The affair of the pro-Russian conference on 22 December 2025 at the Federico II University in Naples, organised by theANPI with Alessandro Di Battista and Professor Angelo D’Orsi, did not end with the tensions in the courtroom and the political clash that followed. In just a few days, it also became an internal case within the partisan association: with a formal communication dated 2 January 2026, the National Secretariat ordered theimmediate commissioning of the ANPI Naples Eastern Zone ‘Aurelio Ferrara’ section , a decision that must be ratified by the National Committee at its next meeting.

In L’Europeista we had reconstructed the episode of 22 December as a leap forward in the political climate over the Russian invasion war in Ukraine: an event hosted in one of the symbolic places of public education, with a moment of pro-Ukraine protest silenced amid insults and shoving and accompanied by the unbearable silence of the rector Matteo Lorito . What happened next, however, is even more instructive than the day itself. On an associative level, the ANPI National Secretariat intervened with a clear political distance: in a note dated 27 December 2025, it reiterated its condemnation of the Russian invasion, the need to work for a negotiated solution and, above all, it declared that it did not agree with the initiative held at the Federico II, inviting people to lower their tones and not to fuel institutional polemics.

It is within this framework that comes the news of the commissioning, motivated not so much by the dispute over the conference itself (already ‘not shared’ by the National Secretariat), but by the management of the section’s public communication. The letter signed by Deputy National Vice President Carlo Ghezzi claims that, at its meeting of 29 December 2025, the secretariat discussed the section’s ‘social media outlets’, judging them to be repeated, improper and often unrelated to the organisation’s territorial profile.

The document cites in particular some posts considered incompatible with the statutory duties and the ‘good name’ of the ANPI. These include one relating to Carlo Calenda and his sons (taken from a third page), assessed as ‘extraordinarily serious in ethical terms’ because it would implicate the family members of a politician; another, dated 27 December, on the arrest of Mohammed Hannoun and others, judged ambiguous and imprudent; and finally, two posts on 30 December, which, by juxtaposing phrases by Sandro Pertini and Sergio Mattarella, are said to have been made with a ‘patently derisory’ intent towards the current Head of State, with a negative reputational effect on the association.

The National Secretariat also explicitly links this communicative escalation to external reactions: the letter observes that content of this kind has fuelled attacks and defamation against the ANPI, contributing to further poisoning the ground already made incandescent by the events in Naples. For this reason, ‘immediate’ receivership is announced and a commissioner is indicated, recalling the obligations of caution, correctness and protection of the honour of the association laid down in the statute and regulations.

In the local political debate, the national decision is already being read as a signal. In a statement, Giuseppe Ferlisi, regional coordinator of ORA! Campania, one of the initiators of the flash mob on 22 December, says: ‘We take note of the ANPI’s decision to commission the Naples East section after the events in Naples. This is further confirmation that the position we took was and is the right one. We hope that the ANPI as a whole will be able to fully rediscover the authentic values of the Resistance embodied today in the Ukrainian battle.”

At this point, there is no point getting around it: the Naples case is not just about a verbal brawl, nor is it just about the umpteenth ideological derby on ‘war and peace’. It is about a deeper pathology that has already done too much damage in Italy: the Putinisation of parts of public opinion, i.e. the habituation to a lexicon, a conditioned reflex and a moral hierarchy that ends up relativising Russian aggression and treating those defending Ukraine as intruders, troublemakers, ‘provocateurs’. That this contagion has touched – and in some cases crossed – even circles linked to the ANPI is a political fact, not an insult.

And it is here that the news of the commission takes on a significance that goes beyond the internal rules and beyond the incriminated posts. If the ANPI wants to remain a credible voice of republican memory, it cannot allow itself free zones where, under the pretext of ‘peace’, pass narratives that look too much like Kremlin propaganda: contempt for those who resist, mockery of institutions, moral aggression, and an idea of anti-fascism that forgets that today, in Europe, there is a people fighting against an armed imperialism.

Fortunately, the distancing of the National Secretariat and this drastic act indicate that a part of the ANPI is probably trying to free itself from that Putin infiltration. This is not a guarantee, but it is a signal. Either antifascism recognises Ukraine as an advanced front of European freedom, or it is reduced to an identity ritual good for processions, vulnerable – through naivety or calculation – to the suggestions of those in Europe who do not want peace, but surrender.