A new right-wing pro-remigration party led by a charismatic former general and combat veteran is rising in the polls in Italy and attracting defectors from establishment conservative parties.
Futuro Nazionale was founded in February by Roberto Vannacci, who was suspended from the army in 2024 over his controversial bestselling book The World Upside Down, which critics claimed was homophobic, racist, and targeted leftists, feminists and Jews.
Mr Vannacci, 57, was elected as a candidate for Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s right-wing populist party The League in the 2024 European elections, but left to start Futuro Nazionale. During his military career he served in Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan as a paratrooper.
The fledgling party hit 4.8% in a recent Ipsos poll, just 0.9% behind The League, claims to have more than 100,000 members, and gained five new MPs last week who moved across from The League and centre-right Forza Italia.
In a TV interview this week Mr Vannacci compared his group of eight MPs to “The Dirty Dozen”, and described himself and his party as “authentic right” rather than “far-right” in a jab at Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who he said had “lost her way”, The Telegraph reported.
“I don’t define myself as coming from the extreme right. I define myself as representing the authentic right,” he said.
Mr Vannacci, who wrote in his book that homosexuals were not normal and blacks could never be true Italians, was also asked about his support for the policy of remigration, and said in response that Italy should start building new facilities for migrants to be held before they were deported.
“If by deportation we mean compulsory movement against their will, yes, for sure. We need to take them to a safe country that will accept them and from there they will be sent back to their country of origin,” he told Otto e Mezzo.
“People who do not have good reason or the right to be here will be remigrated. And that is the majority of them.”
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In response to the savage attempted beheading of a Belfast man by a Sudanese so-called asylum seeker, he said on Instagram: “It is the umpteenth example of violence carried out by people who are meant to be a ‘resource’ for the economy, the umpteenth attack on our society.
“The facts speak for themselves – if you import the third world, you become the third world.”
In an earlier post about the murder of Henry Nowak, he used the hashtag #whitelivesmatter and criticised leftist Italian MPs for kneeling for George Floyd but not Nowak.
Mr Vannacci’s rising popularity has also led to speculation Ms Meloni might ask Futuro Nazionale to join her ruling coalition along with her Brothers of Italy party, The League and Forza Italia.
Francesco Galietti from political risk consultancy Policy Sonar told The Telegraph: “The preferred pastime in Rome at the moment appears to be the divination of Mr Vannacci’s true electoral weight, and whether Meloni will ultimately fold him into her coalition to secure marginal votes.”
But he said this would be an “evident risk to her carefully cultivated posture as a bridge between the harder right and the institutional centre”.
Header image: Left, Roberto Vannacci with his wife (Instagram). Right, as general in 2013 (public domain).
