The monologue of the writer Antonio Scuratioriginally intended to be read at What will bethe Rai broadcast hosted by Serena Bortone, it’s just the latest bone of contention about April 25th: over the years the Liberation Day, despite its unitary and national vocation, has often been at the center of political controversies.
If we go back in time, the national anniversary began to be the subject of disputes and “distortions of memory” – as the political scientist defined them Michele Salvati – since the early post-war years: in 1948, after the exclusion of the left from the government, a celebration began divided between the poles of the Christian Democrats, which aimed at national reconciliation through the story of the Resistance, and the Communist Party, which instead insisted on the pre-eminence of the armed struggle.
We need to get to the sixtiesas Giovanni Belardelli noted on Sheetto arrive at the first real “officialization” of the Liberation Day: It was 1965 when the socialist leader Pietro Nenni spoke in Milan on April 25th as an anniversary “now the nation’s heritage”. After 1968, however, the date returned to the center of the dispute, becoming the emblem of a spirit of the Resistance which, according to the extra-parliamentary left, had been betrayed by the progressive parties.
Subsequently, if we consider with an en passant mention the appropriation of the Liberation by some acronyms of the “red” terrorism of the seventiesto get to more recent frictions we need to quickly rewind to the governments of Silvio Berlusconi: in the years of his executives, 25 April also became an opportunity to demonstrate anti-Berlusconism on the left, but not only: in his first anniversary as Prime Minister , in 2002, Berlusconi issued an official note inviting us to “remember and honor” the figure of Edgardo Sogno, monarchist, anti-fascist and anti-communist, as well as a coup plotter in the Seventies.
Years later, in 2009, Berlusconi took part in a conference for the first time procession for April 25th in Onna, near L’Aquila which had just been hit by the earthquake, and officially proposes to convert Liberation Day into a «Freedom Day» against any totalitarianism. Nothing will be done about it, but the prime minister will reuse the expression with the following year’s celebrations; the following one, 2011, will even see an attempt to abolish April 25th and then, through the proposal of the People of Freedom deputy Fabio Garagnani, to move the holiday to April 18th, the day of the victory of the DC in the ’48 elections, those that will relegate the left to the opposition for decades.
In the last few years, on April 25th he ended up in the eye of the storm almost always due to the difficult coexistence of pieces of its history participating in the processions that commemorate it in Italian cities: the Jewish Brigade, a British military formation made up of men from Israel who fought on the Italian front since ’44, has often been the subject of protests from groups of the extra-parliamentary left, so much so that they defected several Anpi processions. This year, with Israel’s war in Gaza still ongoing, the controversy has heated up further.
Between 2022 and 2023, another international situation entered into the corners of national divisions on April 25: the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought about different political formations (Radicals, More Europe, Action) to promote Liberation celebrations to be extended to the Ukrainian people; a proposal that was not liked by the left and some protesters present at the celebrations in Milan, who in 2022 called the then secretary of the Democratic Party Enrico Letta a “servant of NATO”.
He has been writing about current affairs and culture in Italian newspapers for a decade. He has worked in the editorial offices of Rivista Studio, Forbes and Wired. His Culture Wars newsletter recounts every week the cases in which new codes and discourses around “political correctness” reshape the world in which we live.
