, it presented itself until the 1990s as the defender of Italian fascism's legacy, and later moved towards national conservatism. In 1972, the Italian Democratic Party of Monarchist Unity was merged into the MSI and the party's official name was changed to Italian Social Movement – National Right.
Formed in 1946 by supporters of the former dictator Benito Mussolini, most of whom took part in the experience of the Italian Social Republic and the Republican Fascist Party, the MSI became the fourth largest party in Italy by the early 1960s. The party gave informal local and eventually national support to the Christian Democracy party from the late 1940s and through the 1950s, sharing anti-communism. In the early 1960s, the party was pushed to the sidelines of Italian politics, and only gradually started to gain some political recognition in the 1980s. There was internal competition between the party's moderate and radical factions. The radicals led the party in its formative years under Giorgio Almirante, while the moderates gained control in the 1950s and 1960s. Almirante's return as leader in 1969 was characterised by a big tent strategy.
In 1987, the reins of the party were taken by Gianfranco Fini, under whom it was transformed in 1995 into National Alliance, a post-fascist party. On that occasion a small minority, led by Pino Rauti, disagreed with the new course and formed Social Movement Tricolour Flame instead. In 2009, AN merged with the then centre-right main party, The People of Freedom, while Brothers of Italy was founded in 2012 as a right-wing split of the PdL, and ten years later it became the largest party in the country.
History
Background
The MSI derived its name and ideals from the Italian Social Republic, a "violent, socialising, and revolutionary republican" variant of fascism established as a Nazi puppet state headed by Benito Mussolini in 1943 in the northern part of the Italian Peninsula behind Nazi German frontlines. The sole legal party of the republic, Mussolini's Republican Fascist Party, inspired the creation of the MSI. The party was formed by former fascist leaders and veterans of the republic's fascist army, and it has been regarded as the successor to both the PFR as well as the original National Fascist Party. The MSI nevertheless tried to modernise and revise fascist doctrine into a more moderate and sophisticated direction. It also drew from elements of the anti-communist and anti-establishment stance of the short-lived postwar populist Common Man's Front protest party, and many of its original backers would find a home in the MSI after its dissolution in 1949.Early years (1946–1954)
On 12 November 1946, the Italian Movement of Social Unity was created by Giorgio Almirante and former fascist veterans of the Italian Social Republic to provide a formal role to its representatives, who were supposed to attend a meeting on 26 December in Arturo Michelini's office.The Italian Social Movement was officially founded on 26 December 1946 in Rome via the merging of small political groups: the MIUS, the Front of the Italian, the Front of Work, the Trade Union of Italian Railwaymen, and the Independent Veterans Group. Former RSI official Giorgio Almirante became the party's first leader. The three initial main goals of the party were to revive Mussolini's fascism, attack the Italian democracy and fight communism. Due to the anti-fascist consensus embodied by the post-war Constitution of Italy and agreements with the Allied forces, advocating a return to fascism had to be done discreetly. Although the MSI adapted itself into the constraints of the democratic environment, its manifest ideology was clearly antagonistic and antithetical to liberal democracy, and it was consequently excluded from the Constitutional Arch, the circles of parties that had taken part in the drafting and approval of the Italian Constitution and which persisted as a loose coalition on certain policymaking issues, and from the parties deemed legitimate to govern.
The MSI won financial support from wealthy businessmen and landowners who feared a possible communist regime seizing power in Italy, either coming from a domestic revolution or a takeover by Soviet forces. In the 1948 Italian general election, the neo-fascist party won seven deputies and one senator. But the MSI soon witnessed growing internal conflicts between conservatives, who sought involvement in NATO and political alliances with Monarchists and Christian Democrats, and hardliners who wanted the party to turn into anti-American and anti-establishment platform. Almirante was replaced as the leader of the party in 1950 due to his uncompromising anti-NATO position. His position taken by conservative Augusto De Marsanich, under whose leadership the party won some strong electoral gains.
