Italy’s Jewish community fears rise of the far-right
I‘Before, I was just a working mother who always paid her taxes, but now I’m a terrorist who will fight for liberty’
n the heart of Rome’s historic ghetto Alberto Taschera is preparing to serve the lunchtime crowd at a Jewish trattoria. The sun is shining and there are fresh artichokes but the waiter’s mood is dark and his mind is on a cavalcade of events that have badly shaken Italy’s Jewish community.
“It seems to me incredible that in 2021, there are still fascist parties in Italy,” he said. “It seems like we’re going backwards, not forwards. There is a climate of tension right now. It feels like a critical moment.”
More than 75 years after the downfall of Benito Mussolini and the end of the Second World War, fascism and anti-semitism is again stalking Italy. Yesterday, it emerged that the Right’s candidate to become the next mayor of Rome had praised Hitler and the Wehrmacht. Enrico Michetti expressed admiration for their efficiency and “capability” and said that if a country “slides into chaos, then you need a strong man to restore order”, according to a broadcast found by La Repubblica.
He made the remarks on a station called Radio Radio, with a fellow presenter warning him: “Now they’ll call you a fascist, just like me.”
This week, Mr Michetti apologised after another segment of his radio programme emerged in which he said that the memory of the Holocaust is kept alive because Jews have immense political power and “control the banks”.
The radio presenter and lawyer is heavily backed by the far-right Brothers of Italy party in a secondround mayoral vote that will take place on Sunday. He polled most votes in the first round but tactical voting may hamper his chances of winning.
Brothers of Italy, the heirs to Italy’s fascist movement, is doing well in the polls and in some surveys is now the country’s most popular party. It is accused by mainstream parties of flirting with neo-fascists.
Last weekend, thugs from the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party fought running battles with riot police in Rome during a protest against vaccination passes. They attacked the headquarters of a Left-wing union and rampaged around parliament. “The criminals, the extremists, are not in this piazza, but in the corridors of power,” said Giuliano Castellino, a Forza Nuova leader.
He was subsequently arrested, along with Roberto Fiore, the founder of the fascist party. Pamela Testa, 39, who wore a sweatshirt bearing a famous quote by Mussolini, was among the protesters injured. “Before, I was just a working mother who always paid her taxes, but now I’m a terrorist who will fight for liberty,” she told Italian media, her face streaming with blood.
Andrea Orlando, a government minister, was alarmed by parallels with “what happened in Italy in 1921” – an allusion to the rise of the Blackshirts led by Mussolini, who came to power in 1922. “One hundred years ago, a bloody and ruthless dictatorship started out by attacking unions,” he said. A century on, groups with “fascist inspirations” were taking advantage of the “social tensions” caused by the pandemic, the labour minister said. The violence in Rome “takes us back to the darkest and most dramatic moments of our history,” said Valeria Fedeli, a senator from the centre-left Democratic Party.
In the ghetto, Mr Michetti’s remarks about the Holocaust deeply offended many Jewish people. “Michetti is an imbecile. But imbeciles can be dangerous,” said Bruno Di Veroli, 80.
“The extreme Right is an ugly thing. After all these years, it should no longer exist,” he said.
Everywhere you look in the ghetto, a tangle of cobbled lanes, kosher restaurants and bakeries, there are memories of the dark days of 1943 when the SS rounded up more than 1,000 Jews and sent them to death camps. One plaque commemorates a Jewish man named Settimio Calò who came home one day to find that his wife and nine children had been deported to Auschwitz. He never saw them again.
Another plaque commemorates newborn babies who were deported and murdered. “They had not even started to live,” it says.
After the clashes on Saturday, Rome is braced for more trouble. It could come tomorrow, the day on which all Italian employees will have to show a “green pass” – showing either that they have been vaccinated or have tested negative for Covid in the previous 48 hours. Forza Nuova and other fascist groups such as Casapound have tapped into anger over the green pass, without which they cannot work. Although 80 per cent of Italians over the age of 12 are now vaccinated, around three million have refused the jab.
There are growing calls for Forza Nuova and other fascist movements to be banned outright but, in the meantime, they are gearing up for more trouble this weekend.
On a “No Green Pass” chat group on the messaging app Telegram, which has nearly 30,000 followers, one activist wrote: “They want war and they will have war.” Another wrote: “We need to play dirty – put kids and old people at the front of the demonstrations.”
In the ghetto, a stone’s throw from the river Tiber, there is a mixture of concern and weary resignation.
“For us, it’s not strange that there are still fascists in Italy,” said Fiorella Di Segni, 82, who is Jewish. “We are battle hardened. We know what could happen, even 80 years after the war. We’ve been in a state of war since the deportations of 1943.”