Italian Senate elects as president a Meloni ally who accumulates relics of the dictatorship

Italian senators have elected this Thursday as president of the Upper House Ignazio La Russa, one of the founders of Brothers of Italy and who exhibited in an interview four years ago a room in which he kept relics of the dictatorship, including a figure of Benito Mussolini.

La Russa has been elected with 116 votes, in a first political victory for the party of Giorgia Meloni that, however, has been marred by the rebuff of Forza Italia, which has symbolically shown its apparent discomfort with the management of the negotiations to share office.

Meloni has celebrated the election of “a patriot, a servant of the State, a lover of Italy.” He also recalled that for the Brothers of Italy he is “an irreplaceable reference”, insofar as he contributed to its formation after a political past linked at all times to neo-fascism, reports the RAI channel.

In fact, La Russa boasted in 2018 in an interview to ‘Il Corriere della Sera’ of a collection of memories of the dictatorship and references to Mussolini, in a video that has now become topical again due to his ascension to the second most authoritative position in Italy.

It so happens that the provisional presidency of the Senate in this inaugural session has been occupied, for age, by Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor who has invited the legislators to combat the messages of hatred, in a speech interrupted by applause on several occasions.