In mid-September, the Laghetto dell’Eur retains a summer warmth. Among the families in the park, there is a multitude of young people in green shirts whom the dominant narrative would categorize as dangerous extremists. Instead, they are animating Fenix, the annual festival of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth movement of Fdi. They are the youths demonized two years ago by a leaked investigation signed by Fanpage, which had turned this context into a huge receptacle of fascism. The generalized expectation of an average observer, therefore, would be to find themselves facing a bunker surrounded by a network of hatred, or at least a resentful fortress folded in on itself. Instead, what was the strong point of a thematic program based on the leitmotif “The time of courage”? An open, frank, and unfiltered confrontation on Thursday evening between Giovanni Donzelli, organizational manager of Fratelli d’Italia, Andrea Piepoli, of the national executive of Gn, and Francesco Cancellato, the director of that very Fanpage that every two hours denounces the government’s intolerance and the neofascism of Giorgia Meloni’s youth organization. And they invite him to speak, without hooding or beating him. Has such a regime ever been seen?
The lesson that emerges from this edition of Fenix is the total reversal of this approach. Instead of the victim refuge or systematic booing, the youths of Gioventù Nazionale have chosen a path infinitely more difficult and politically mature: listening. Attention, we are talking about youths splashed on the front page, some of whom have been excluded from politics, perhaps with legal consequences as well. The booing would have been the least towards those who had exposed them to public ridicule. Instead, the form at Fenix became substance. “In a time when the left fans the fears of our generation, this is the time of courage,” says Piepoli to Libero. “We foster confrontation; at the Unity festivals, no one from the center-right is invited. Much of the press enjoys telling what we are, no one says anything when youth left-wing figures proudly call themselves the grandchildren of communism, exalt Lenin and Stalin, or publish graphics in tribute to Fidel Castro.” Not only that. At Fenix, the comrades thought well to leave their mark, that is, pro-foibe and pro-P38 slogans graffitied at night on the event’s banners.
“To nostalgia and the slogans of the left, we respond with the solid concreteness of ideas that become action,” relaunches Francesco Di Giuseppe, national vice president of Gn. “It is no coincidence that topics are being addressed against the common backdrop of courage. Like the courage to stay, opposed to a flaunted freedom to leave and travel the world, a mask that hid the lack of real opportunities. Thanks to the government and the mountain plan arrived more than thirty years after the last one and desired by the vice president of the EU Commission Raffaele Fitto, there will finally be a generation that will restart from the internal areas that no one before had the courage to enhance, protect, and relaunch.”
The event, which will culminate with the intervention of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni tomorrow morning and which has seen ministers and institutional leaders parade on stage (from Ignazio La Russa to Raffaele Fitto, up to debates on nuclear power, the fight against the mafia supported in memory of Paolo Borsellino, the one dedicated to the exclusion of Idrovolante Edizioni and Passaggio al Bosco from “Più Libri Più Liberi”), leaves a precise political signal on the field. The spied-on, analyzed, and branded youths present themselves as a conscious community that does not need to erect fences to defend their identity. They have understood that to dismantle the house of cards of accusations, it is not necessary to return the same coin, but to do the exact opposite of what the opponent expects: sit at the table, look them in the eyes, and beat them on the ground of argumentation. A lesson in democratic maturity that the left would do well not to ignore.
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