Mussolini quits party as leader rejects Fascism

Alessandra Mussolini, the most glamorous figure in Italian politics since La Cicciolina, a granddaughter of Il Duce and a niece of Sophia Loren, announced yesterday that she is quitting Alleanza Nazionale (AN), the political party directly descended from Benito Mussolini's Fascists, for which she is an MP.

The former topless model made her announcement after the party leader, Gianfranco Fini, who is also the Deputy Prime Minister, flew home from a four-day official visit to Israel during which he denounced Fascism as an "absolute evil". Nine years ago Mr Fini described Benito Mussolini as "the greatest statesman of the 20th century".

In Israel he said he had changed his mind about the dictator. He also repudiated the Republic of Salo, the Nazi puppet state in northern Italy where Mussolini finished his days after the Allies invaded.

Mussolini's granddaughter, who was elected as an MP for Naples in 1992, is also her party's most popular celebrity. For her, Mr Fini went too far in renouncing the party's past. She told Ansa news agency that she was leaving the party "because of an incompatibility ... not so much with my political position as with the name I bear". She said: "I allowed Fini to conclude his trip to Israel without polemics ... I dispute Fini's right to liquidate in the name of all Italians an important period in the history of our fatherland." It is the third time she has threatened to resign from the party.

Mr Fini, who was challenged by Ms Mussolini for the party leadership last year, has been tugging AN towards the centre for a decade. He has changed the party's name and played a constructive part in talks on the European Union's new constitution. Recently, he stunned Italians when he proposed giving voting rights to legally resident immigrants.

His visit to Israel was intended to expiate his party's lingering guilt over the Race Laws enacted in 1938, which led, after Mussolini had fallen from power, to the deportation of 6,000 Italian Jews to Nazi death camps. He paid his respects at the Holocaust Museum and the Western Wall, and had talks with politicians including the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. He failed to win over all doubters. One politician described him as a "fascist creep".

But even before he had taken off his skull cap, the mutterings of dissent within his party had risen to a babble.

One of the senior "colonels" in the party, Francesco Storace, governor of the Lazio region, denounced Mr Fini's message in Israel, calling it an "unacceptable, undemocratic, media-driven operation ... which is going to be firmly rejected".

Another leader, Mirko Tremaglia, minister for Italians Abroad in Silvio Berlusconi's government, who volunteered to fight alongside Mussolini in the Republic of Salo, said: "I only know that I don't permit myself to judge either history or Mussolini."