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.
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