Italian Social Republic (German Heritage)

The Italian National State (:Stato Nazionale Italiano), known as North Italy, was the authoritarian government on the Italian Peninsula that existed from the end of until the restoration of democracy in 1990.

After the, nationalist forces took control of the south and reinstated the Bourbon monarchy. During WWII, the south was invaded by the as part of its National Socialist policies. The Nationalist government fled through Albania, and then in. A joint French/British/American invasion of the south and a German/Austrian invasion to the North invasion in 1942 led to both armies rapidly advancing towards each other. During the four years of occupation, the diplomats from the Allies, who supported a restoration of the to the Italian throne, and Germany, who supported the Nationalist government, competed for influence over the Italian peninsula.

After negotiations, the Vienna Agreement was signed, creating a Savoyard kingdom to the south, and a Nationalist republic to the north. , which was in the allied occupation zone, was divided between North and South Italy.

After relocating to the North, the previous monarchist arrangement now held no benefits for the republican north. The Balbo government rapidly embraced republicanism, reorganising the Nationalists into the Nationalist Republican Party. This rapid change to the “left” (the PRN was still fervently right-wing) dismayed many hard-line monarchists, who left the administration and traveled south. The first years of the Nationalist period were spent purging the remaining communist/socialist support and the mafia. After relative stability was achieved in the early 1950s, the government focused itself on a large-scale revitalisation project, and worked to gain foreign investment from the Berlin Pact. As a result, many companies such as Fiat moved back to the industrialised north, leading to a economic boom from the mid-1950s onwards.

At the end of the Cold War, the various democratic movements in North Italy started to gear towards a “” of their own. Despite this, the majority of democrats also disliked the idea of reunification with the rival to the south. In WWII, the Mafia were reestablished and used to fight and govern against the communist state, leading to a revival of the Sicilian Mafia that had been eradicated during the Nationalist era. Compared to the North, the south was also economically much poorer and had one of the highest rates of corruption and unemployment in Europe. A referendum in 1989 made it clear that the North Italian people were not in favour of reunification, but instead supported a Northern democratic independent republic. In April 1990, the first free elections since 1913 were held, in which the Movement for a Democratic Italy under Arnaldo Forlani won a majority.