Italian Holocaust survivor oversees election of fascist relic collector
Liliana Segre warns against discrimination as far-right politician Ignazio La Russa, who owns a bust of Mussolini, becomes senate speaker
Michael Daventry is Jewish News’s foreign and broadcast editor
An Italian Holocaust survivor oversaw the election of a man who enjoys collecting fascist memorabilia as the next president of the country’s Senate.
Liliana Segre, 96, told senators of how she felt “disconsolate and bewildered” after she was forced to leave her school in 1938 because after new antisemitic laws came into force.
The 96-year-old was presiding over the Senate’s first session since last month’s election in which right-wing parties – including one with neo-fascist roots – won enough seats to form the next government.
Segre was the only member of her family to emerge alive from the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of the Second World War.
She made no public comment about the recent election but told senators: “it is impossible for me not to feel a kind of vertigo, remembering that the same little girl who on a day like this in 1938, disconsolate and bewildered, was forced by racist laws to leave her school desk empty.
“And that same little girl today finds herself by a strange fate, even on the most prestigious desk in the Senate.”
Segre received a standing ovation from senators before they voted to elected Ignazio La Russa, who owns a bust of wartime fascist leader Benito Mussolini, as the chamber’s next speaker.
He presented Segre with a bouquet as he took her seat.
La Russa, whose middle name is Benito, is a senior member of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party led by Giorgia Meloni, who is expected to become the next prime minister.
A video posted in 2018 on the Corriere della Sera website showed La Russa in his home showed he collected memorabilia of Mussolini.
Mussolini ruled Italy for more than two decades, allying it with Nazi Germany and enacting antisemitic laws that ultimately led to the death of nearly 6,000 Italian Jews in camps.
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