Far-Right Head of Italy’s Senate to Honor Jan Palach, Despite Criticism

Ignazio La Russa, the controversial head of the Italian Senate from the far-right Brothers of Italy party, will arrive in Prague on Tuesday.

According to ANSA, his stay in the Czech Republic will include a visit to the memorial at Terezín, which was a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

La Russa, who will attend a conference of EU parliamentary presidents in Prague, will also lay a wreath at the Jan Palach memorial. He arrives in Prague on Italian Liberation Day, when Italians commemorate the anniversary of the end of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1945.

“I was struck by the fact that the president of the Senate Ignazio La Russa goes to Prague to pay homage to Jan Palach, who is certainly a hero of freedom, but there are 364 other days a year to do it”. Then he added: “Tomorrow in the country where there was the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine or the massacre of Marzabotto or Sant’Anna di Stazzema it would have been more logical to bring a flower there”, he concluded.

The Nazi murdered 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome, 770 people at Marzabotto outside Bologna, and 560 people including 130 children at Sant’Anna di Stazzema near Lucca.

La Russa became speaker of the upper house last October when the Brothers of Italy party, which he co-founded, won the elections. Its leader, Giorgia Meloni, became prime minister and formed a government with another far-right party, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right formation, Forza Italia.

He has become known for a series of controversial statements and has also faced calls from the opposition to resign from the Senate.

La Russa claims that there is no place for nostalgia for Mussolini in the Brothers of Italy party, but has himself faced suspicions of fascist sympathies. In 2018, it was revealed that La Russa had a collection of Mussolini busts at home.

During the Covid-19 pandemic on social media, he also urged Italians to greet each other with a salute instead of a handshake.