during a rally in
Rome The MSI's political program stressed
traditional values,
law and order, and hostility towards revolution and revolutionary movements. It particularly advocated a
centralised state with a
presidential system of government, and no devolution of powers to regions. The party pursued a dualistic policy, in which it combined
anti-establishment discourse with a practical policy of electoral cooperation with the mainstream right. According to
Aldo Cazzullo, the MSI had "two souls": one "inspired by
Arturo Michelini, was bourgeois, Atlanticist, pro-American and pro-Israel" and the other led by
Pino Rauti, was "anti-bourgeois, anti-Atlantic, and pro-Arab"; the first "prevailed, also thanks to the decision by
Giorgio Almirante who, after having clashed with him at the 1963 congress, made an agreement with Michelini". Although it was for a long time preoccupied with the debate of
fascism and
anti-fascism, the party started to distance itself from this in the early 1970s to rather focus on contemporary Italian issues. While both wings of the party agreed after the 1950s that fascism was dead, they nevertheless saw some good things in fascism that they wanted to reinstitute. When the party transformed itself into the AN, it outspokenly rejected fascism, as well as "any kind of totalitarianism and racism". In contrast to other far-right parties in Europe which increased their power in the late 1980s, the MSI chose not to campaign against immigration, because Italy was less concerned about the topic at the time versus other European countries.
Internal factions The MSI included a large variety of currents, which ranged from republicans to monarchists, Catholics to anti-clericals, conservative capitalists to radical anticapitalists, and revolutionaries to corporatists. The party was mainly divided between the adherents of what
Renzo De Felice called the "fascism-movement" and the "fascism-regime", roughly also corresponding to the party's "northern" and "southern" factions. The former "leftist"-tendency was more militant and radical, and claimed heritage from the socialistic and anti-bourgeois "republican" fascism of the
Italian Social Republic and pre-1922 fascism, as represented by the
Fascio d'Azione Rivoluzionaria. The latter drew more from the mainstream clerical, conservative, authoritarian, and bourgeois fascist tendency that prevailed after the stabilisation of the fascist regime. Most of the party's initial leaders were northern radicals, but most of its support was from voters in the South. In the North, the party elite to a large extent consisted of highly ideological veterans from the civil war. As the Italian Social Republic (RSI) had not existed in the South, and there thus had been no civil war, the southern MSI-supporters and notables were by contrast largely moderate-conservatives, less interested in ideology. When the conservatives gained power of the party in the 1950s, they steered it more towards the traditional
clerical and
monarchist right-wing.
Foreign policy The MSI took a strongly
nationalistic approach in
foreign policy,
International affiliation From the end of the war to the late 1980s, the MSI was the chief reference point for the European far-right. By the initiative of the MSI, the
European Social Movement was established after conferences in Rome in 1950 and
Malmö,
Sweden, in 1951. The conference in Malmö was attended by around one hundred delegates from French, British, German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, and Swedish neo-fascist groups, with some notable figures including
Maurice Bardèche,
Karl-Heinz Priester,
Oswald Mosley, and
Per Engdahl. The MSI was also part of the
New European Order, together with, among others, the
Falange and the
Socialist Reich Party. Due to the MSI's support for continued Italian control of
South Tyrol, German-speaking delegates eventually left the NEO. Growing divisions and external competition left both groups largely moribund by 1957. At a conference in
Venice in 1962, the
National Party of Europe was formed by the MSI, the
Union Movement, the
Deutsche Reichspartei,
Jeune Europe, and the
Mouvement d'Action Civique. The group was effectively defunct by 1966. In response to the development of "
eurocommunism" in the mid-1970s, Almirante initiated the first conference of a "
Euro-Right" in Rome in 1978. The meeting included the Francoist
New Force, France's
Party of New Forces (PFN), and parties from Belgium, Portugal, and Greece. The parties were unable to gather enough support to establish a group in the
European Parliament following the
1979 European election. After the
1984 European election, the MSI was finally able to establish a
European Right group, together with the French
National Front (which had emerged victorious from its rivalry with the PFN) and the Greek
National Political Union. However, following the
1989 European election, the MSI refused to join the new
European Right group over the territorial dispute of South Tyrol, due to the arrival of
The Republicans, a German party which supported South Tyrol claims made by the
Freedom Party of South Tyrol. Neither The Republicans, nor the Belgian
Vlaams Blok party, wanted to form a group with the MSI over this issue. As the MSI transformed itself into AN, it distanced itself from increasingly powerful European far-right parties such as France's
Front National and Austria's
Freedom Party. ==Popular support==