People appear to give the banned fascist salute during a rally in Rome, Italy (Picture: AP)
If you thought that this is archival footage from Germany during the Second World War, then you would be wrong; this is present day Italy during Giorgia Meloni’s premiership.
Hundreds of people were filmed giving a fascist salute during a rally in Rome without any police intervention.
A video circulating on social media showed the crowd raising their arms in a Nazi-style salute while chanting in front of the former headquarters of the now defunct neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party (MSI).
The event on Sunday commemorated the killing of three neo-fascist teenagers in the Italian capital in 1978.
Under Italy’s post-war legislation, use of fascist symbolism, including the straight-armed salute, is prohibited.
Known as the Roman salute, the hand gesture has long been considered a symbol of fascisms despite its origins in ancient Roman.
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Opposition politicians in Italy demanded that the government explain why police did not stop the rally.
Elly Schlein, a member of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies and secretary of the centre-left Democratic Party, wrote on Facebook: ‘Rome, January 7, 2024. And it feels like 1924.
‘Neo-fascist organizations should be dissolved, according to the Constitution.’
Schlein and others outraged by the use of the fascist-salute noted with irony that last month, when a theater-goer at La Scala’s opera house’s premier shouted ‘Long live anti-fascist Italy’ The man was quickly surrounded by police from Italy’s anti-terrorism squad.
‘If you shout “Long live anti-fascist Italy” in a theater, you get identified; if you go to a neo-fascist gathering with Roman salutes and banner, you don’t,’ said Schlein in a post of the social media platform X.
Then she added: ‘Meloni has nothing to say?’
Bringing up the issue in Parliament, the politician said: ‘It is embarrassing that the silence of Giorgia Meloni is unable to say a word of condemnation about the rally on January 7 in Acca Larentia, she cannot distance herself from her past, of which she is hostage.’
Meloni came to power in 2022 as Italy’s first female prime minister at the head of a coalition, giving the country its most right-wing government since Mussolini’s.
Leaders of the country’s tiny Jewish community also expressed dismay over the fascist salute.
‘It is right to recall the victims of political violence, but in 2024 this cannot happen with hundreds of people who give the Roman salute,’ Ruth Dureghello, who for several years led Rome’s Jewish community, wrote on X.
Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws helped pave the way for the deportation of Italian Jews during the German occupation of Rome in the latter years of the Second World War.
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