What Was Forza Italia?
Forza Italia was founded by the media and business magnate Silvio Berlusconi in January 1994, at a moment of unprecedented upheaval in Italian politics. The Tangentopoli investigations (literally "Bribesville"), which ran from 1992 onwards, had exposed systematic corruption across Italy's established parties — the Christian Democracy (DC), the Socialist Party (PSI) and their smaller allies — effectively destroying the political class that had governed the country since 1945. Italy's First Republic had collapsed, and a political vacuum opened.
Berlusconi moved with remarkable speed to fill it. Forza Italia — the name drawn from a football supporters' cheer — was organised not through traditional party structures but through Berlusconi's Fininvest business network and its regional commercial television infrastructure. It recruited candidates from business, sport and civil society rather than party cadres, and positioned itself as a new political movement untainted by the corruption of the old parties.
The party contested the March 1994 election in coalition with the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale in the south (as Polo del Buon Governo) and with the Lega Nord in the north (as Polo della Libertà). This coalition won the election, and Berlusconi formed his first government, though it lasted only until December 1994 when Lega withdrew its support.
Forza Italia would go on to anchor Italian centre-right politics for nearly two decades, winning power again in 2001 and 2008. Its organisation was always sui generis — critics described it as a personal vehicle for Berlusconi rather than a conventional party — but its electoral base and its ability to hold together disparate right-wing currents made it the dominant force on the centre-right throughout the Second Republic's first phase.
Crosetto Joins and Is Elected
Guido Crosetto joined Forza Italia in 1994, at the time of the party's founding. He was in his early thirties, already active in business and local public affairs in Cuneo, the principal city of the province of that name in the southern Piedmont. His economics background from the University of Turin and his involvement in local industry gave him the profile that Forza Italia sought in its candidates: business-oriented, credible in civil society, and outside the tainted political class of the old parties.
He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from Cuneo in 1996, in Forza Italia's first opposition election after the collapse of Berlusconi I. Although the centre-left Ulivo coalition under Romano Prodi won the national election, Crosetto was elected and began building his parliamentary career. His Cuneo constituency in Piedmont — a traditionally conservative, agricultural and industrial area — would return him to parliament at each subsequent election.
In 2001, with the centre-right Casa delle Libertà coalition winning a decisive majority, Crosetto was re-elected. In 2006, despite the narrowest of centre-left victories (Prodi's coalition prevailed over Berlusconi by a margin of approximately 25,000 votes nationwide), Crosetto held his seat. In 2008, following the early collapse of Prodi's second government, the centre-right again won a majority under the new banner of the Popolo della Libertà.
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Role and Expertise within Forza Italia
Within Forza Italia and the Camera dei Deputati, Crosetto developed a specialist identity centred on defence, security and industrial policy. He served on the Commissione Difesa (Defence Committee), and his economic background equipped him to engage substantively with questions of procurement, defence spending, and the intersection of industrial policy with national security. These were not marginal concerns in the Italian context: Italy maintained significant state involvement in the defence sector through companies such as Finmeccanica (later Leonardo), and defence procurement decisions had both strategic and industrial consequences.
His style was direct and sometimes combative — characteristics that distinguished him from the more emollient Forza Italia mainstream and gave him a public profile that transcended his party role. He developed a reputation as someone who would say uncomfortable things plainly, a quality that attracted attention and sometimes controversy, but that also established him as an independent voice rather than a party loyalist.
Within the Casa delle Libertà coalition architecture, Crosetto positioned himself as a constructive centre-right parliamentarian who could engage with issues of national interest beyond factional lines. His relationships with colleagues in Alleanza Nazionale — including Ignazio La Russa and Giorgia Meloni, both of whom came from the post-fascist tradition — would prove decisive when the question of founding a new party arose after 2011.
The Popolo della Libertà Era (2008–2013)
In November 2007, Berlusconi announced the merger of Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale into a new unified party, the Popolo della Libertà (PdL — People of Freedom). The merger was formally completed in March 2009, though the two parties had already contested the 2008 election under the PdL banner.
The fusion created the largest single political force in Italian history, bringing together the liberal-conservative and market-oriented Forza Italia tradition with the post-fascist and national conservative tradition of AN. For Crosetto, the merger meant a formal change of party label but a continuation of the same parliamentary work. He remained focused on defence and security matters and was appointed Undersecretary of State for Defence in the Berlusconi IV government formed after the 2008 election, serving under Minister of Defence Ignazio La Russa — his AN colleague who had also joined PdL.
The PdL's coherence as a party proved short-lived. It was always a coalition of distinct political families rather than an organically unified movement, and the strains became apparent as Berlusconi's political difficulties mounted after 2010. In 2010, Gianfranco Fini — who had led AN and then served as President of the Chamber of Deputies — broke with Berlusconi and departed from PdL to form his own group, Futuro e Libertà per l'Italia. The PdL's parliamentary majority was weakened, and the Berlusconi IV government fell in November 2011 under the pressure of the sovereign debt crisis.
Reasons for Departure and the Decision to Found FdI
The conditions for Crosetto's departure from the PdL — and for the founding of Fratelli d'Italia — were structural as much as personal. The PdL's identity problem had become acute: it was neither a genuine unified party nor an effective coalition, and with Berlusconi's legal difficulties compounding the political fragmentation, the centre-right in Italy lacked a credible governing project.
For Crosetto, Meloni and La Russa, the failure of the PdL presented both an obligation and an opportunity. The post-AN tradition — national conservatism, sovereignty, a firm commitment to Italy's Western alliances but an insistence on Italy's distinct national interests — had lost its organisational home. A new party could give that tradition a proper institutional form and compete for votes from the substantial electorate that felt unrepresented by the fragmented remnants of the Italian right.
The founding of Fratelli d'Italia in December 2012 was therefore not an opportunistic manoeuvre but a response to genuine political demand. The three founders brought complementary strengths: Meloni's political communication skills and her ability to build a mass movement; La Russa's institutional authority from his years as Defence Minister and his post-AN networks; and Crosetto's credibility in business and defence circles and his direct, no-nonsense public style.
Historical Significance
Crosetto's years within Forza Italia were formative in ways that shaped everything that followed. He gained parliamentary experience, built defence expertise, established relationships across the Italian centre-right, and developed a public profile that was genuinely his own rather than derivative of a party machine. When the opportunity to found a new party arrived, he had the standing to be a genuine co-founder rather than a junior recruit.
The trajectory from FI member to PdL undersecretary to FdI co-founder to Defence Minister encapsulates a larger Italian story: the reorganisation of the centre-right from Berlusconi's personal vehicle to a structured multi-party coalition anchored by a new conservative movement. Forza Italia, transformed and diminished, remains part of the current governing coalition under Berlusconi's successor Antonio Tajani, but the dominant force is now the party that Crosetto helped build a decade after leaving FI.
His time in Forza Italia also illustrates something about the peculiarity of Italian politics in the Second Republic: the extent to which individual politicians' trajectories — rather than party programmes or ideological consistency — determined the shape of political competition. Crosetto carried what was useful from the FI experience, discarded what was not, and built something new. That capacity for strategic renewal, rather than loyalty to any particular organisational form, characterises his political career.