Fini, Gianfranco

(1952– )

   Architect of the recent transformation of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano/Italian Social Movement (MSI) into a new, conservative party, Gianfranco Fini is one of the smoothest performers in contemporary Italian politics. In the 1980s, the Bologna-born Fini was controversially chosen by Giorgio Almirante as his successor. Accordingly, in 1987, Fini became party secretary; after Almirante’s death, he assumed the leadership of the MSI’s conservative wing. In 1990, at a party congress in Rome that was marred by fisticuffs between the factions, the MSI elected Giuseppe “Pino” Rauti, the ideologue of so-called fascism of the left, to the secretaryship, although Fini’s outstanding final speech consolidated his personal standing within the movement. Rauti’s attempt to transform the MSI into a campaigning anticapitalist force quickly proved itself a failure with the MSI’s ultraconservative electorate, and Fini returned to the party leadership in time for the collapse of the party system in 1992. In December 1993, when he was narrowly defeated for the mayorship of Rome, Fini proved that there was a reservoir of former Democrazia Cristiana/Christian Democracy Party (DC) voters who were willing to vote for the MSI if the movement presented itself as a party of Catholic conservatives that had turned its back on its Fascist past. In a masterstroke of political presentation, Fini put together an electoral pact called the Alleanza Nazionale/National Alliance (AN). Apart from a few former DC rightists and a handful of conservative professors, the pact was the MSI by another name. In alliance with Silvio Berlusconi in the “Good Government Pole,” the AN obtained twice as many votes as the former MSI in the general elections of March 1994 and entered Berlusconi’s short-lived government. Fini, who tainted his growing reputation by calling Benito Mussolini the “greatest statesman of the 20th century” shortly after the 1994 poll, completed the transformation of the MSI into the AN in January 1995 at a conference in Fiuggi, near Rome, that explicitly rejected core aspects of the MSI’s ideological heritage. This process of intellectual democratization was carried on at a second conference in Verona in 1998. Fini has also worked hard to distance the party from the anti-Semitic heritage of the 1938 racial laws. Making atonement for the past, Fini has visited Israel, and as foreign minister during the latter stages of the 2001–2006 Berlusconi government tilted Italian government policy in a pro-Israeli direction. The AN remains a medium-sized party that has underachieved in electoral terms. Fini’s achievement, however, has been to legitimize the postfascists as an authentic mainstream conservative party. As recently as the late 1990s, Fini’s appointment as foreign minister would have aroused ferocious debate throughout the European Union (EU).

   See also Casa delle Liberta (CDL).