Italy's right-wing parties have also elected a reactionary politician to head the second chamber of parliament after appointing an admirer of dictator Benito Mussolini as president of the Senate.
Lorenzo Fontana was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies in Rome on Friday. The 42-year-old is an arch-Catholic deputy of the far-right populist League party and was a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin for years.
In the opposition, the election of the former minister caused outrage.
Only on Thursday, the ultra-right Ignazio La Russa was elected leader in the other parliamentary chamber, the Senate; he collects fascist memorabilia and has pictures and statues of Mussolini in his living room.
Fontana received 222 votes in the fourth round of voting on Friday and thus the required absolute majority of the total of 400 deputies.
The shift to the right in Italy is therefore already evident in the election of the first posts and even before the formation of the government, with which election winner Giorgia Meloni will probably be tasked next week.
La Russa of Meloni's radical far-right Brothers of Italy party and Fontana constitutionally hold the two highest offices in the republic behind the president.
Fontana wants to restrict the right to abortion and opposes gay marriage, which several media such as the daily newspaper La Repubblica recalled on Friday.
Moreover, he was - at least until Russia's attack on Ukraine - an admirer of Putin.
After Moscow's annexation of Crimea, Fontana wore a T-shirt with the inscription in Italian that said "NO sanctions on Russia" to the European Parliament in the autumn of 2014.
From 2018 to 2019, he was minister for the family and then minister for Europe.
Now that the presidents of the two chambers have been elected, in the next few days President Sergio Mattarella will in all likelihood entrust Meloni with forming a government as the winner of the elections.
Within Meloni's right-wing alliance, however, there have recently been ructions: According to media reports, Silvio Berlusconi of the conservative Forza Italia (Forward/Let's Go Italy) was particularly angry because Meloni did not want to give his party the ministries it wanted.
Among other things, the 86-year-old is demanding the justice portfolio - Berlusconi himself is still on trial for corruption in connection with parties featuring underage women.
The former prime minister, who returned to the Senate after nine years, also wants his long-time confidante Licia Ronzulli in the Cabinet. Meloni rejected this.
