From the Amnesty to Autistici/Inventati: 80 Years of Containment on the Left (ES | FR | DE)
To the left of the PD there is a desert. Not fragmentation, not a plurality of voices, not a dialectic: a desert. The daily newspaper Il Manifesto survives as a masthead but produces no cultural hegemony or political pressure. Autistici/Inventati, until the US designation of August 26, 2026, represented a digital infrastructure for those positioned outside the institutional perimeter — not an organized political subject. And there was nothing else.
To the right of the centre-right, instead, there is a galaxy: Vannacci, identitarian lists, sovereignist movements, continuous splits, permanent internal competition. A constellation that divides, recomposes, attacks itself — but exists, produces debate, conquers media and electoral spaces. The same electoral law — Rosatellum, Italicum, Porcellum — that penalizes the small parties on the left does not prevent the proliferation of labels on the right. The asymmetry cannot be explained by the rules of the game. It must be sought elsewhere.
To understand it, one must go back to 1946. The Italian Republic is born without a reckoning with the fascist twenty-year period. Two omissions mark its original character. The first: the Togliatti amnesty (June 1946), which cancels or drastically reduces fascist crimes, freeing thousands of those responsible for the regime. The second: the failure to convene an international tribunal for the crimes of Italian fascism. Unlike Germany and Japan, Italy was never collectively called to account for its totalitarian experience.
The result is that the state apparatus — bureaucracy, armed forces, judiciary, intelligence services — was never purged. The cadres trained under fascism remained in place. Some were recruited into the clandestine NATO structures of Gladio (Stay-behind), with Anglo-American approval. From this original ambiguity was born the strategy of tension: the phase from the late 1960s to 1980 — unpunished massacres, bombs, the years of lead — has an objective political effect: it pushes the population towards the defence of the established order. Voting becomes an act of loyalty to a system perceived as threatened.

