Back to the Post-Fascist Past or Landing in the Populist Radical Right? The Brothers of Italy Between Continuity and Change

ABSTRACT

Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) is the new rising star of Italian politics. Scholars and pundits briskly categorised it as a (new) populist radical right (PRR) party. Still, FdI’s newness needs to be properly framed. A splinter party of the Popolo della Libertà, it claims a direct lineage with the Alleanza Nazionale – two cases not easily agglutinated into the PRR family. The article analyses the (dis)continuity associated with FdI, examining ideology, organisation, and the continuity of elites. It demonstrates that FdI’s organisation and political elites largely overlap with its predecessor parties. However, FdI accomplished a major ideological rebranding, positioning itself as radically different from both the mainstream centre-right and the post-fascist tradition of the Italian right.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• Italian politics
• Fratelli d’Italia
• new parties
• party elites
• party ideology
• party organisation
• Giorgia Meloni

Acknowledgement

An early version of this paper was presented at the 2021 Conference of the Italian Political Science Association in the panel ‘Until you changed yourself, you could not change the others: exploring challenger parties’ institutionalisation’. The authors would like to thank all the participants in this event, and in particular Sorina Soare and Davide Vittori for their invaluable comments, the two anonymous referees of the article for their insightful suggestions and the editors of SESP for their guidance and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2126247

Notes

1. It should be remembered that in the context of the investiture vote, all the MPs who later founded FdI voted in favour of the Monti cabinet.

2. The MEPs of the party, elected in 2009 with the PdL, remained however within the European People’s Party group until 2014.

3. GAL/TAN is an acronym for Green, Alternative, Liberal/Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist. It was introduced in the framework of CHES in order to measure party positions on the cultural dimension of political competition (Hooghe, Marks & Wilson 2002).

4. Dipartimenti e Laboratori Tematici, available at https://www.fratelli-italia.it/dipartimenti-e-laboratori-tematici/ (last accessed August 18, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonardo Puleo

Leonardo Puleo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of European Studies/CEVIPOL - Université Libre de Bruxelles. He received his PhD from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and the University of Florence in June 2021. His main research interests concern party competition, with a focus on the impact of challenger parties and the spreading of illiberal ideas.

Gianluca Piccolino

Gianluca Piccolino is a postdoctoral researcher at Istituto Diritto, Politica, Sviluppo (Dirpolis) of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. His research interests focus on populist and extremist parties and European Union politics.