Italy’s New President of the Senate Has Basement Full of WWII Fascist Memorabilia

ROME—On the first cold rainy day in the Italian capital after the long hot summer, Italian senators elected their president, Ignazio Benito Maria La Russa, who openly collects World War II Fascist memorabilia, including busts and statues of the dictator Benito Mussolini in his basement. His father was the secretary of the Fascist Party under Mussolini, and some of the tokens are directly tied to il Duce, he told an Italian television crew who were allowed into the trophy room.

His election was held against the backdrop of Italy’s Sept. 25 elections, in which Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party became the furthest right-leaning government elected in Italy since the end of World War II. La Russa won despite coalition member Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party abstaining, having wanted Berlusconi—back after being banned from office for a decade due to tax crimes—for the job. The extra votes were garnered from 17 opposition members who clearly don’t oppose all that much and who will give the far-right majority even more power if the first test serves as precedent.

La Russa has served as Italy’s defense minister and is well known in international circles. He has kept his views on the continuing of Russian sanctions close to his chest, but he has previously spoken in favor of Vladmir Putin. Party leader and Italy’s likely next prime minister Giorgia Meloni has urged her party members to side with Ukraine, and says her first state visit after being sworn in could be to Kyiv.

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La Russa’s election paves the way for the election of the leader of the lower house of parliament, which is expected to go to a member of the far-right Lega party led by Donald Trump fan Matteo Salvini.

The new parliament, which is a slimmed down version of previous parliaments thanks to changes made in the last government before it fell, was opened by Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre who, at 92, reminded lawmakers that October 25 will mark the 100th anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome. “It is impossible for me not to feel a kind of vertigo remembering that the same little girl who, on a day like this in 1938, disconsolate and lost, was forced by racist laws to leave her empty desk at primary school, is now, by a strange twist of fate, at the most prestigious desk in the senate,” she said to applause before the vote and before she handed the symbolic opening bell to La Russa.

Meloni is expected to be sworn in as Italy’s first female prime minister on Oct. 21.

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