Jackboot-in-mouth ails Italy's right

BEFORE even taking power, Italy's victorious right is struggling to control its extreme elements. Yesterday the Freedom Alliance was trying to limit the fall-out from the call by a neo-Fascist deputy for the return of Adriatic territory lost to Yugoslavia after the Second World War.

Mirko Tremaglia said on Thursday that Italy had a historic claim to the Istrian peninsula and Dalmatia, now part of Slovenia and Croatia. Istria was part of Italy until it was ceded to Yugoslavia in 1947, and Dalmatia was occupied by Italy during the Second World War. Mr Tremaglia declared that Italy should tear up the treaty of Osimo, signed with the former Yugoslavia in 1975, which settled the border between Italy and Slovenia. This is the official neo-Fascist line, but whereas it was treated as a joke while the party was in the political wilderness, the prospect of neo-fascists in government is ringing alarm bells in Italy and abroad.

'Such statements never contribute to a friendly atmosphere between states,' the Croatian embassy in Rome said in a statement. The Slovenian ambassador told Reuters that questioning established borders 'was out of date with the situation in Europe' and affected minorities in both countries. The neo- Fascists' partners, Forza Italia and the Northern League, distanced themselves swiftly from Mr Tremaglia's call. 'Such positions are unrealistic,' said Livio Caputo, a Forza Italia senator. And Roberto Maroni, the league's deputy leader, said: 'The Osimo question is an artificial problem.' Beniamino Andreatta, the outgoing centrist Foreign Minister, said it was absurd to bring up the border issue again. Mr Tremiglia has also called for Italy to block Slovenia's request - due to be discussed in Brussels on Wednesday - for an association accord with the European Union until the new republic improves compensation for Italians forced out at the end of the war.

Adding to the embarrassment of the mainstream right is the latest outburst by Irene Pivetti, their controversial Chamber of Deputies Speaker. Ms Pivetti, a League deputy, stoked the debate over her suitability for high office by becoming the latest member of the future government to praise Mussolini.

She told the right-wing Italia Settimanale: 'Mussolini has done more than anyone for women and the family, nothing has been done since then.' Ms Pivetti, 31, added that although she was not a fascist, 'I am bright enough to recognise the positive things that fascism achieved before the disastrous pact with Hitler'. Marco Pannella, the former Radical Party leader but now, like Ms Pivetti, part of the Alliance, called her 'a disgrace to the Second Republic'.

Giulia Picco, a feminist and writer, said Ms Pivetti had wiped out decades of achievement in women's rights. 'Mussolini's main interest in women was as brood mares for a new generation of young fascists,' she said.

Ms Pivetti's comments are doubly provocative, since an outcry had only just died down over remarks made by the neo-Fascist leader, Gianfranco Fini, praising Mussolini as 'the greatest statesman of the century'. Her imposition on the Chamber as Speaker by the Alliance last Saturday caused deep misgivings among the opposition, not only because she is the youngest and most inexperienced person to hold the post, but because of her track record of anti-Semitic and bigoted religious statements.

In November 1992 she referred in a newspaper article to an outcry over the spraying of Stars of David on Jewish shopkeepers' windows as 'hysterical witch-hunts'. It was an excuse, she said, 'for the over-sensitivity of a band of young Jews itching for a fight'. She continued: 'From the Second World War to today, the Jews in our country have always been able to retain the religious, cultural and racial minority identity that they guard so jealously; only marrying between themselves, considering themselves the chosen people, ever-expanding the considerable economic, intellectual and political influence of their community.'

When the Anti-Semitism World Report cited these comments as cause for concern last summer, Ms Pivetti made a formal request to parliament for protection against what she called 'Jewish freemasonry'.

Known by admirers as well as detractors as 'Joan of Arc' for her ultra-Catholic fervour (she is a supporter of the French traditionalist, Archbishop Lefebvre) Ms Pivetti maintains that other religions have to be considered inferior, since Catholicism 'is the only true, revealed religion'. In a recent interview published in La Repubblica she said: 'We cannot uncritically support the declaration of the rights of man when it stipulates full freedom of religious belief for all. Everyone must share the Catholic faith. What can I learn from a Muslim?' Her outbursts stirred her party leader, Umberto Bossi, not known himself for tact and diplomacy, to comment: 'Like all Catholics, Irene is often prey to the sort of fundamentalism worthy of (Ayatollah) Khomeini.'

(Photograph omitted)