Gianfranco Fini was the leader of AN from its foundation through 2008, after being elected President of the Chamber of Deputies. Fini was succeeded by Ignazio La Russa, who managed the merger of the party with Forza Italia (FI) into The People of Freedom (PdL) in 2009.[12] During AN's last congress, it was decided that a foundation would manage the assets and the political legacy of MSI/AN; as a result, the National Alliance Foundation was established in 2011.[13][14][15] A group of former AN members, led by La Russa and Giorgia Meloni, as well as former Christian DemocratGuido Crosetto, left the PdL in 2012 to launch the Brothers of Italy (FdI), while others remained in the PdL and were among the founding members of the re-launched Forza Italia (FI) in 2013. The National Alliance Foundation authorised FdI to use AN's symbol in 2014[16] and onwards.
History
Foundation
National Alliance was launched in 1994 when the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the former neo-fascist party, merged with conservative elements of the former Christian Democracy, which had disbanded in 1994 after two years of scandals and various splits due to political corruption at its highest levels, exposed by the Mani pulite investigation, and the Italian Liberal Party, disbanded in the same year. It was officially launched in January 1995. Former MSI members dominated the new party, and the MSI's last leader, Gianfranco Fini, was elected the new party's first leader.
The AN logo followed a template very similar to that of the Democratic Party of the Left, incorporating the MSI logo in a small roundel of the AN logo as a means of legally preventing others from using it. The name was suggested by an article on the Italian newspaper Il Tempo written in 1992 by Domenico Fisichella, a prominent conservative academic. Starting in the 1990s, the MSI gradually transformed into a mainstream right-wing party, culminating in its 1995 dissolution into AN.
When Fini visited Israel in late November 2003 in the function of Italian Deputy Prime Minister, he labelled the racial laws issued by the Italian fascism regime in 1938 as "infamous", as also Giorgio Almirante, historic leader of MSI, had done before.[17] He also referred to the Italian Social Republic as belonging to the most shameful pages of the past, and considered fascism part of an era of "absolute evil", something which was hardly acceptable to the few remaining hardliners of the party. As a result, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been at odds with the party on a number of issues for a long time, and some hardliners left the party and formed Social Action.[8][18]
In occasion of the 2006 Italian general election, AN ran within the House of Freedoms, with new allies. The centre-right lost by 24,000 votes in favour of the centre-left coalition The Union. Individually, AN received nearly 5 million votes, amounting to 12.3%. In July 2007, a group of splinters led by Francesco Storace formed The Right, which was officially founded on 10 November. Seven MPs of AN, including Teodoro Buontempo and Daniela Santanchè, joined the new party.
After the sudden fall of the Prodi II Cabinet in January 2008, the break-up of The Union and the subsequent political crisis which led to a fresh general election, Berlusconi hinted that Forza Italia would have probably contested its last election and the new party would have been officially founded only after that election. In an atmosphere of reconciliation with Gianfranco Fini, Berlusconi also stated that the new party could see the participation of other parties.[22] Finally, on 8 February, Berlusconi and Fini agreed to form a joint list under the PdL banner, allied with Lega Nord (LN).[23] After the victory of the PdL in the 2008 Italian general election, AN was merged into the PdL in early 2009.[24]
During AN's last congress, it was decided that a foundation would manage the assets and the political legacy of MSI/AN; as a result, in 2011 the National Alliance Foundation was established.[13][14][15] In 2014 the Foundation, which has been successively led by Franco Pontone, Franco Mugnai and Giuseppe Valentino, gave the Brothers of Italy (FdI), a political party formed by former AN members who had splintered from the PdL and who were led by La Russa and Giorgia Meloni, the authorisation to use AN's symbol.[16] Former AN members have since been active in several parties, but mostly in FdI, however the Foundation continues to have former AN members of all ideological stripes in its ranks, including those who are now members of the new Forza Italia, the new Lega and the most-recently formed Independence.
Ideology
National Alliance's political programme emphasised:
Distinguishing itself from the MSI, the party distanced itself from Benito Mussolini and fascism, and made efforts to improve relations with Jewish groups.[8] For example, after far-right skinheads celebrated the then-AN politician Gianni Alemanno's election as Mayor of Rome in 2008 by making the Roman salute outside the Palazzo Senatorio, Alemanno visited Rome Synagogue, where he gave a speech praising what he called the universal values of the fight against Nazism. The shift was also present in the rhetoric of the party's leader Fini, who went from declaring himself as "fascist for the 2000s" in 1987 when at the head of the MSI, to describing himself as a conservative at the time of the AN's launch in 1994.[25] With most hardliners leaving the party,[8][18] it sought to present itself as a respectable conservative party and to join forces with Forza Italia in the European People's Party and eventually in a united party of the centre-right. Historian David Broder has compared the AN to the People's Party in Spain, a post-Francisco Franco party.[25]
Although the party approved the market economy and held favourable views on liberalisation and the privatisation of state-owned companies, AN was to the left of Forza Italia on economic issues and sometimes supported statist policies.[26] That is why the party was strong in Rome and Lazio, where most civil servants live.[citation needed] The implosion of the Christian Democrats created space for a more economically interventionist party of the conservative right, and the AN sought closer ties to the former DC factions that joined the Berlusconi-led alliances of the right. As part of this, it also moderated its stances on the European Union and immigration, both of which were conditionally accepted by the party's leadership.[25] Moreover, AN presented itself as a party promoting national cohesion, national identity, and patriotism.
