A minister in Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has proposed removing the green, white and red flame in her party’s logo, which recalls the fascism of wartime dictator Benito Mussolini, a news release said Thursday.
“If we want to look ahead, the time will come to extinguish the flame,” Parliamentary Relations Minister Luca Ciriani told Il Foglio newspaper.
The flame in Italy’s national colors comes from the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party founded by Mussolini’s followers in 1946. It is seen as symbolic of the eternal flame that burns on Mussolini’s grave.
In 1995, the MSI became the more moderate National Alliance (AN), which retained its symbol, and the AN evolved in 2012 into the Brothers of Italy, the party Meloni leads.
Ciriani, leader of Meloni’s party in the Senate, stressed that the flame was a thing of the past, adding that the time would come to remove it from the party’s logo. “It may not be soon, but it will come,” he said.
Senate President Ignazio La Russa, a member of the same party, was noncommittal. “At some point, remove the flame? Sooner or later, the world will also end,” he said.
Another senior party member, Fabio Rampelli, vice president of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, rejected the idea.
“Almost 30% of Italians placed their cross under our symbol. It doesn’t seem to me that people have a problem with it. On the contrary, perhaps they vote for us precisely because we have the flame,” the newspaper Corriere della Sera said. quoted him.
