Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has ruled out removing the tricolour flame from her party's logo, despite calls in her own camp to ditch the fascist symbols.
"Removing the flame was never an issue on the agenda," Meloni said.
Her comments came after Luca Ciriani, a member of the prime minister's ultraconservative Italian Brothers party and minister for parliamentary relations, said "the time will come to extinguish the flame."
"It is a symbolic thing and like so many other symbolic things, its turn will come even if it is not completely abandoned," he explained in November.
Meloni is the most far-right Italian leader since 1945. She is trying to distance herself from the legacy of her nationalist party, founded in 2012, whose roots lie in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, AFP reported.
As a young activist in 1996, she declared that she believed World War II-era fascist ruler Benito Mussolini was a "good politician." Now she argues that fascist nostalgics "have no place" in Italian political life.
Her opponents, including some members of her own party, regularly call for the removal of the green, white and red flame of the Italian flag that inspired Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen when he created the far-right National Front in 1972.
Some analysts say the base of the logo represents Mussolini's tomb in his hometown of Predapio, which still attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year.
In 2014, the flame was incorporated into the Italian Brothers logo.
Several senior officials of the Italian Brothers make no secret of their admiration for the fascist regime, which introduced "race laws" against Jews in 1938.
The current President of the Senate and co-founder of the Italian Brothers, Ignazio La Russa, is a former activist of the Italian Social Movement and collects busts of "The Duce".
More than two years after Meloni took office in October 2022, her party remains the country's leading party. Its approval rating, though down 16 points, is 42%, according to an Ipsos poll.
"I have done nothing to be ashamed of," Meloni pointed out.
If she remains in power until her third anniversary in October 2025, her government will become one of the three longest in the post-war period. | BGNES
