Heading opinion polls ahead of September 25’s snap general election, Giorgia Meloni is at pains to assert her Fratelli d’Italia party’s “Atlanticist” credentials. Her party is the heir to the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) created by defeated fascists in 1946, and its logo still includes the MSI tricolor flame symbolizing the revival of the old cause. Yet Meloni insists that the party’s Mussolinian connections lie long in the past — with its commitment to NATO supposedly proving its establishment bona fides.

Yet this also isn’t ever so new, even compared to the openly neofascist parties of past generations. While the MSI was a small and mostly marginal force in postwar Italian politics, already from the 1950s many of its lieutenants turned to seeking a place for themselves within the mainstream center-right, in the name of a shared anti-communism. The approach taken by “post-fascists” today is no sudden change of heart, but the product of a decades-old strategy, which already bore fruits when they entered national government as part of Silvio Berlusconi’s coalitions in the 1990s and 2000s.

Gregorio Sorgonà is author of La scoperta della destra: Il Movimento sociale italiano e gli Stati Uniti, a recent study of the MSI, its efforts to insert itself into the Western anti-communist mainstream, and its ties to US politics and society in postwar decades. Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to Sorgonà about this party and its lasting influence on today’s Italian far right.