Gianfranco Fini - Early years, Coalition, Controversies

Italian politician, born in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, N Italy. He became leader of the neo-Fascist MSI or Movimento sociale italiano (Italian Social Movement) (1987–90, 1991–5). In 1994, to rid the party of its connection with Fascism, he helped establish AN (Alleanza Nazionale). In 1995 the MSI joined with AN and he was elected president.

For the Argentine artist Leonor Fini, see Leonor Fini.

Gianfranco Fini (born January 3, 1952) is an Italian politician.

Fini was born in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna.

Early years

National Secretary of Fronte della Gioventù ("Youth Front") in 1977, he was first elected as a representative to the Camera dei Deputati (or Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian Parliament) on June 26, 1983 with the far-right MSI-DN party.

In the 1990s he gradually began to move the party away from its loosely neo-fascist political line towards a mainstream conservative ideology.

In January 1995, at a party conference in the town Fiuggi, not far from Rome, he was officially elected president of the then newly-formed Alleanza Nazionale, a position he has held ever since.

Coalition

Fini and his party have been part of Berlusconi's center-right House of Freedoms coalition which won the 1994 and 2001 parliamentary election.

Controversies

Although the National Alliance draws most of its electoral support from Italy's south, Gianfranco Fini is a native of the rich northern city of Bologna - itself, paradoxically, a traditional communist stronghold.

He remains the politician who in 1992 and 1994 praised Italy's wartime dictator Benito Mussolini as “the greatest statesman of the twentieth century” and declared that “Fascism has a tradition of honesty, correctness and good government”.

During a visit to the Fosse Ardeatine - where 335 Italians, most of them Jews, were killed by the Germans on 24 March 1944, to pay homage to the victims, he took the opportunity to declare: “Nobody can ask us to deny our past, to break a continuity that is rooted at the base of our party, at the very moment when we are saying clearly that we have no desire to restore fascism. Not neo-fascists” Later in 1994, Fini went on to declare in parliament: “Anti-fascism was an essential moment in Italy’s return to the values of democracy.”

He was in Genoa during the 27th G-8 Summit and maintained close contact with the police and security forces.

During his first visit to Israel on 23-24 November 2003, he disowned fascism, claiming that it was an expression of “absolute evil”, and denounced the racist laws that were imposed under fascism, adding that many Italians had acted with "laziness, indifference, complicity and cowardice" in not opposing the anti-Jewish laws introduced in 1938 in imitation of Nazi Germany.

This led Mussolini's granddaughter, Alessandra, a longtime member of the MSI/AN, to leave the party (saying her family's honour had been abused) and found her own party, Libertà di Azione - Freedom for Action (later renamed Azione Sociale), which would ally itself with other neo-fascist parties in Alternativa Sociale.

However, Fini can take comfort from an opinion poll, published last month, suggesting that his recent condemnation of fascism has the support of 70% of National Alliance supporters.

It is a further stage in the effort by Fini to detach the party, now part of the ruling government coalition, from its fascist heritage after the cosmetic changes that were decided in Fiuggi on 27 January 1995.

Members of his own party were none too happy with the new line.

As well as making clear repudiations of Italy's fascist past and calling for votes for non-citizen immigrants, Fini has taken up other positions that run contrary to the fascist tradition in Italy.

Gianfranco Fini is still left with the problem of how to renew the leadership of his party.

In the campaign for the referenda of June 2005, concerning the Italian law on artificial insemination techniques, considered by some the most restrictive in the world except for Costa Rica's, Fini surprisingly declared he would vote "Yes" to three of four referenda, splitting his own party, which is more aligned with the Catholic Church.

On January 29, 2006, after the approval by the Senate of the Fini-sponsored drug bill (equiparation of marijuana to class 1 drugs such as heroin or cocaine for dealers and fines for consumption) Fini, guest on the popular TV-Show Che tempo che fa, hosted by Fabio Fazio, admitted to having smoked marijuana while on vacation in Jamaica with a few friends, which in his words "made me sick for two days".

Two National Alliance MPs offered their backing to Paolo Di Canio, the Serie A player fined for giving the straight-arm salute and proposed a collection to pay the €10,000 penalty imposed on the Lazio forward by Italian football's disciplinary authority.

Among those who endorsed the whipround was Fini's wife, Daniela.

Fini's spokesman, Salvatore Sottile, has been arrested in the scandal the involved pretender Vittorio Emanuele III and other political figures during June 2006.