Italy opens parliament proceedings with speech by Holocaust survivor

A 20-minute speech by senator-for-life Liliana Segre in Italy’s upper chamber of parliament received four standing ovations on Thursday as the 92-year-old holocaust survivor opened the Senate’s first session for the new legislature.

Both chambers met for the first time on Thursday after Italy held a snap election last month that saw the far-right Brothers of Italy win with 26 percent of the vote. Its leader Giorgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, is expected to be nominated prime minister and lead a right-wing coalition that includes Silvio Berlusconi’s centrist Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s anti-migrant League.

“Today, I am particularly moved by the role that fate holds for me,” Liliana Segre said in her speech.

“In this month of October, which marks the centenary of the March on Rome that began the Fascist dictatorship, it falls to me to temporarily assume the presidency of this temple of democracy, which is the Senate of the Republic.”

Segre, who was sitting in for a more senior senator who couldn’t attend, took note of the “symbolic value” of the coincidence.

“The chilling shadow of war once again hovers over our Europe, it’s close to us with all its burden of death, destruction, cruelty, terror,” the senator told the chamber, referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

As a child, Segre was deported to a Nazi concentration camp, becoming one of the few to survive to tell the story. After being deprived of an education as a child, she spent the last decades educating school children about her experience. She was nominated senator-for-life in 2018, and presides a special commission against intolerance, racism and antisemitism.

“It is impossible for me not to feel a kind of vertigo, remembering that that same little girl who on a day like this in 1938, disconsolate and lost, was forced by the racist laws to leave her elementary school bench empty. And that, by some strange fate, that same girl today finds herself on the most prestigious bench, in the Senate.”

Mussolini admirer elected as speaker

The opening sessions of the two chambers of parliament on Thursday saw MPs begin the process of electing new speakers for both houses, a key step ahead of the formation of a new government.

The elected speakers will then take part in discussions with President Sergio Mattarella on who should lead the next government.

By Thursday afternoon, MPs had elected as speaker of the Senate Ignazio La Russa, co-founder of the Brothers of Italy party alongside Giorgia Meloni.

In recent days, a video has emerged of the veteran politician and former defense minister showing off fascist memorabilia in his home – including a statue of Mussolini, photographs and medals. La Russa’s father was once a minister in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party established after the end of World War II. The party counted among its ranks former members of the Italian Social Republic, a Nazi puppet state established in northern Italy during the German occupation.

La Russa and Meloni were also activists in the youth wing of the movement before it became the National Alliance – a party that said it wanted to distance itself from fascism.

The new Senate speaker was also caught at least twice on video doing the Nazi salute – called the Roman salute in Italian. Once in Parliament in 2017, while arguing against a draft law that aimed at criminalizing it, and at a funeral.

During her election campaign, Meloni tried to project a moderate image and insisted her party and the Italian right have “handed fascism over to history.”