“The Italian Constitution doesn’t contain the word ‘anti-fascism.’” So claimed Senate president Ignazio La Russa last Friday, explaining that in the constitutional debates that followed the defeat of Benito Mussolini’s regime, “the moderate parties didn’t want to offer such a gift to the [Communists] and the USSR.” Today holding the second-highest post in the Italian Republic, La Russa has long claimed that postwar “anti-fascism” was a Soviet-inspired ideology designed to silence right-wingers like himself. Ahead of today’s public holiday commemorating the Italian resistance against fascism, La Russa announced he would spend the day paying tribute to Jan Palach — the Czech student who self-immolated in protest of the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968 — as well as the victims of Nazism at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

This attempt to “both-sides” Liberation Day was surely controversial, not least because the Senate president is meant to be a neutral umpire of the Constitution. Many insisted that the document is anti-fascist in spirit throughout; that it specifically forbids the recreation of the Fascist Party; and that even Christian Democratic framers of this document did specify its anti-fascist, rather than just “non-fascist,” character.

Yet La Russa’s comments were also unsurprising, coming from a veteran neofascist well known for his efforts to relativize “both sides” of Italian history. As Silvio Berlusconi’s defense minister in 2008, he insisted at one memorial event that not only those who resisted Hitler’s invasion of Italy, but also fighters for the Nazi-collaborationist Salò Republic, should be seen “in objective terms,” as men who “subjectively, from their point of view, fought believing in the defense of the Fatherland.” Even in recent weeks, La Russa has trivialized the World War II–era resistance, falsely claiming that the 1944 partisan action at Rome’s Via Rasella targeted a “musical band of semi-pensioners,” when in fact it attacked a military police unit under SS command.