ABSTRACT
Until the 1990s, the musings of the renowned historian of Italian fascism, Renzo De Felice, as to the difficulties of establishing a legitimate right-wing political force in post-war Italy appeared to hold true. The right-wing label was associated with extremism and anti-democratic sentiment and regarded as a ‘taboo’ in Italian politics (Pasquino 2005; Sidoti 1992: 155). This perception had been fuelled by the historical role played by the Italian right and notably the multiple connections between the conservative and fascist right in Italian history. Since the foundation of the modern Italian state in the second half of the nineteenth century, the traditional conservative right had been easily swayed by authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies, with a substantial section of it generally being rather suspicious of democratic norms. This was illustrated by the accommodations reached by the conservative right and the fascist right in the early 1920s. The Italian conservative right generally shared the fascist distrust of liberal institutions, as well as the fascists’ virulent anticommunism. It eased the path to power of the fascists, believing that it could manipulate them in order to preserve and promote its own interests. As Roland Sarti notes, Italian conservatives showed very little ‘Burkean respect for institutions and processes received from the distant past’ (Sarti 1990: 14). Conservative forces in Italy have always been rather more attached to traditional symbols of authority such as family and church than to political institutions. Conservatives in Italy have supported authoritarian dictatorships when they felt that they could get away with it (prior to 1945 at least – although much the same could also be said of most European countries), or democratic constitutionalism where they felt they could maintain their interests or at least manage an inevitable change in conditions favourable to them. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the changed political climate meant that most conservatives saw the Christian Democratic (DC) party as a convenient vehicle for the promotion of their interests. The mass mobilisation
against fascism and the new international order, in which Italy was placed very much within the US sphere of influence, meant that a democratic system would prevail in the post-war period, the precise procedures of which were established by the new republican constitution drawn up by the constituent assembly in 1946-47. Most conservatives were content to work within the newly constituted liberal democratic system, in which the exclusion of the communist left from power became the unwritten first article.