Leadership of Arturo Michelini (1954–1969)
Four years later in 1954, De Marsanich was replaced by Arturo Michelini. The conservative elements dominated the party in the 1950s and 1960s, and it maintained a rather moderate course. By the late 1950s, the MSI had become Italy's fourth largest party, and the Italian party system was unique in Europe in terms of having a continual and significant neo-fascist presence since the end of World War II. Michelini established the strategy of inserimento during his leadership of the party, which consisted in gaining acceptance through cooperation with other parties within the framework of liberal democracy. Disgruntled by the MSI's focus on parliamentarism and their attempts to establish an image of democratic respectability, the radicals broke out to create several splinter groups. Pino Rauti and others left in 1956 to found Ordine Nuovo, while Stefano Delle Chiaie established the National Vanguard in 1960.In the wider context of the Cold War, anti-communism had replaced anti-fascism as the abiding principle of the Italian Republic, and Christian Democrats started to accept political backing from the party to prop up their minority governments after the 1958 Italian general election. Already in the late 1940s, the Christian Democrats, somewhat reluctantly, had discreetly accepted support from the MSI to keep the Italian Communist Party out of the Roman city council.
In March 1960, the MSI even became the sole backer of the Christian Democratic minority Tambroni Cabinet, which had enormous political implications. As concerns grew over the party's expanding role in Italian politics, riots became commonplace between neo-fascist supporters and radical leftists. Learning that the National Congress of the MSI was about to be held in Genoa in July 1960 to celebrate the accomplishment of the inserimento strategy, militant anti-fascist protests erupted on 30 June in the city. Those rallies spread to other Italian cities over the next fortnight, resulting in violent and sometimes lethal clashes with the police. The government consequently banned the congress from taking place, and eventually resigned on 27 July. This event marked the failed end of the inserimento strategy, and the beginning of the party's long decline. Following the victory of a centre-left government in 1963, the Christian Democrats no longer needed the parliamentary support of the MSI, and the party was definitively forced back into the "political ghetto". Its main objective in the following decades thus became to get back into the political game. The demise of the strategy is also deemed conducive to the radicalisation of the violent splinter groups like Ordine Nuovo.
Leadership of Giorgio Almirante (1969–1987)
Michelini remained the leader of the MSI until his death in 1969, when the party's first leader Almirante regained control. The latter attempted to revitalise the party by pursuing an aggressive policy against left-wing student uprisings, since the 1968 student movement had been devastating for the party's youth organisation.Learning from Michelini's failed approach of inserimento, Almirante declared in his report to the party's central committee in 1969: "We stand before two different paths: an alternative to the system or an alternative within the system". He introduced a double strategy of hard anti-systemic discourse combined with the creation of a broader "National Right" coalition in 1972. He broadened the party in both conservative and radical directions, initiated a cooperation that eventually led to a merging with the Monarchist National Party, reintegrated Rauti and other radicals into the MSI, and attempted to attract conservative figures from the Christian Democrats and the Liberals. The party grew strongly in the early 1970s, claiming 420,000 members in 1973. Contesting the 1972 Italian general election in a joint list with Monarchists, the MSI almost doubled its support up to 8.7% of the votes, its highest score ever until 1994. It successfully capitalised on southern protests and an agenda of "law and order".
However, the MSI supported acts of political violence committed by young activists and the revolts in the Mezzogiorno; the party was also in contact with some sectors of terrorismo nero, involved in right-wing domestic terrorist attacks during the Years of lead. Those connections, in apparent contraction to the respectability sought by the party, damaged its public reputation. Support for the MSI consequently receded in the 1976 Italian general election, and many conservatives pulled out from the party, leaving it with 279,000 members that year. Frustrated in their aspiration to turn the MSI in a mainstream conservative party, moderates formed the short-lived National Democracy in 1976, accusing Almirate of maintaining contacts with right-wing terrorism and of being unable to follow a concrete parliamentary strategy. The new party, which took with it half the MSI parliamentary representation and nearly all of its public finance, was dissolved in the aftermath of the 1979 Italian general election.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a second wave of right-wing terrorism in Italy led to political radicalisation among some MSI members, and a part of them left the party to form new splinter groups. A new wave of studies and "historicisation" of fascism, widely debated in the public media, participated in pacifying the political climate. The MSI's insistent denunciations of violence began to gain in credibility, and the party became less stigmatised in mainstream politics. After he became prime minister in 1983, Bettino Craxi of the Italian Socialist Party met with MSI leaders, and his office later issued a statement that expressed regrets for the "ghettoisation" of the party. In 1984, high-level representatives of the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the Democratic Socialists attended the party congress of the MSI for the first time. The next year, the party was granted a position on the board of directors of the RAI, the state radio and television network.