Just three years ago no one knew Italy Roberto Vannacci – but now the former army general has the headlines of every newspaper in the country. He owes the attention to his announcement that he wants to found a new right-wing extremist party. Futuro Nazionale, it should be called, National Future. Apparently, even under the post-fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Italy, things are not yet right-wing enough for him.
The dashing 57-year-old ex-soldier is certainly suitable as a right-wing icon. He, himself the son of an officer, became a paratrooper general during his active time and was deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the noughties, and then also in Libya. But apparently this job didn’t fulfill him. After work, in 2023, he sat down at the computer and wrote a book with the programmatic title “Il mondo al contrario” – “Twisted World”. What he found particularly distorted was the whole woke stuff, the idea of a multicultural society, the attention to gays, lesbians and trans people as well as feminism.
He self-published the work, but then the left-liberal daily newspaper printed it The Republic Excerpts – and circulation went through the roof. In the end, Vannacci was not only happy about 250,000 copies sold, but also about the fact that he had become a national celebrity almost overnight.
This was also noticed by a politician who has been on the right-wing fringe for years: Matteo Salvini. He, who, as head of the Lega in the cabinet of the post-fascist Giorgia Meloni, is deputy prime minister, suffers from the fact that Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (26 percent in the 2022 elections) had clearly left his Lega (8.8 percent) behind – and he saw Vannacci as an opportunity to strengthen the Lega again.
The AfD as a role model
The opportunity arose in the 2024 European elections, for which he hired the general as the Lega’s top candidate. This paid off a little for the party, which ended up with 9 percent, but a little more for Vannacci himself. With a total of 2.2 million votes for the Lega, the man was able to record 550,000 preference votes in his personal account alone. This immediately earned him the vice-chairmanship of the Patriots in the EP (which also includes Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, the Spanish Vox and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz) and, since 2025, the post of one of the four deputy chairmen of the Lega.
But even Salvini’s staunchly right-wing populist, xenophobic store is too lax for Vannacci. He has been preaching “remigration” for months and believes that “mass immigration undermines the compactness of a civilization and dilutes the identity of a people.” It celebrates the “Decima Mas”, an elite unit of the Italian Navy that distinguished itself during the Second World War with numerous crimes against the partisans who fought Mussolini.
And although he was deputy leader of the Lega, he founded circles all over the country under the name “Team Vannacci” that spread this idea – and that were probably intended from the start to serve as a springboard for the now announced founding of the party: for the creation of a “non-moderate right,” whose model the Italian media repeatedly cites the AfD as.