La Russa, from the MSI of the 70s towards the second institutional position

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With the unmistakable goatee and a characteristic tone of voice (immortalized by Fiorello and which he served as a voice actor for an episode of the “Simpsons”), exuberant, controversial, the most accredited candidate for the presidency of the Senate Ignazio La Russa (full name Ignazio Benito Maria), born in 1947, should reach the second institutional position with a very long political career behind him that he carried out together with his profession as a criminal lawyer. A path that began more than fifty years ago, when in 1970 he enrolled in the MSI-DN, and marked by fundamental passages such as that of January 1994, when in Rome, he presided over the Congress meeting which formally gave way to the National Alliance. Since then he has always been close to the right-wing leader Gianfranco Fini until the breakup when the then Speaker of the Chamber gives life to Fli’s brief and unfortunate experience. But first in 2008, when An and Forza Italia merge into the People of Freedom, he becomes Minister of Defense. Four years later he will be among the founders, with Giorgia Meloni and Guido Crosetto, of a new right-wing party: Brothers of Italy who will now express the prime minister for the new government which came out of the polls on 25 September.

A political family

Sicilian-Milanese, La Russa was born on 18 July 1947 in Paternò, in the province of Catania. He studied in St. Gallen, in a college in German-speaking Switzerland, and then graduated in law at the University of Pavia. Politics belongs to the family. His father Antonino (who died in 2004), a war volunteer in Africa (captured by the British in El Alamein, Egypt, where he remained prisoner until July 1946) was a Missino senator for 5 legislatures and twenty consecutive years until 1992. Year in which, in an ideal handover, Ignazio La Russa made his debut in Parliament.

The link with Ligresti

Ignazio’s father, Antonino, was then a fellow countryman of Salvatore Ligresti (both born in Paternò, in the province of Catania): one lawyer, the other entrepreneur, and they were linked during the Milanese years. It is said that it was Nino La Russa who introduced Ligresti to Enrico Cuccia.

For Ignazio, a political career began at the age of 10

An all-right career, therefore, for Ignazio, which began – the chronicles tell – even at 10, when he held his first meeting with his father. His elder brother Vincenzo (who died in 2021 at 83), on the other hand, has never played in the right wing: he chose the DC, of ​​which he was a deputy, and after the dissolution of the “White Whale” he joined the CCD.

The name of Vincenzo La Russa was at the center of controversy for the proposal (later rejected) to register him next November 2 in the Famedio, the pantheon of illustrious Milanese in the monumental cemetery. A controversy that broke out in the same days in which Ignazio’s younger brother, Romano, former European parliamentarian and councilor for security in Lombardy, was in the storm due to a Roman salute on the occasion of the funeral of his brother-in-law, the exponent of the Milanese right wing Alberto Stabilini , a Roman salute given during a funeral.