Regarding institutional reforms, the party was a long-time supporter of presidentialism and a plurality voting system, and came to support also federalism and to fully accept the alliance with Lega Nord, although the relations with that party were tense at times, especially about issues regarding national unity.
Fini, a moderniser who saw Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron as role-models, impressed an ambitious political line to the party, combining the pillars of conservative ideology like security, family values, and patriotism with a more progressive approach in other areas, such as stem cell research and supporting voting rights for legal aliens. Some of these positions were not shared by many members of the party, most of whom staunchly opposed stem cell research and artificial insemination.[18]
Factions
National Alliance was a heterogeneous political party and within it members were divided in different factions, some of them very organised:
New Alliance (Nuova Alleanza), formerly called Right and Freedom (Destra e Libertà), headed by Altero Matteoli and Adolfo Urso, was formed by the staunchest supporters of Gianfranco Fini within the party and supported a liberal political agenda.
Social Right (Destra Sociale), led by Gianni Alemanno, advocated a more social approach to economic policy and was considered at the right of the party. It had close ties with the General Labour Union.
D-Destra, led by Francesco Storace, was the most conservative component of the party, proud of the MSI's tradition and in open opposition to Fini. Formed as a split from the Social Right, the group finally left AN and launched The Right in July 2007.
In the party there was also a group named Ethic-Religious Council, whose board members included Gaetano Rebecchini (founder, ex-DC), Riccardo Pedrizzi (president), Franco Tofoni (vice-president), Luigi Gagliardi (secretary-general), Alfredo Mantovano, Antonio Mazzocchi, and Riccardo Migliori. This was not a faction but an official organism within the party and expressed the official position of the party on ethical and religious matters. Sometimes the group criticised Fini for his liberal views on abortion, artificial insemination, and stem-cell research, which led some notable ex-DC members as Publio Fiori to leave the party. Some members of the council, such as Pedrizzi and Mantovano, were described as members of an unofficial Catholic Right faction.
The party had a good showing in the first general election in which it took part, achieving 13.5% of the popular vote in 1994 Italian general election. In the 1996 Italian general election, when Fini tried for the first time to replace Silvio Berlusconi as leader of the centre-right, the party grew its support to 15.7%. From that moment the party suffered an electoral decline but remained the third force of Italian politics.
In the 2006 Italian general election, the final election in which the party participated on its own account, AN won 12.3% of the vote, securing 71 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 41 in the Senate. In the 2008 Italian general election, the party had 90 deputies (excluding Fiamma Nirenstein, Alessandro Ruben, and Souad Sbai, whose election was supported both by Forza Italia and National Alliance),[27] and 48 senators,[28] who were elected as part of a joint election list under the banner of The People of Freedom.
The electoral results of National Alliance in general (Chamber of Deputies) and European Parliament elections since 1994 are shown in the chart below.
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
The electoral results of National Alliance in the 10 most populated regions of Italy are shown in the table below.
^Tarchi, Marco (2007), "Recalcitrant Allies: The Conflicting Foreign Policy Agenda of the Alleanza Nazionale and the Lega Nord", Europe for the Europeans, Ashgate, p. 188
^Catellani, Patrizia; Milesi, Patrizia; Crescentini, Alberto (2006). "One Root, Different Branches: Identity, Injustice and Schisms". Extreme Right Activists in Europe: Through the Magnifying Glass. Routledge. p. 18. ISBN9780415358279. Yet this is not to say that the fascist heritage in the new 'post-fascist' AN faded altogether. At least at the beginning, Fini had a double standard of communication, one for inside the party, stressing continuity with fascism, one for outside the party, stressing change.
^Catellani, Patrizia; Milesi, Patrizia; Crescentini, Alberto (2006). One root, different branches: Identity, injustice and schisms. Routledge. p. 204. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
^Agnew, John (February 1997). "The dramaturgy of horizons: geographical scale in the 'Reconstruction of Italy' by the new Italian political parties, 1992–1995". Political Geography. 16 (2). Elsevier: 99–121. doi:10.1016/s0962-6298(96)00046-7.
