Berlusconi: ‘Mussolini did good in many ways’

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi praised Benito Mussolini for “having done good” despite the Fascist dictator’s anti-Jewish laws, immediately sparking expressions of outrage as Europe yesterday held Holocaust remembrances.

Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying his likely reasoning was that it would be better to be on the winning side.

The media mogul, whose conservative forces are polling second in voter surveys ahead of next month’s election, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust.

In 1938, before the outbreak of the Second World War, Mussolini’s regime passed the so-called racial laws, barring Jews from universities and many professions, among other bans.

When the Nazi regime occupied Italy during the war, thousands from the tiny Italian Jewish community were deported to death camps.

“It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then,” Berlusconi said of Mussolini’s support for Hitler. “Certainly the government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler’s Germany rather than oppose it.”

Berlusconi added that “within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good”.

More than 7,000 Jews were deported under Mussolini’s regime, and nearly 6,000 of them were killed.

Reactions of outrage, along with a demand that Berlusconi be prosecuted for promoting Fascism, quickly followed his words.

Berlusconi’s praise of Mussolini constitutes “an insult to the democratic conscience of Italy”, said Rosy Bindi, a centre-left leader. “Only Berlusconi’s political cynicism, combin-ed with the worst historic revisionism, could separate the shame of the racist laws from the Fascist dictatorship,” he said.

Italian laws enacted after the country’s disastrous experience in the war forbid the encouragement of Fascism.

A candidate for local elections, Gianfranco Mascia, pledged that he and his supporters will present a formal complaint tomorrow to Italian prosecutors, seeking to have Berlusconi prosecuted.

This is not the first time Berlusconi has courted controversy when speaking of Mussolini.

In 2010, he told world leaders at a Paris conference that he had been reading Mussolini’s journals, and years earlier Berlusconi claimed Mussolini “never killed anyone”.

Berlusconi is running in the Feb 24-25 parliamentary elections and has repeatedly changed his mind on whether he is seeking a fourth term as prime minister.

Mario Monti is also running, but polls put him far behind front-runner Pier Luigi Bersani, a centre-left leader.