By Mark Lowen BBC Rome reporter Image source, Reuters Image caption, Giorgia Meloni, 45, leads Italy’s reactionary Brothers of Italy celebration For 40 years, Anna Maria Tortora hasactually offered her ripe tomatoes and fresh cucumbers to faithful consumers at her market stall in Rome. Little did she understand that the young lady who utilized to line up holding the hand of her grandpa might be Italy’s next prime minister. With that little lady, Giorgia Meloni, now the frontrunner to lead Italy, Anna Maria swells with pride: “I brought her up on my beans! She consumed well, and she grew up well.” The market is in Garbatella, a working-class southern area of Rome and generally a bastion of the left. It’s an incongruous origin for a politicalleader who might endupbeing Italy’s veryfirst reactionary prime minister giventhat Benito Mussolini after elections next month. “She’s not agent of this location, which is traditionally red,” states Marta, a consumer pressing her pram past the veggie stalls. Her senior mom, Luciana, informs me she’s afraid of the possibility. “I’m exceptionally anti-fascist,” she includes. “If she gets in, it will be a really awful duration.” Image caption, Anna Maria and the veggies that Giorgia Meloni was “brought up on” The fascist label is something that Giorgia Meloni emphatically declines. Her celebration, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), is leading in the viewpoint surveys and, speaking in English, Spanish and French in a current video, she firmlyinsisted it had consigned the ideology to history. But history is part of the issue in a nation which had no comparable of Germany’s de-Nazification after the war, enabling fascist celebrations to reform. Founded in 2012, Brothers of Italy has its political roots in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which increased from the ashes of Mussolini’s fascism. The celebration keeps the logodesign of post-war reactionary celebrations: the tricolour flame, typically viewed as the fire burning on Mussolini’s burialplace. “Giorgia Meloni doesn’t desire to drop the sign since it’s the identity she can’t escape from; it’s her youth,” states Gianluca Passarelli, a teacher of political science at Rome’s Sapienza University. “Her celebration is not fascist,” he describes. “Fascism implies to get power and damage
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