Italians Mark WWII Victory Over Fascism

ROME —  Italians by the hundreds of thousands paraded through cities up and down the peninsula Monday to celebrate the World War II victory over fascism in a country where the political heirs of dictator Benito Mussolini are now returning to power for the first time in half a century.

After decades in extremist disgrace, Italian neo-fascists are partners in a winning election alliance and can expect key ministerial posts in a new right-wing government to be formed later this week.

Liberation Day celebrations marking the end of the Mussolini era in 1945 filled streets and piazzas Monday from Genoa to Rome to Naples.

The biggest crowd gathered in rain-scourged downtown Milan under a vast patchwork of banners and umbrellas before the city’s landmark Gothic cathedral. “Without memory there is no future,” read one soggy banner in a crowd of mainly leftist and centrist opposition supporters.

Monday’s parades offered an implicit reminder to media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi that anti-fascism and democracy must remain cornerstones of the fledgling “Second Republic” spawned last month in an election that ousted political parties that have ruled Italy since the war.

Berlusconi, who watched the marches on television, will probably be asked to form a government Wednesday. He and his newly founded, assertively free-market Forza Italia (Go Italy) party won last month’s election in alliance with neo-fascists led by Gianfranco Fini and northern federalists under Umberto Bossi.

Police feared that left-right tensions might spawn violence during the commemorations, but they passed without serious incident. In Milan, police had to form a protective wedge around Bossi, who marched amid jostling and heckling from leftists who reviled him for aligning with the neo-fascists.

Bossi, head of the Northern League, dismissed the incident as sour grapes, but Monday’s massive nationwide turnout at the invitation of leftist parties and associations of partisans who fought the Nazis underlined concern about the rise of the right.

Fini and Bossi are both pledged to the democratic system, but signs of intolerance and authoritarianism among their supporters worry some opponents.

Fini--who heads the National Alliance, which sprang from the shards of fascism--bypassed the demonstrations Monday to attend a memorial Mass with party members and sympathizers in Rome.

President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro is scheduled to end a leisurely round of consultations with political leaders today. On Wednesday, he will probably name a prime minister-designate--Berlusconi by all accounts. Then it will be up to the 57-year-old self-made billionaire to assemble a Cabinet and government program convincing enough to win the consent of both houses of Parliament.