Jo McKenna: Rome correspondent as Giorgia Meloni's nationalist Brothers of Italy win election - The Mike Hosking Breakfast

The Brothers of Italy party, which won the most votes in Italy's national election, has its roots in the post-World War II neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

Keeping the movement's most potent symbol, the tricolour flame, Giorgia Meloni has taken Brothers of Italy from a fringe far-right group to Italy's biggest party.

A century after Benito Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome, which brought the fascist dictator to power, Meloni is poised to lead Italy's first far-right-led government since World War II and Italy's first woman premier.

How did post-facism begin in Italy?

The Italian Social Movement, or MSI, was founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, chief of staff in Mussolini's last government. It drew fascist sympathisers and officials into its ranks following Italy's role in the war when it was allied with the Nazis and then liberated by the Allies.

Throughout the 1950-1980s, the MSI remained a small right-wing party, polling in the single digits. But historian Paul Ginsborg has noted that its mere survival in the decades after the war "served as a constant reminder of the potent appeal that authoritarianism and nationalism could still exercise among the southern students, urban poor and lower middle classes".

The 1990s brought about a change under Gianfranco Fini, Almirante's protege who nevertheless projected a new moderate face of the Italian right. When Fini ran for Rome mayor in 1993, he won a surprising 46.9 per cent of the vote - not enough to win but enough to establish him as a player. Within a year, Fini had renamed the MSI the National Alliance.

It was in those years that a young Meloni, who was raised by a single mother in a Rome working-class neighbourhood, first joined the MSI's youth branch and then went on to lead the youth branch of Fini's National Alliance.

Does that mean Meloni is a neo-facist?

Fini was dogged by the movement's neo-fascist roots and his assessment that Mussolini was the 20th century's "greatest statesman". He disavowed that statement, and in 2003 visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel. There, he described Italy's racial laws, which restricted Jews' rights, as part of the "absolute evil" of the war.

Meloni, too, had praised Mussolini in her youth but visited Yad Vashem in 2009 when she was a minister in Silvio Berlusconi's last government. Writing in her 2021 memoir I Am Giorgia, she described the experience as evidence of how "a genocide happens step by step, a little at a time".

During the campaign, Meloni was forced to confront the issue head-on, after the Democrats warned that she represented a danger to democracy.

"The Italian right has handed fascism over to history for decades now, unambiguously condemning the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws," she said in a campaign video.

How did the Brothers of Italy emerge?

Meloni, who proudly touts her roots as an MSI militant, has said the first spark of creating the Brothers of Italy came after Berlusconi resigned as premier in 2011, forced out by a financial crisis over Italy's soaring debt and his own legal problems.

Meloni refused to support Mario Monti, who was tapped by Italy's president to try to form a technocratic government to reassure international financial markets. Meloni couldn't stand what she believed was external pressure from European capitals to dictate internal Italian politics.

Meloni co-founded the party in 2012, naming it after the first words of the Italian national anthem. "A new party for an old tradition," Meloni wrote.

Brothers of Italy would only take in single-digit results in its first decade. The European Parliament election in 2019 brought Brothers of Italy 6.4 per cent - a figure that Meloni says "changed everything".

As the leader of the only party in opposition during Mario Draghi's 2021-2022 national unity government, her popularity soar