Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday ruled out removing the tricolour flame from the logo of her party, despite calls within her own camp to dispense with fascist symbols.
“Removing the flame… has never been an issue on the agenda,” Meloni said in an interview with leading newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Her comments came after Luca Ciriani, a member of Meloni’s ultraconservative Brothers of Italy (FdI) party and minister for relations with parliament, said “the moment will come to extinguish the flame”.
“It’s a symbolic thing and like so many other symbolic things it’ll have its day, even if it won’t be abandoned completely,” he told Il Foglio newspaper in November.
Meloni, the most right-wing Italian leader since 1945, has tried to distance herself from the legacy of her nationalist party, which was founded in 2012 and has its roots in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI).
As a young activist in 1996, she said she believed World War II-era fascist ruler Benito Mussolini had been a “good politician”. She now claims that those nostalgic for fascism “have no place” in Italian political life.
Her opponents, including some members in her own party, regularly call for the removal of the flame in the green, white and red of the Italian flag, which inspired France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen when he created the far-right National Front in 1972.
According to some analysts, the base of the logo represents Mussolini’s tomb in his home town of Predappio, which still attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.
The flame was incorporated into the FdI logo in 2014.
Several senior FdI officials make no secret of their admiration for the fascist regime, which introduced “racial laws” against Jews in 1938.
The current Senate president and FdI co-founder Ignazio La Russa is a former activist in MSI and collects busts of “Il Duce”.
Last month, the ultraconservative Libero Quotidiano newspaper, run by a former Meloni government spokesman, published a front-page photo of Mussolini with the headline: “Man of the Year.”
In an editorial, it accused the left of exploiting history for political ends.
More than two years after Meloni took office in October 2022, FdI remains the country’s leading party and her approval rating, although down 16 points, is at 42 percent, according to an Ipsos poll published on Thursday.
“I have done nothing to be ashamed off,” Meloni told the Corriere della Sera.
If Meloni stays in power until her third anniversary in October 2025, her government will become one of the three longest in the post-war period.
(AFP)