Sadly his armed forces are as crap as OTL and he gets panned and occupied by Germany.
The political scene of Italy was as charged as the international scene at this time [the 1910’s] with the Italian public growing ever more disaffected with the Liberal state. Many differing political opinions clashed and struggled for supremacy in this tumultuous environment, merged, divided, formed coalitions, dragged each other down. A short list will include all manners of opinions from left, right, and center: Royalists and Republicans, Nationalists and Internationalists, Marxists and Capitalists, Liberals and Socialists, Papists and Anti-Clericals, Authoritarians and Anarchists, Corporatists and Anti-Corporatists, Conservatives and Futurists…
…The roots of Italian Fascism grew from two startlingly different seeds. One was the Authoritarian Nationalism of Enrico Corradini. The other was the Radical Revolutionary Syndicalism of Sergio Panunzio. Add to the mix former Socialists like Alfredo Rocco and the first Duce Benito Mussolini…
…Corradini’s putsch took the Italian Nationalist movement by storm, centralizing the institutions and driving the core objectives towards the authoritarian… democratic Nationalists were alienated and many left the movement… Objectives of the party now included an authoritarian national state built on national “myths”, militarism, and anticipation for the future…all citizens were expected to sacrifice individual goals for the greater need of the national state, if necessary to die for the common good…a collectivist “proto-Corporatism” where everyone worked together for the common good of the nation rather than individually or divided by class…
…The syndicalist connection is less apparent to the casual student of Fascism. While Corradini had syndicalist sympathies, it still seems a long leap from the international Marxist roots of Radical Syndicalism to Marxism’s modern “enemy” Fascism…
…The bridge from international Marxism to National Syndicalism, the core of Fascism, lies in the specifics of Italy’s national socio-economic situation. As a proto-industrial state just emerging from agrarianism, many among the various subsets of greater Italian Marxism, such as Panunzio and Rocco and eventually Mussolini, began to question whether Italy was “ready” for proletarian revolution when she barely had a proletariat at all! This lead, interestingly enough, to a growing movement within Socialist and Syndicalist circles to bridge the gap between the emerging industrial state and the late industrial society necessary for true Marxian revolution. The contemporary failures of the young Soviet Russian economy merely fed these worries. Only through rapid industrialization and emergent capitalism, the emergent theory went, could the young nation create the proper conditions for the “inevitable” proletarian revolution! Philosophers in the Soviet Union would derisively call this “shortcut Marxism”, which is ironic considering Lenin’s and Stalin’s own attempts to do effectively the same thing through executive will with proto-Industrial Russia.
Furthermore, Italian syndicalists began to grow increasingly worried for the fate of the emerging national entity. Reactionary foreign intervention against the Russian revolution, which came alarmingly close to succeeding, foretold an equivalent fate for an emergent Marxist Italy, a nation far too vulnerable to outside involvement as the last centuries’ history had shown time and time again. In yet another astonishing turn, Radical Syndicalists began to see a need for a strong national state…a Proletarian Nation capable of both spurring the necessary industrial growth and defending the young nation from foreign intervention.
What started with radical, revolutionary, international, and even anarchic syndicalist thought began to coalesce around the writings of Panunzio and Rocco. Neo-Hegelian transcendental collectivism replaced the Kantian empiricist individualism of classical Liberalism and the class-based post-positivism of Marxism, driven by a philosophy of collective consciousness…
With war brewing on the continent and dissatisfaction with the Liberal state growing, the authoritarian Nationalists of Corradini and the Radical Sydicalists of Panunzio found natural allies in one another. While Nationalism was moving towards collective Corporatism, Radical Syndicalism was seeing merit in a strong, authoritarian national state. It was only a matter of time until the two seemingly disparate political philosophies found common cause…
…All these ideas came together in the work of Giovanni Gentile whose emergent “Actualism” envisioned a post-war rise of a revolutionary “new state” with the “fully rational and concrete” collective will which would lead Italians of all classes to work, united like the rods of the fasces, towards the common goals of the “national” Italians. Gentile’s Actualism would form the philosophical cornerstone from which nationalists and Syndicalists would bridge their philosophies, creating the National Syndicalist foundation of the emerging post-war Fascist party.
