The process of forming Italy’s new right-wing government began with the sight of an Auschwitz survivor handing over the country’s second highest-ranking office to a senator who refuses to celebrate the nation’s liberation from fascism.

The centre-right coalition emerged victorious at last month’s elections, with Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia the largest party.

However, due to the makeup of the Italian legislature, forming a stable government is not an easy task, with the country changing administrations every 13 months on average since World War II.

Talks this week ended with FdI and Matteo Salvini’s Lega agreeing to back Ignazio La Russa as president of the Senate, with the Lega’s Roberto Calderoli agreeing not to contest the election.

A first vote requiring a two-thirds majority failed to return a victor, with Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party abstaining as the former Prime Minister looked to secure a high-ranking position for Licia Ronzulli. However, a second ballot requiring just a majority of the 200 senators saw La Russa elected with 104 votes.

Berlusconi was seen appearing to tell the new senate leader to "f*** off" in the aftermath.

Meloni, who will be Italy’s new Prime Minister said: “We’re proud that the senators have elected a patriot, a servant of the state, a man in love with Italy and someone who has always put the national interest before anything else.”

Electing a new President of the Senate following an election requires an interim in the role, with that honour going to the oldest sitting senator. With 97-year-old Giorgio Napolitano unwell that meant Liliana Segre, a holocaust survivor from Milan, taking up the post.

Born into a secular family of Jewish descent, the 92-year-old was unaware of her religious background until Mussolini’s racial laws saw her expelled from school in 1938. After an unsuccessful attempt to flee into Switzerland in 1943 Segre, then aged 13, and her father, Alberto, were arrested. Following close to 50 days of incarceration, first in Como then in Milan, the pair were deported to Auschwitz on January 30 1944.

The Herald:

She was separated from her father on arrival and would never see him again. Alberto Segre was killed on April 27 1944. A few weeks later his parents, Liliana’s grandparents, were arrested and sent to the camp. They were killed on arrival.

Typically children under 16 were sent to the gas chamber, but Segre survived the selection. She also survived the forced labour in the Auschwitz munition factory and a death march to Ravensbruck concentration camp, which was liberated by the Red Army on May 1, 1945. According to Italian holocaust historian Bruno Maida there were 776 Italian children under 14 deported to Auschwitz. Just 25 survived.

Segre only began speaking about her experiences in the mid-1990s, touring the country to educate students. On the 80th anniversary of the introduction of the racial laws that meant her deportation, President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella made her one of just five senators for life for ‘outstanding patriotic merits in the social field’.

She opened the new parliament with some pointed remarks as the process of seating a government viewed as the most right-wing since Mussolini began, using her speech to discuss the resistance, Liberation Day, the constitutional right to freedom from discrimination and the defence of parliamentary government.

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Segre said: “In this month of October, on which the centenary of the March on Rome which began the fascist dictatorship falls, it is down to someone like me to momentarily assume the presidency of this temple of democracy that is the Senate of the Republic.

“And the symbolic value of this random coincidence is amplified in my mind because, you see, in my time school began in October and it is impossible for me not to feel a sort of vertigo remembering that the same little girl who, on a day like this in 1938, disconsolate and lost, was forced by racist laws to leave her school desk empty, today is, by a strange quirk of fate, on the most prestigious bench of the Senate.”

The man who will take on the role permanently, whose middle names are Benito Maria, has deep ties to the far-right. His father, Antonino, was secretary of the fascist party in Paterno, Sicily, and joined the party’s heir, the Movimento Sociale Italiana (MSI) after the war.

Ignazio would join the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front) of the party in 1971, and was one of the leaders of the Milanese wing when a ‘demonstration against red (left wing) violence’ was organised. On what would become known as ‘Black Thursday’, the march turned violent and police officer Antonio Marino was killed by a hand grenade.

He, along with Meloni and Guido Crosetto, was one of the founding members of Fratelli d’Italia, which bears the MSI’s flame insignia on its party logo.

A 2018 video shows La Russa in his home which is decorated with images of Mussolini and the youth wing of the fascist party. In the video he jokes there are also Communist symbols – but only to wipe his feet on.

La Russa does not celebrate Liberation Day on April 25 and clashed with Antonio Suetta, bishop of the diocese of Ventimiglia-Sanremo, after his refusal to hold a mass commemorating Mussolini on the anniversary of his death.

The 75-year-old has looked to distance himself from fascism in recent years, claiming “we left that behind” when the MSI was dissolved in 1995. However, in a debate in September he stated “we are all heirs of il Duce”, clarifying “if you mean the heirs of the Italy of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents” and at the beginning of the Covid pandemic the then vice-president of the senate suggested handshakes be replaced by a fascist salute in a social media post which was later deleted and blamed on a colleague.