The idea of calling the adherents of Vannacci’s Futuro Nazionale ‘futurists‘ might sound suggestive at first glance, but it is enough to scratch the surface for the operation to appear not only unoriginal, but culturally improper. Firstly because this is not the first time the term ‘futurists’ has been used in recent political circles. This was the name given to the sympathisers of Gianfranco Fini and his Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia party. ‘Futurists’ so much so that they even animated a newspaper with the explicit title ‘Il Futurista’, advancing avant-garde positions such as openness to civil rights and integration.

Today, the reproposition appears not only fragile, but downright posturing. Because between the movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Vannaccian ideological universe, the distance is sidereal.

What Futurism really was

Futurism was born in 1909 with the publication of the Manifesto in ‘Le Figaro’. It is a pure avant-garde movement: it extols speed, the machine, the industrial city, the break with the past, the demolition of museums considered as ‘dusty temples of tradition’.

The Futurists wanted to symbolically set fire to libraries, break up the academy, destroy the cult of memory. Theirs was a cult of the new, often even obsessive, radical, provocative. In art as in society.

Among the essential guidelines of futurism was the rejection of passivism, the celebration of dynamism and modernity, linguistic and artistic experimentation, the tension towards tomorrow, and the breaking of conventions.

Despite historical ambiguities and later compromises with the fascist regime, the heart of futurism remains a centrifugal drive towards the unprecedented.

The ‘rearguard’ passed off as a future

The battles carried out by Vannacci since his appearance on the public scene – from the divisive language on identity issues to the rigid positions on civil rights, immigration and social models – have nothing of the futurist avant-garde tension. Rather, they are operations of identity recovery, of reaffirmation of a mythologised and simplified past. More than a forward-looking movement, it is a nostalgic narrative: order, tradition, fixed roles, clear boundaries.

If futurism wanted to overcome and erase static categories, the Vannaccian proposal re-proposes them as bulwarks. If Marinetti sought cultural shock in order to open horizons, the Vannaccian ‘black thing’ – an often macchiettish right-wing, steeped in stereotypes – uses provocation as an instrument of polarisation, not creative liberation.

Futurists for Putin: a historical paradox

Futurism – with all its contradictions – was truly dedicated to the future. It was a permanent laboratory, a linguistic workshop, an explosion of forms.

The ‘future’ evoked by Vannacci appears instead as a comeback: a future that resembles yesterday, sometimes a deformed and simplified yesterday. A rearguard that presents itself as avant-garde.

If one takes Futurism seriously, in its dimension of radical avant-garde, of the exaltation of modernity, of speed, of the breaking of static balances, it is difficult to imagine the Futurists siding with an imperial nationalism that looks towards the restoration of a tsarist or Soviet past.

The movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was born as an explosion against immobilism, against the veneration of the past, against the idea of a civilisation stuck in nostalgia. It is an aesthetic of forward projection, of the violent transformation of reality.

And if we were to imagine the futurists in the present, with their obsession with movement, speed and transformation, it is hard to imagine that they would have recognised themselves in Vladimir Putin’s imperial nostalgia. More plausible is that, unlike the abusive futurists, they would have looked where the possibility of a new beginning is at play – for better or worse.

And so the parallel is almost inevitable: in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it is the Putin rhetoric so dear to Vannacci and the Vannaccians that is steeped in the past, in the recovery of the ‘great Russia’, in historical mission, in identity restoration. It is a deeply retrospective discourse, based on imperial memories and an organic and hierarchical vision of the nation.

Ukraine, on the contrary, beyond propagandistic simplifications, presents itself as a project of self-determination and integration in a contemporary European horizon. It is, symbolically, a battle for the right to choose one’s own future.

If futurism was – for better or for worse – a cult of dynamism, of movement, of creative autonomy against the established order, it is hard not to see where that tension would lie today. Certainly not in the defence of a twentieth-century imperial order, but in the drive to break a balance imposed by force.

An anthropological-cultural short-circuit

If the operation of calling its adherents ‘futurists’ would like to evoke momentum and modernity, the positions expressed by the general – marked by an identity-based, hierarchical, nostalgic vision – seem to be on an opposite trajectory to the idea of the future as a rupture.

Futurism wanted to transcend static categories; the Vannaccian discourse tends to stiffen them.
Futurism attacked the past; sovereignist rhetoric sacralises it.
Futurism celebrated the energy that overwhelms; identity nationalism defends symbolic and cultural boundaries as impassable lines.

It is true that futurism had a controversial relationship with fascism, and that part of the movement allowed itself to be seduced by the idea of authoritarian modernisation. But even then, the regime tried to tame an avant-garde that was by nature unstable, restless and allergic to crystallisation.

Today, the reference to futurism by the Vanaccian ‘black thing’ appears more as an attempt to give itself a cultural aura it no longer has than as a real ideal consonance. For if there is one thing the Futurists would have detested, it is the idea of turning the future into a mask for the past. It is an almost ironic paradox: a movement that wanted to destroy the cult of the past used as a label by those who make the past their symbolic horizon.

And if there is a final historical irony, it is this: a movement that extolled the breaking of balances and continuous transformation would hardly recognise itself today in a closed and monolithic idea of identity. With all due respect to labels, there is very little in common between Marinetti’s avant-garde and Vannacci’s proposal.

Calling oneself a ‘futurist’ implies a semantic responsibility

It is not enough to conjure up the future: one must inhabit it. And this, today, is a far more complex terrain than a simple nominal operation.

To call oneself a ‘futurist’ is not enough to be one. One should at least share the idea that the future is not a nostalgic refuge, but a territory to be invented. And on this, the distance seems unbridgeable.