THE timing was either deliberate provocation or a serious gaffe. On January 27th Silvio Berlusconi, who is leading the right into next month’s general election, chose Italy’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day to praise Benito Mussolini, his country’s Fascist dictator. While remarking that Mussolini “did good”, he deplored the dictator’s anti-Semitic race laws, which banned Jews from careers in finance, the universities, the armed forces and the public administration and prevented Jewish children from attending school. Yet it must have been obvious to Mr Berlusconi that however critical he was of the race laws, any word of justification for Mussolini on the day Jews remember the dead of the Shoah would cause a furore. As with many of Mr Berlusconi’s ostensible mistakes, there are grounds for believing that this one was deliberate. The following day it emerged that he had not even been invited to the event at which he made his comments. So what was he up to? It is highly likely that he was trying to woo those who are inclined to the right, but who are tempted either by abstention, or by the “plague on all your houses” Five Star Movement, led by a comedian and blogger, Beppe Grillo, or by a new, radical alternative: CasaPound, which takes its name from the Fascist and anti-Semitic 20th century American writer, Ezra Pound. How well it is doing is impossible to gauge because, as its leading candidate complained last week, pollsters are excluding it from their surveys. But it certainly has a broad sea in which to fish. One pollster has calculated that a fifth of all Mr Berlusconi’s traditional supporters are uncertain how to vote. An alternative (but not mutually incompatible) explanation is that Mr Berlusconi was again using an outrageous remark to draw attention to himself. Over the years he has compared himself to Jesus Christ, described Barack Obama as “suntanned”, declared there was no one in history to whom he should feel inferior and described Mussolini’s policy of internal exile for political opponents as sending people on vacation.

Some of these comments may indeed have been the ill-considered utterances of a man who has spent much of his life surrounded by underlings, in business and later in politics, who dared not contradict him. But when someone as intelligent as Mr Berlusconi repeats a remark that has already caused uproar, as he did with quip about Mr Obama’s skin colouring, it is fair to assume he is doing it to put himself at the centre of attention. His apparent craving for publicity has long been the object of comment and speculation by amateur psychologists. It may be pathological, but at election time it is also highly rewarding. Mr Berlusconi’s comments about Mussolini once again put him back in the headlines.

On this occasion, it may be wondered at what cost. In many other countries, such a remark would exact a heavy price. But in Italy that is much less certain. One of his ministers argued that Mr Berlusconi’s view of Mussolini reflected the “common wisdom” among his compatriots: that although his race laws may have been an “abomination”, Italy’s wartime dictator achieved much. That was going too far. As the uproar on Twitter and other social-media platforms demonstrated, lots of liberally minded Italians disavow Mussolini utterly.

Even so, they are not the sort of people who would consider voting for Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom movement. In a wide arc of the population, stretching from around the centre to the far right, Italy’s Fascist past is seen as just another phase in the country’s tumultuous history, which, like others, had its good points and bad.

It is not at all unusual to hear in shops, bars and taxis remarks that echo Mr Berlusconi’s view that Mussolini did a lot for Italy and that he was a lot less evil than Hitler. It is far less common to encounter reminders that it was Mussolini who inspired Hitler and not the other way round, or that some 8,000 Jews were killed because of Italy’s alliance with Germany in the second world war.

Italy has never had the reckoning with its totalitarian past that Germany underwent in the years following 1968. On the contrary, the 1970s were characterised by a vicious conflict between the far left and the far right that involved street fighting, bombings and killings. Some of the far-rightists who played prominent roles in those years have since gone on to play an important part in Italian politics, albeit having at some point disowned the uglier aspects of the Mussolini era. Most were allied to Mr Berlusconi.