GIANFRANCO FINI, the Italian deputy Prime Minister, who once called Mussolini the greatest statesman of the 20th century, has sought to make a decisive break with his extremist past by delivering an uncompromising condemnation of Fascism and anti-Semitism during a visit to Israel.

In Italy yesterday, Signor Fini’s statement was widely seen as an attempt to reposition himself as a viable centre-right successor to Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister.

Signor Fini, a former neo-Fascist youth leader, said in Jerusalem that he had decisively broken with the legacy of Mussolini, whose dictatorship he described as “absolute evil”.

After laying a wreath at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Signor Fini — wearing a Jewish skull cap — condemned Fascism as “a shameful chapter in the history of the Italian people”. He said that too many Italians had failed to oppose Mussolini’s “disgraceful and shameful” anti-Semitic race laws in 1938 because of a mixture of complacency, collaboration and fear.

Signor Fini gave a warning that “the weeds of anti-Semitism” still flourished and urged all Europeans to “uproot” them. Under Mussolini, 6,000 Italian Jews were deported to Nazi death camps.

Signor Fini, 51, heads the “post-Fascist” Alleanza Nazionale, which he forged into a mainstream conservative party in 1995 from the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the neo-Fascist successor to Mussolini’s Blackshirts.

Alleanza Nazionale is the second-largest party in Signor Berlusconi’s coalition of the Centre Right and Signor Fini served as Italy’s delegate to the European convention drawing up the new European Union constitution.

Mirko Tremaglia, a minister in the Berlusconi coalition who was a member of Mussolini’s last government, said that he would “resist to the last” any attempt by Signor Fini to erase the last vestiges of Fascism by altering the Alleanza Nazionale party logo, which incorporates a Fascist flame. Signor Tremaglia said that he was still proud of having served Mussolini during the dictator’s last stand before being murdered by partisans in 1945. He said that Fascism had been a “complex phenomenon” and to condemn it wholesale as shameful or evil was “not the way to win credibility with the Italian people”.

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