The thrust of the National Alliance is for renewal and progress

The thrust of the National Alliance is for renewal and progress.”This is, in fact, the authentic voice of fascist Italy, which postured as dynamic but turned out to prefer the sloth of the Bourbons. ”It’s impossible to transfer to Italy the definitions of British politics. the old Communist Party and the new PDS may not have been parties of the government but they were part of the power structure.”If this is not classical fascism, what is it? Mr Fini has explicitly said it is not Thatcherite. There’s a risk of drifting into the sort of geographical egotism that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia.” Not much room for consociativismo there.On the ”Great Terror”: ”It didn’t need the fall of the Berlin Wall to convince Italians that communism was built on foundations of lies, hypocrisy and illiberalism. In fact he is positioning himself for the upheaval that will come when the Berlusconi interlude gives way to a second phase of remaking Italian politics It is certain to be a period of sharp conflict. It will mark the definitive break with the post-war notion of consociativismo, under which government and opposition often submerged their differences to serve the collective interests of the political class.

Mr Fini’s clear manifesto is contained in a short but vigorous book entitled La Mia Destra (”My Right”).Here he is on the would-be secessionist Northern League: ”Italy is indivisible There is an Italian People. Mr Fini’s hour may be at hand.”We cannot betray our ally in government,” Mr Fini said last week. Half a century after the fall of Mussolini, Mr Fini has made right-wing politics acceptable once again.What makes him so important is that the reworking of Italian politics is far from complete In the 1980s the system appeared impervious to change. Christian Democrats, who said they were conservatives, ruled over a vast public sector financed by debt and lubricated by corruption. Socialists, who said they were reformers, muscled in to share power and advance the interests of their sympathisers. Smaller parties, all preaching sound finance or enlightened liberalism, were bought off with ministries and jobs.Outside this endlessly turning circle stood the two rival ideological extremes.

The Communists, now split into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and a hardcore rump, provided the Great Terror. The ”threat” of their entry into government legitimised the ruling order and ensured foreign support. The neo-fascists, where Mr Fini began his youthful activities in 1967, were useful insofar as they both gave right-wingers an outlet for nostalgia and frightened everybody else with reminders of the past. Politically, they were irrelevant.All that changed with the corruption investigations of 1992, the collapse of the old parties, partial reform of the electoral system and the victory last March of the right-wing slate in which Mr Berlusconi forged an electoral pact with the National Alliance and the federalist Northern League Now Mr Berlusconi is doomed by allegations of corruption The League is relevant only in the north. He has rechristened the old neo-fascists (they used to be called the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI) and brought them into government with an unctuous skill that only a few years ago would have been regarded as miraculous. He is the most interesting and complex figure in a political landscape at present dominated by a television showman, Silvio Berlusconi. Last week, as Mr Berlusconi’s star waned, Mr Fini radiated gravitas ”The country has need of public duty .and an elevated sense of responsibility,” he said.

”Political squabbles cannot be allowed to obstruct the passage through parliament of the national budget, the indispensable ingredient for the economic well-being of all our people.”
Mr Fini, as head of the National Alliance, the heirs of Mussolini’s fascists, is concerned to avoid painful reminders of the past. It is true that Mr Fini occasionally sports a daring tie – only the other day he was wearing one on which dolphins frolicked in a canary-yellow sea. At 42, he is perhaps the most youthful leader of a major Italian political party He could make or break this and the next Italian government. SOBER suit, sleek haircut, earnest spectacles, well-scrubbed face: Gianfranco Fini is the epitome of what many Italians call a persona seria, a serious person. ”The Bosnian Serb army have demonstrated their policy of burning villages and towns in their wake, which must question their published aims.” If the town does fall, the UN will be as big a loser as the Bosnian government.(Photograph omitted). ”I think their objective is Fifth Corps” – the government forces that are based in the town.The Serbs have expressed it otherwise: ”The Bihac ’safe area’ will be safe once our army has entered it and disarmed the Muslim forces,” Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, said a few days ago.Even a UN report casts doubt on that.