# Brothers of Italy *Fratelli d'Italia* — the governing party of Italy since October 2022, named after the first line of the national anthem, and the end point of the longest continuous organizational lineage on the European right. ## The Line **Republican Fascist Party (Salò) → [[Italian Social Movement]] (1946) → [[National Alliance (Italy)]] (1995) → People of Freedom (2009) → Brothers of Italy (2012).** Founded in December 2012 by [[Giorgia Meloni]], Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto out of the wreckage of the People of Freedom, all three of them formed in the MSI's youth organizations. The party kept the **tricolour flame** — the MSI's symbol since 1946, read for eighty years as the flame burning over Mussolini's tomb — and put it on the ballot paper. **That the logo survived every rebrand is the single most informative fact about the party.** Names were changed three times; the symbol never was. ## The Ascent | Election | Result | |---|---| | 2013 | 1.96% — barely above the threshold | | 2018 | **4.4%** | | 2022 (25 Sept) | **26.0%**, 119 deputies and 65 senators; coalition 43.8% | | 2024 European | 28.8%, first party | | Aug 2026 average | **27.0%** | **From 4% to 26% in four years.** The mechanism was not persuasion; it was position. FdI was the only significant party to stay out of the Conte II and Draghi grand coalitions, and it collected the entire opposition vote of a country that had been governed by national-unity cabinets for three years. Its coalition partners, the **Lega** and **Forza Italia**, were inside those governments and were punished for it. The lesson generalizes and the vault should hold it plainly: **in a system of permanent grand coalitions, the sole abstainer inherits everything.** ## In Government The record refuses to be simple. Atlanticist and pro-Ukraine in foreign policy against its own coalition partner's instincts; hard-restrictionist on migration and NGO rescue at home; institutionally ambitious — a rewritten RAI leadership, the **Albania protocol**, direct election of the prime minister, and the judicial reform that voters rejected in March 2026. Its European home is the **European Conservatives and Reformists** group, which Meloni chairs — deliberately not the harder-right bloc that houses [[AfD]] and the party of [[Marine Le Pen]]. That choice is the whole strategy in one procedural decision. ## The Pressure Now [[Roberto Vannacci]]'s **Futuro Nazionale**, launched June 2026, polls **6.6%** — ahead of the Lega — on the argument that FdI moderated once it had power. One sitting FdI deputy has already defected. The party's problem is no longer legitimacy; it is that legitimacy has a price, and somebody is now collecting it. ## See Also - [[Giorgia Meloni]] · [[Italian Social Movement]] · [[National Alliance (Italy)]] · [[Gianfranco Fini]] - [[Roberto Vannacci]] · [[Matteo Salvini]] · [[Silvio Berlusconi]] - [[National Conservatism]] · [[Global New Right Network]] · [[Viktor Orbán]] · [[Vox (Spain)]] - [[Italian History Hub]]