'Unsettling' passage from Segre to La Russa say Jews

(ANSA) - ROME, OCT 13 - The passage from Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre who led Thursday's Senate session to elect a new Speaker and the newly elected Speaker Ignazio La Russa was "unsettling" because the latter grew up in neofascist circles and did not seem to have buried his past, Jewish Pages, the daily of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities, said after the election of the Brothers of Italy (FdI) bigwig.
    "A standing ovation in Palazzo Madama for Liliana Segre, called to preside over the first session of the new Senate that then elected Ignazio Benito Maria La Russa to the second highest institutional post in the Italian State," it said.
    "A symbolic passage and according to various observers and unsettling one between a woman persecuted by Nazi-Fascism in her youth and a political figure who grew up in the milieux of the neofascist far right and who does not seem to have settled his accounts with that past very well".
    La Russa, 75, is a former member of the postwar neo-fascist MSI party which was founded by members of Benito Mussolini's Fascist party.
    Segre, 92, was deported to Auschwitz as a girl.
    FdI leader and likely first Italian woman premier Giorgia Meloni has stressed that the Italian right has handed over Fascism to history many years ago and the FdI shares values and policies with Britain's Tories and US Republicans. (ANSA).