They are the faces of the new Italian legislature. On Friday 14 October Lorenzo Fontana, 42, from Verona (North) was elected and close to Matteo Salvini (League, far right) was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies. A consecration for this tough party, traditionalist Catholic known for his opposition to gay marriage and closeness to Russia. In 2019 he declared that he wanted to make the Lega “a hinge between Trump and Putin”. Fontana’s election triggered violent protests on the benches of the opposition. Several MPs from the Democratic Party (PD, center left) unfurled a banner with the following sentence: “No to a homophobic and Putin-friendly president. “The election of the Chamber of Deputies takes Italy a little further from the heart of Europe,” complained Enrico Letta, Secretary General of the PD, outside the plenary hall.
Along with Ignazio La Russa, who was elected head of the Senate on Thursday, Lorenzo Fontana symbolizes the institutional anchoring of the radical right in Italy. The latter, an old veteran of Italian politics, already vice-president of the House of Lords under the previous legislature, is co-founder of Fratelli d’Italia with Giorgia Meloni, who is at the helm of the far-right coalition following her victory in the September 25 legislature elections. Mr. La Russa was also Silvio Berlusconi’s defense minister from 2008 to 2011. The man who was active in the Italian Social Movement (MSI) in his youth never concealed his longing for Mussolini. In a 2018 video that has been circulating on social networks in recent days, we see him showing his collection of Duce figurines to a journalist.
Ironically, Thursday’s session was chaired by lifelong Senator Liliana Segre, a former Auschwitz survivor who had asked Giorgia Meloni to remove the flame from the Fratelli d’Italia symbol. “It’s impossible for me not to feel a kind of dizziness when I recall that the same little girl who was forced to leave her elementary school desk empty because of race laws in 1938 now finds herself through a strange fate in office in the Senate! “, Liliana Segre explained with emotion and much applause.
Spectacular turn of events
But alongside Ignazio La Russa’s post-fascist profile, it is the way he was elected that will have marked this return to Parliament. His appointment is indeed the result of a turn of events. With a majority of 115 seats from the 200 senators, the votes of the elected representatives of the right-wing coalition (FDI, League and Forza Italia) should have made the election of La Russa a mere formality. But to everyone’s surprise, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia group abstained, with the exception of former Council President – who returned to the Senate after a nine-year absence – and outgoing Senate President Maria Elisabetta Casellati. Ignazio La Russa was finally elected thanks to the contribution of 17 opposition votes.
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