ROME: Twelve members of Italy’s fringe group CasaPound have been jailed for seeking to revive the Fascist Party, which ruled from 1922 to 1943 under dictator Benito Mussolini.
It is the first time a law which bans the “reorganization of the dissolved Fascist party,” has been applied to the neo-fascist group, the Repubblica daily said Friday.
The case dates to 2018, when CasaPound members attacked people who attended a protest against Matteo Salvini, head of the anti-immigrant League party and then interior minister.
All defendants were convicted on Wednesday by a court in Bari in southern Italy and given 18 months in jail.
Seven were also sentenced to 12 months for assault.
Elly Schlein, head of the center-left opposition Democratic Party, called on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government to ban the group.
“Now that there’s a ruling that establishes it, the government has no choice but to do what we’ve been asking of it for a long time: dissolve Casapound, dissolve neo-fascist organizations as laid out in the constitution,” she said.
CasaPound, which is based in Rome, takes its name from Ezra Pound, the modernizt American poet who collaborated with Fascist Italy during World War II.
In parliamentary elections in 2013 and 2018, the group won less than one percent of the vote. It subsequently decided not to contest polls.
CasaPound members have been filmed making the Fascist salute in Rome, an action that current Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi condemned in 2024 as “contrary to our democratic culture.”
However, he said at the time that it was complicated to ban such groups, saying the law only allowed for this in very limited circumstances.
Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party has its roots in the MSI, a party founded by supporters of Mussolini after World War II.
However, the prime minister has condemned Fascism and acknowledged Fascist Italy’s complicity in the Holocaust.