The ‘fascist threat’ in Berlusconi’s Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is still frequently the case today that the Italian political media use the term ‘fascist’ as an epithet aimed at opponents who do not proclaim themselves to be such in order to discredit them in the eyes of democratic public opinion, a usage with a long history in the Italian Republic. In recent times the alarm over an imminent fascist threat was reiterated with regard to Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which in the years between the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century offers a paradigmatic case. Following the collapse of the First Republic, the profound transformation of the political framework and Berlusconi’s entry onto the scene, the category of fascism was in fact revived in an attempt to delegitimize a right-wing coalition that in turn disavowed the values of anti-fascism. By examining how the political media debates of the period between the birth of Forza Italia and the fall of the last Berlusconi government, the aim of this article is to highlight these tendencies to use the past and bend it to current needs with effects that are still visible in the current situation of political communications.