The "Anniversario della Liberazione" has never been a day of national unity.

Liberation Day has been an annual national holiday since 1949.

But it was and is primarily the Left Party that celebrates the armed struggle of the anti-fascist partisans on April 25 and sings the resistance hit “Bella Ciao”.

The right wing tends not to sing and celebrate on April 25th.

Some of them, especially those on the fringes, see the fall of the Mussolini regime from 1945 to the present day not as a victory for democracy but as a loss of national greatness.

Left and right are only united in their joy when the holiday extends the weekend, as it did this year.

Matthias Rub

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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In the past two years, the parades, organized by the "Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia" (ANPI), had to be canceled or held in a greatly reduced form due to the pandemic.

This Monday, the "National Association of Partisans of Italy" can once again wave their flags in the relevant squares of Italian cities and belt out their melancholic battle song.

Because the government in Rome lifted most of the measures to contain the corona virus at the beginning of April.

And yet a shadow hangs over the liberation celebrations.

This time it is the left itself that is arguing.

On Good Friday, ANPI President Gianfranco Pagliarulo warned against bringing NATO flags to demonstrations ahead of the upcoming April 25 celebrations.

That would be just as "inappropriate" as equating Italy's former resistance to Nazi-fascism with today's Ukrainian resistance to the invasion at the behest of Russia's leadership under President Vladimir Putin, Pagliarulo said.

The journalist and former senator was born in 1949, so he is not a veteran of the anti-fascist resistance himself.

On the other hand, Pagliarulo is a veteran of the Italian Communist Party, which has been loyal to Moscow for many years, to which he belonged until it was dissolved in 1991.

The governing coalition led by non-party Prime Minister Mario Draghi sees things differently.

According to unanimous press reports on Sunday, Rome wants to put together another package of military aid for Kyiv, which includes heavy artillery and various types of armored vehicles.

The arms deliveries are supported by the leadership of the Social Democrats and the left-wing populist Five Star Movement, the main political pillars of the Draghi coalition.

From their ranks there was clear criticism of the attitude of ANPI President Pagliarulo.

Former interior minister and former Putin admirer Matteo Salvini expressed skepticism about arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Salvini is party leader of the right-wing Lega, which also belongs to the Draghi coalition.

However, it remains unlikely that he and leading right-wingers will take part in the peace march of the left-wing ANPI on National Liberation Day.