Vita gazette – The holder of the second important seat after the President was elected in the country. The founder of the Fratelli d’Italia was elected to the highest seat of Palazzo Madama. Ignazio La Russa is the new president of the Senate, elected with 116 votes (out of a majority of 104). Sixty-five blank ballots, while two votes went to Liliana Segre, who chairs the Chamber, and the same for Calderoli.

The right-wing coalition elected Ignazio La Russa, one of the founders of the Fratelli d’Italia together with Giorgia Meloni, as president of the Senate. The new president of the Senate is a well-known face of Italian politics and has a long institutional curriculum. In addition to being defence minister for three years in the last Berlusconi government, La Russa was vice president of both the House and the Senate.

His heart is always right

With the heart always on the right, from the extreme one of the 70s to that of today. For 50 years, Ignazio Benito Maria La Russa has been one of the protagonists of Italian politics and the chair of President of the Senate represents the high point of his long career.

Fathers and sons: National Fascist Party

Ignazio Benito La Russa is originally from Catania, he was born 75 years ago in Paternò. His father Antonino had been secretary of the National Fascist Party of the city and after the war he was elected senator with the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the party that gathered those nostalgic for fascism. Both Ignatius and his younger brother Romano followed their father and began a militancy in the Youth Front, the youth section of the MSI.

Youth Front

After studying in Switzerland and then in Pavia, Ignazio La Russa began to practice as a lawyer and became politically involved. At the beginning of the seventies, he became head of the Youth Front.

As a criminal lawyer, in the 1980s, he represented the family of Sergio Ramelli, a militant student of the Youth Front killed in Milan on April 29, 1975, by a group of left-wing militants. He played in the Youth Front (he was the epic protest on 1 December 1989 in Milan against the former president of the Soviet Union Michail Gorbachev) and then in the Italian Social Movement.

In the eighties and nineties, La Russa was elected to the regional council of Lombardy and then to the municipal council of San Donato Milanese. In 1995 he joined the so-called “Fiuggi turning point” promoted by Gianfranco Fini, the operation with which the then party secretary transformed the MSI into a National Alliance, trying to soften and blur the party’s ties with the fascist past. With the new La Russa party, he was elected to the House without interruption until 2008, when he ran for Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL). In 2009 the National Alliance entered the PDL and La Russa became its national coordinator.

With Berlusconi

Thanks to the rapprochement with Berlusconi, winner of the 2008 elections, La Russa was Minister of Defense until 2011. Four years after the fall of that government, he said he was the one who convinced Berlusconi to participate in the international military intervention in Libya in 2011 which led to the removal and death of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi.

Brothers of Italy

In 2012, La Russa left the PDL and founded Brothers of Italy together with Giorgia Meloni (also a minister in the last Berlusconi government) and Guido Crosetto. In 2018 he was elected senator and vice president of the Senate for the entire term just ended.

In general, however, during the years in which he was minister, the media talked about him above all for the frequent quarrels with journalists and opposition politicians.

Surely La Russa is histrionic and also likeable, he cultivates various passions. The first, shared in the past in Milan only by the aristocratic bourgeoisie and by many people belonging to right-wing circles, is that for Inter: the “beloved”. The second for science fiction books and the third for dogs, especially loving the German Shepherd. Legend has it that one of these dogs in the past “barked at companions”. For his character, and for the heart that has always beaten to the right, especially in Milan he has been at the centre of various controversies, in which the centre-left has not spared him criticism, for example on his defence of the presence of the crucifix in schools or for the opposition, like all the centre-right parties, to marriages and adoptions by homosexual couples. He recently appeared in a video showing his collection of Benito Mussolini busts. He replied to the criticisms and accusations of fascism that “today in the Fratelli d’Italia there is no room for nostalgics”.