When hundreds of hard-right protesters marched through Bologna at the weekend yelling “Italy for Italians, Europe for Europeans”, left-wing activists and anarchists tried to drive them back, only to clash with baton-wielding riot police.
Tear gas was fired and both police officers and protesters were injured, but that was just the warm-up as things started to get really out of hand.
It was not the dreadlocked leftwingers or bomber-jacketed Benito Mussolini fans who pushed things to another level but Italy’s politicians, starting with the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who demanded the closure of any meeting places used by the left-wing protesters.
They were nothing less than “communist insects”, he said, reviving an insult used by Seventies Italian neo-fascists.
Anti-fascist demonstrators clashed with riot police in Bologna at the weekend
MICHELE NUCCI/LAPRESSE/REX FEATURES/SHUTTERSTOCK
Matteo Lepore, Bologna’s left-wing mayor, also went on the offensive, hinting that the green light for the right-wing march through the centre of his city came directly from the prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s government. “They sent 300 black shirts,” he said, referring to the paramilitary wing of the party run by the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini in the Thirties.
Before next Sunday’s regional elections that will determine the future of Emilia Romagna, which includes Bologna, the row over the protest rocketed the country back to the Seventies, when communists and fascists killed each other in street battles and joined deadly terrorist groups.
The language used reveals how Italy’s left-right divide remains bitter and how politicians will dredge up the past at the drop of a hat, even at the risk of reviving an era of violence the country tried to leave behind 40 years ago.
Giorgia Meloni’s deputy, Matteo Salvini, denounced the demonstrators as “communist insects”
ALAMY
“Haven’t we had enough?” asked the columnist Flavia Perina in a front-page editorial about the unrest in Monday’s La Stampa. “This was a parody of a civil war that all adults should distance themselves from.”
The right-wing protesters, drawn from the ranks of the neo-fascist group Casapound were pelted with objects thrown from balconies by Bologna residents, who clearly recall the bombing of the city’s railway station in 1980 by members of the neo-fascist terror group Avanguardia Nazionale, which killed 85 people.
Many of the more than 1,000 left-wing marchers hailed from Italy’s “centri sociali”, or social centres — the name given to organised squats where sometimes violent demonstrations are planned.
As the tear gas dissipated, Meloni accused left-wing politicians of encouraging leftist “hooligans,” while Maurizio Gasparri, an MP in her ruling coalition, claimed that the Italian left was dragging the country back to the days of the Red Brigade, the left-wing terrorist group that kidnapped and killed the former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.
The former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigade
BACHRACH/GETTY IMAGES
The station bombing and the murder of Moro were key events in the so-called Years of Lead in Italy, which ran from the late Sixties until the Eighties as the country sat on the Cold War fault line between East and West.
On the left, communists frustrated with being kept out of power turned to violence, while rightwingers were allegedly backed by the US and members of the Italian establishment to commit bombing attacks, then blame their opponents in a bid to deter the public from voting for the left.
The Bologna attack is now viewed as a prime example of the right’s “strategy of tension”. Recent court rulings have established that the fascist bombers were funded by Licio Gelli, head of the notorious P2 masonic lodge, which included senior judges and politicians.
“Italy is now returning to the language of the time as the government depicts the opposition as increasingly radical and vice versa, while each becomes more extreme, leaving less room for moderation in politics,” said Massimo Franco, a political commentator with the newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Bologna Central railway station was bombed in 1980, leaving 85 people dead
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Another factor is the number of hardline protagonists from the Seventies who are still in politics or in the media.
Ignazio La Russa, co-founder of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, was involved in violent street protests as a youth member of Italy’s postwar fascist MSI party, of which Meloni was also a member.
In 2015, when the journalist Mario Calabresi took over as editor of the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica, one of its columnists was Adriano Sofri, a former far-left activist once jailed for ordering the murder of his father, a police officer.
Franco said he feared that voters would switch off. “Italian voters are by and large moderate and will stay at home at the next election,” he said.
Writing in La Stampa, Perina said that politicians were convinced that talk of “communist insects” and “fascists” would help them mobilise their core voters.
But she warned: “Past experience tells us that words can become deeds, dangerous deeds. Even those who did not live through that should have an inner voice warning them not to raise their voice against their enemy.”