National Alliance (Italy)
Template:Infobox Italy Political Party
National Alliance (Italian: Alleanza Nazionale, often shortened to AN) is a right-wing Italian political party. It was formed by current secretary Gianfranco Fini from the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was declared dissolved in January 1995, and conservative elements of the former Christian Democracy, which had disbanded in 1994 after two years of scandals and various splits due to corruption at its hightest levels, exposed by the Mani Pulite investigation. Former MSI members were however still the bulk of the new party.
The logo follows a template very similar to the Democratic Party of the Left, with the previous logo in a small circle (as a means of legally preventing others from using it), and the name is inspired by an article on the Italian newspaper Il Tempo written in 1992 by Domenico Fisichella.
Its electorate is mainly in the central-southern regions, but it also competes in the north-east with the Lega Nord, its ally in the ruling right center coalition Casa delle Libertà. The relationship of AN with the Northern League can be tense at times, especially about issues of national unity, but the two parties share views on other issues such as immigration; AN's view is normally more moderate than Lega Nord's.
Political program
AN's political program emphasizes:
- Catholicism, close to the official Church position, also due to the participation of the former members of the Christian Democracy;
- law and order, especially laws aimed at controlling immigration and promoting national cohesion, also due to the partitipation of the members of the former MSI.
Distinguishing itself from the MSI, AN has used the expression "post-Fascist" to characterise itself, and proclaims its commitment to constitutionalism, democracy and political pluralism. However, while the uncontested leader Gianfranco Fini has been steering mostly clear of blunders to the fascist pasts, many high-ranking members (often dubbed colonels), such as Ignazio La Russa, have been caught in statements defending the combatants of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, the German puppet state in northern Italy during World War II. Some proposals have been laid out by members of AN to make the status of RSI veterans equal to that of partisans, thus equating freedom fighters and Mussolini-loyalist fascist soldiers.
Alleanza Nazionale has distanced itself from Benito Mussolini and fascism and made efforts to improve relations with Jewish groups. With most hardliners leaving the party, it seeks to present itself as a respectable rightwing party.
Nearly two-thirds of the party's supporters approve of the capitalist system and hold favourable views on the privatisation of state industries.
History
In January 1995, as officially Gianfranco Fini proclaimed MSI's dissolution, and the foundation of the AN, he announced the abandonment MSI's ideological stances, symbols, gestures and salutes that had closely identified it with the Mussolinian past.
Despite Fini's success in distancing the party's image from the former MSI, including the suppression of anti-Jewish comments in public and the party organ "Il Secolo d'Italia", there remain contradictions within the party, mainly in regard to its fascist past.
A rare anti-Semitic manifestation was a March 1999 leaflet produced by the AN's Julius Evola Club in Sestu (Cagliari). The leaflet quoted alleged Talmudic passages as proof that Jews compared gentiles to beasts. In response to protests, the local AN president claimed that the references were intended to be "neither racist, nor anti-democratic nor anti-Jewish".
The AN club in Fiumicino (close to Rome), called for a square to be named after fascist leader Ettore Muti, while the president of the region of Latium, Francesco Storace, asked that each city dedicate a street to Giorgio Almirante, the predecessor of Fini as the leader of the now-defunct MSI, and a criminal of war during World War II.
When Gianfranco Fini visited Israel in late November 2003 in the function of Italian deputy prime minister, he labeled the racial laws issued by the fascist regime in 1938 as "infamous". He also referred to the RSI as belonging to the most shameful pages of the past, and considered fascism part of an era of "absolute evil".
As a result, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and some hardliners left the party; she stated that "absolute evil" for her was piazzale Loreto, the square in Milan where her grandfather's remains were shown to the public in the final days of World War II.
Government participation
The party has taken part in the first three House of Freedoms coalition governments (1994 and from 2001) of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, in the second and third of which Fini is deputy prime minister and, from November 2004, foreign minister.
Electoral Results
In 1998, it had a membership of 485,657 in 11,539 branches, 89 deputies and 41 senators in the Italian Parliament and nine members of the European Parliament.
The AN suffered a 5 percent loss in the 1999 elections to the European Parliament, obtaining only 10.3 percent of the vote. It recovered somewhat in the April regional elections, gaining 12.8 percent nationwide, and well over 20 percent in Rome and Latium.
In the May 2001 national elections AN obtained 96 seats out of 630 in the Chamber of Deputies and 46 seats out of 324 in the Senate. The party lost a few key seats in the 2003 local elections such as the Province of Rome, but its position remained firm. The party obtained 11.5 percent of the vote and 9 seats in the June 2004 European Parliament elections. In the 2005 regional elections AN lost almost all the remaining key seats, such as the Region of Lazio.
In the European Parliament, its MEPs work within the group of the Union for a Europe of Nations.
July 2005 purge
In July 2005, three of Fini's "colonels" (Altero Matteoli, Ignazio La Russa and Maurizio Gasparri), among the most powerful politicians in the party, were overheard in a café close to the Italian Parliament by an intern of the newspaper Il Tempo. [1] They were recorded making unflattering comments about Fini's health, political capacity and unfitness to run the upcoming political campaign for the 2006 national elections.
As the news was made public, the three tried to apologize, but an allegedly furious Fini fired all of them on July 18, and assumed complete control of the party. He proceeded to reengineer the party's structure, and assigned the new posts.
In the congress that had been held a few weeks before these events, Fini had criticised factionalism in the party, and received explicit criticism for that—possibly for the first time so explicitly in a party that has a long tradition of obedience to its leader.