If, as everyone predicted, the Fratelli d'Italia win the elections in Italy on Sunday, the country will have a post-fascist prime minister - with an ambiguous attitude to the prefix "post".

A hundred years after Mussolini's March on Rome in the last days of October 1922 and in an atmosphere in which the dictatorship of the "Duce" is considered half as wild.

A look at history shows how brutally this takeover of power was enforced at the time.

It can be read by a contemporary witness, a very keen observer, who in 1932 in exile in Paris presented a report that Folio Verlag made available again in a German edition a few days ago: Emilio Lussu's "March on Rome and Surroundings".

Note the addition "and surroundings", which, as Claus Gatterer explains in his afterword to the German first edition from Europaverlag from 1971, ironizes the adventurous, touristic character of the march.

Lussu wasn't just anyone, Lussu was a hero and a prominent public enemy of the fascists.

Born in 1890 as the son of Sardinian farmers, studied law, an ascetic, highly decorated officer in the Karst battles of the First World War.

He also wrote a book about it – “A Year on the Plateau” (1938).

As an oppositionist, Lussu was a humanist

From the point of view of a simple soldier, the madness of the war of attrition, the sacrifice of Italian soldiers is dissected by an inhuman general staff.

Shortly after the war, the politicians triumphed over the writers in Lussu.

The remains of the Brigata Sassari, which was only occupied by Sardinians, became the Partito Sardo d'Azione, the political counterpart to fascism, as invented by the former leftist Mussolini because there was more to be gained politically on the right.

Lussu describes laconically and with a feeling for the bizarreness of many duels how the blackshirts paved their way to power - with intimidation, looting, beatings, murder.

And he shows the core problem: you knew each other.

Knew that anyone who recently became a fascist had recanted yesterday.

That Mussolini takes up his command post in Milan during the march

calls Lussu "undoubtedly original": "Even today, 600 kilometers between the supreme commander and the fighting army is an extraordinary distance.

On the other hand, Milan offers the advantage that it is only a few kilometers from the Swiss border.”

In 1927 the fascists banished the member of parliament Lussu to the prison island of Lipari. From there he escaped in a spectacular action with a speedboat, surviving the tuberculosis he had brought with him from prison.

After the end of Mussolini, Lussu returned to the political stage, became a minister in the first post-war government and later a senator.

He dies in Rome in 1975.

As a member of the opposition, Lussu was a humanist and, according to Gatterer, "Eternal Tomorrow", an exceptional figure in a country that never carried out the complete destruction of the fascist state that he demanded in 1943.