Last September, when Giorgia Meloni pulled off a long-predicted victory in Italy’s general election to become not only the country’s first female prime minister but also its first from a party tracing its ideological heritage back to Benito Mussolini, analysts struggled to find the right words to describe her politics. Were she and her Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party “neo-fascist”, “post-fascist”, “far right” or just “nationalist-conservative”? And how worried should we all be?

During the campaign, Meloni sought to wave aside the F-word, saying that fascism was “handed over to history”. Both then and in office she has also given reassurance about her intended policies, positioning herself as firmly pro-Nato and pro-Ukraine, Atlanticist on foreign policy but also determinedly within the European framework on economics, on the euro and even on migration.

Financial markets have taken her government calmly. There have been some spats with France about undocumented migrants, and the Meloni government has taken a tough line against NGO rescue boats in the Mediterranean. But even on that issue she is no longer far from the European mainstream, and Britain’s recent promises to bring in automatic deportation for undocumented migrants have made Italy’s policies seem almost reasonable.

So has the F-word actually been “handed over to history” in Italy? Not really, as this helpful book by David Broder, a British historian long resident in Italy, shows.

For a start, such dismissive phrases have been used for decades by leaders of the precursor parties to Fratelli d’Italia, and yet members have continued to show a strong and unashamed fondness for that very history. And alongside those postwar efforts at re-legitimisation, groups related to the post-fascist parties were involved in violent acts of terrorism, dubbed the “strategy of tension”, most notoriously the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the 1980 Bologna station bombing.

Meloni has sought to suppress what she calls “nostalgics” within her party. The difficulty is that the main current that connects the various postwar rightwing parties and movements with Mussolini and fascism is not so much nostalgia for particular fascist actions as a desire to treat Italian history in the first half of the 20th century as being a legitimate and proud part of national identity.

In this regard, Italian rightists can usefully be compared to nationalists in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party, including their late prime minister Shinzo Abe. In Abe’s revisionist view, the principal sin committed by pre-1945 Japan was not its army’s atrocities, which he sought to deny or play down, but having lost the Pacific war, rather as to Italian rightists the principal error made by Mussolini was allying himself to Adolf Hitler and thus ultimately to a losing cause.

Just as such Japanese nationalists like to play up episodes in which their country can see itself as a victim, so episodes cited in Mussolini’s Grandchildren as forming a key part of contemporary fascist memorialising are moments of victimhood. One such, commemorated since 2005 by a “Day of Remembrance”, is the “foibe” mass killing of Italians by Yugoslav partisans in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia borderlands during and after the second world war.

History is identity, and identity politics is a key part of Fratelli d’Italia’s appeal. Since entering government, it has played up a conservative view of Catholic Italian culture over issues such as LGBT+ rights, surrogate motherhood and citizenship, and been rewarded by a further rise in the opinion polls. Yet neither this nor Meloni’s policies are new or unique to her party. Her coalition’s stances are pretty similar to those pursued by the coalitions led in 1994, 2001-06 and 2008-11 by Silvio Berlusconi, a man who notoriously said that Mussolini was “a good leader” who sent people away “on holiday”.

The good news is thus that Fratelli d’Italia’s success does not imply that fascism has suddenly been resurrected in Italy. The bad news is that the resurrection has been going on for decades now, and the ideas associated with fascism are shared broadly across the parties of the right. Those parties, which generally work more cohesively together than do those of the left, have captured 35-45 per cent of the vote in the past two general elections. Whether or not this should cause long-lasting concern depends on two things.

First, whether the coalition makes any serious attempt to reform Italy’s constitution so as to centralise power in a directly elected presidency, which the right, with its belief in the smack of firm government, would hope to control. This has been mooted by Meloni, but it is hard to see how such a reform could be achieved, given the need for constitutional changes to be approved by referendum.

The second is whether splinter groups associated with the right resort to violence during some future crisis, and how the Meloni government reacts if they do. Italy today is a more peaceful place than it was during the 1970s, when the neo-fascist “strategy of tension” was at its height. Long may it remain so.

Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy by David Broder, Pluto Press £17.99, 240 pages

Bill Emmott is a former editor of The Economist and author of ‘Good Italy, Bad Italy’

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