Far Right and HIV/AIDS in Italy (1980s–1990s)

In the 1980s and early 1990s the HIV/AIDS epidemic served as a major political stress test for several Western liberal democracies, often leading conservative and far-right forces to politicise and instrumentalise the crisis for xenophobic, homophobic, anti-system critiques and campaigns for morality. This essay investigates the Italian case and shows that the Italian main far-right party, the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI), adopted a surprisingly non-coercive, non-homophobic, non-xenophobic and collaborative approach to the AIDS crisis. The MSI’s official newspaper, Secolo d’Italia, largely eschewed the moralising, anti-homosexual crusades common elsewhere, framing the epidemic primarily around governmental inefficiency, dependence on foreign supplies and the drug crisis. MSI parliamentarians actively sought dialogue with other political forces in both the national and European parliaments and explicitly rejected illiberal measures such as mass registration, mandatory tests, non-disclosure criminalisation, discrimination and AIDS-related restrictions to international travelling. This measured stance, likely influenced by the specific epidemiology in Italy (where intravenous drug use predominated) and its later onset, was a critical factor in facilitating the adoption of a pragmatic and liberal national AIDS law in 1990. Furthermore, the crisis contributed to the MSI’s progressive integration into Italy’s democratic-parliamentary system, leading to the MSI’s transformation into a formally defascistised right-wing party in the 1990s and ultimately to today’s far-right-led government.