Parliament in Italy: Mussolini nostalgic becomes head of the Senate

Two and a half weeks after the election, Italy’s parliament nominated right-wing La Russa for the state’s second-highest office. He immediately got the necessary majority – and flowers from a Holocaust survivor.

At its inaugural session in Rome, Italy’s parliament elected the right-wing politician Ignazio La Russa to head the Senate. The 75-year-old was the preferred candidate of his party leader Giorgia Meloni, who wants to become prime minister soon, and is considered one of her close confidants.

La Russa received 116 votes in the first ballot. The necessary absolute majority of the 206 senators was 104. The Sicilian was proclaimed in the first session of the 19th legislative period by Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre.

Like Meloni, La Russa was a former member of the neo-fascist MSI party and has been a leading politician on the Italian right for decades. La Russa and Meloni’s party, the Fratelli d’Italia, is planning a government alliance with the right-wing populist Lega and the conservative Forza Italia.

Dispute with Berlusconi

However, the alliance did not speak out unanimously in favor of career politician and former Secretary of Defense La Russa. Italy’s former head of state Silvio Berlusconi had asked the senators of his party Forza Italia to abstain from voting on the head of the Senate – possibly to give the Fratelli a lesson.

TV images showed Berlusconi and La Russa arguing in the hall and Berlusconi insulting the candidate. Like Matteo Salvini of the Lega, Berlusconi disagrees with Meloni on many points. For example, he refuses arms deliveries to Ukraine.

During the election campaign, La Russa claimed that all Italians were “heirs of the Duce” – that is, of dictator Benito Mussolini. Four years ago, in an interview, La Russa showed his living room, which included a statue of Mussolini. During the corona pandemic, he advised on Twitter that the Italians should no longer shake hands, but show the fascists’ “Roman salute” – analogous to the Hitler salute. Following the public outcry over the statement, La Russa deleted the tweet.

Ignazio La Russa, newly elected President of Italy’s Senate, delivers his inaugural speech during the opening session of Parliament in Rome.

Image: dpa

Appeal against “politics of shouting”

Holocaust survivor Segre, who was the oldest member of parliament to chair both the session and the presidential election, received standing applause several times. She reported a “queasy feeling” when she thinks of the Jewish girl in 1938 who, because of the fascist reprisals, was no longer allowed to return to her bench in elementary school, “but today, thanks to a strange fate, she is on the most important bench in the school Senate”.

Segre, who survived the concentration camp in Auschwitz, made an emotional appeal to overcome the divisions in society, to stand up against hatred and exclusion and to stop the “politics of shouting”. Segre recalled that just at the end of October it will be 100 years since the Fascists came to power in Italy.

Further decisions are pending

In the second chamber of parliament, the House of Representatives, there were initially no signs of a successful election. There, a majority of two-thirds is required in the first three ballots, which the legal alliance does not have. From ballot four, which is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, the absolute majority is sufficient – the legal bloc would come to this. It is considered certain that a politician from the Lega will then be elected President of the Chamber of Deputies. The Lega became the second strongest party in the legal alliance.

The president will then appoint someone – in the current case, the ultra-right Meloni after her election victory – to form a government. In the past, it took between four and twelve weeks for a new government to form in Italy.

With information from Jörg Seisselberg, ARD Studio Rome