From Warriors, Diplomats, Statesmen, Dictators – the Political and Diplomatic History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, by Dr. Eric Spellman, Harvard University, 1994
The growing momentum of the radical wing of the ever-splintering Socialist Party served to further alarm the powers-that-be and served to further radicalize anti-socialist elements. […] This would come to a head with the biennio rosso or “two red years” of 1919-20, a major and nationwide socialist “uprising” that seized government offices, private residences and private property. The red flag soon flew in dozens of cities and farming communities…visible from every building and steeple. Fears that a full Bolshevik-style Socialist Revolution was underway spread panic among the monarchy and government and further radicalized anti-socialist elements. Among these groups, the most notable was the Associazione Nazionale dei Combattenti (ANC; “National Returned Soldiers’ League”). Nominally an apolitical fraternity for combat veterans, the ANC soon became a hotbed for militarist and nationalist politics. […]
Meanwhile, a third faction was asserting itself and drawing adherents from left and right, that of the Catholic Church. This “white” movement preached church, community, and social change while calling upon an international and universal catholic movement to restore traditional values and bring peace to the greater (world) Christian community… The ever-radicalizing anti-socialist factions, particularly those anti-Clerical factions, saw yet another threat to their emerging goals for a “new Italy” and a “new politics”. […]
The anointed spiritual head of the growing nationalist and radical irredentist movement was poet and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio. A charismatic and commanding figure with the aura of a Greco-Roman Hero, D’Annunzio led a cult of personality culminating in the formation of his “Legion” and their presumptive conquest of the disputed Dalmatian port of Fiume. […] Occupying the port city, D’Annunzio proclaimed himself the “Duce” of a new “Republic of Fiume”…in practice the assumptive rulers of this new republic were effectively warlords who lived in hedonistic luxury while the city went about its business…the Legion’s legendary parties soon devolved into cocaine-fueled orgies. […] The Fiume Republic, of course, soon became the darling of the nationalists and irredentists, earning praise from many nationalist journalists, including Mussolini and Balbo. […] While departing Prime Minister Nitti was unsure of how to deal with the problematic Fiume Republic, treating the issue as a domestic affair, newly returned Prime Minister Giolitti took a hard-line stance, opening talks with the newly formed government of Yugoslavia… [which culminated in] the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in November of 1920, giving all of Istria, four of the Dalmatian coast islands and Zara to Italy and making Fiume an independent free state with close economic ties to Italy. […] In hindsight Giolitti’s accomplishments for Italy were admirable and executed with diplomatic aplomb… [however] the irredentists were enraged at such a “betrayal” that forfeited the majority of the Dalmatian coast to “barbaric Slavs”. […]
What is most significant about D’Annunzio’s short-lived republic is that it served as a de facto dry run for the upcoming Fascist Revolution. Many of the tactics, policies, goals and even terminology and songs of the eventual Fascist Party found their source at Fiume with D’Annunzio’s Legion. […] Fascism at this time was in its infancy, the original fasci di combattimento being first declared at the Piazza San Sepolcro on the 23rd of March, 1919…by a rising star in nationalist circles, journalist Benito Mussolini. Mussolini began his journalistic and political career as a Socialist, at one time serving as editor of the socialist paper Avanti! […] However, Mussolini’s growing pre-war interventionist stance and his championing of syndicalists with nationalist sympathies like Panunzio alienated him from the mainstream Socialist movement. Eventually he left his post at Avanti! and founded a new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia…though still a self-proclaimed Socialist, Mussolini gravitated ever more towards the emerging national syndicalist circles. […]
By this point Mussolini had burned every bridge between him and the Socialist movement and became one of their more outspoken enemies…whether ill will and bad blood led to his fanatical “conversion” and the eventual creation of Fascism is debatable, but whatever the cause, Mussolini would emerge in the post war era as a central figure in anti-Socialism. […]
At first the fasci di combattimento lacked any unifying doctrine. Formed from roughly 350 attendees (far less than the later aggrandized claims of the party), these “Fascists of the first hour” came from such varied backgrounds as nationalists, syndicalists, Futurists, irredentists, anti-clericals, anti-monarchists, republicans, former socialists, former soldiers and reactionaries. The only thing all could agree on was that they opposed the Socialists. […] In keeping with this ad hoc assembly, early Fascist doctrine was flexible and vague with the goal of attracting as many adherents as possible. […] This open doctrine was expressed at the time by Mussolini: “Fascism for the moment only has a history [back to 1915] and not a doctrine. It will acquire one when it has time to elaborate and coordinate its ideas”.
From Fasces Ascendant, the Rise of Fascism in Italy by Dr. John McDonnell, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996.