Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy in October 1922 after threatening to march on Rome, and declared himself dictator on 3 January 1925. His government suppressed political opposition, arresting Communist parliamentarians and expelling Socialists in 1926, interning others without trial, and bringing roughly two-thirds of the country's newspapers under direct Fascist ownership. He built the corporatist economic model, organizing employers and workers into state-supervised syndicates in place of independent unions and free markets, that gave Fascist Italy the label corporatism has carried as its defining historical case ever since. In 1938 his government enacted racial laws stripping Italian Jews of civil rights, aligning Italy with Nazi Germany's antisemitism ahead of deportations to Nazi camps after Germany occupied northern Italy in 1943; he was deposed in 1943 and executed by Italian partisans in 1945.