ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 presents the ideology of CasaPound as a set of normative beliefs about the role of man in society and about how contemporary societies shall be organized. The main goal is to see whether the specific ideological traits of CPI help understand the visibility of the group in public debates. The chapter opens with a discussion of how CPI articulates nativism (3.1) and authoritarianism (3.2) − the two core ideological features of the far right. The chapter then examines CPI’s stances on economic and social issues (3.3), before moving to the other themes that inform CPI’s worldview, such as EU integration, the environment, gender and international relations (3.4). Based on a set of interviews with the group’s leadership, as well as internal literature and extant scholarship, the chapter illustrates that CPI’s ideological platform constitutes a patchwork of ad hoc issues combining references to historical and post-war Fascism and themes inspired by topical events in public debates, which CPI addresses strategically to seize visibility in the public sphere.
