ITALY: Not for the first time, the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, will be in the hot seat when, as acting foreign minister, he attends Monday's meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
ITALY: On the agenda is the Italian government's decision to nominate the Deputy Prime Minister and Alleanza Nazionale leader, Mr Gianfranco Fini, as its representative on the forthcoming European Convention.
Senior European partners on Thursday in Brussels expressed serious reservations, of a technical and political nature, about the nomination of Mr Fini (49).
The technical reservations - linked to the fact that an Italian, the former Prime Minister, Mr Giuliano Amato, has already been appointed (by the European Council) as Deputy President to the Convention - will doubtless soon be resolved, but not without much Brussels backroom politicking.
The other, more serious reservations about Mr Fini, however, expressed most forcibly by Germany, concern the Deputy Prime Minister's fascist past. As leader of Alleanza Nazionale, formerly called the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), Mr Fini's political lineage stretches straight back to Mussolini.
While heading the MSI youth movement in the late 1970s, Mr Fini earned himself a reputation for being a hard-line "blackshirt" enthusiastic.
He did little to harm that reputation when in 1994, shortly after Mr Berlusconi's first general election victory, he described Mussolini as "the greatest \ statesman of the century". Perhaps stung by the criticism engendered by that remark and also alarmed by the cold reception afforded by (some) European partners to the five MSI members of that first Berlusconi government, Mr Fini has since devoted much time and energy to reshaping and redefining his party, steering it carefully away from its fascist past towards a modern European centre-right position.
In January 1995, he changed the party's name to Alleanza Nazionale during a party congress which not only adopted a motion repudiating all forms of anti-semitism but which also prompted a subsequent split with the party's hard-line, fascist rump, then led by Mr Pino Rauti and called the Fiamme Tricolore. Soon afterwards, Mr Fini visited the Fosse Adreatine site, paying tribute to those Italians, many of them Jews and partisans, slaughtered in an infamous March 1944 Nazi reprisal massacre.
In February 1999, he took another step on the road to international rehabilitation by visiting Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Only this week, perhaps aware of the concern caused by his forthcoming nomination, Mr Fini admitted that he would not now call Mussolini the greatest statesman of the century.