In 1924, elections were held in Italy. Mussolini won the elections, so two thirds of the seats in parliament were given to him and to his Party. This is the majority they needed to gain more control.
The room were the voting took place was filled with Fascist thugs, this people was there in order to intimidate the politicians not to vote against the Fascist Party. This is an example on how Mussolini used violence to gain more power, and it really worked because this way he already has 66% of the seats in the Parliament.
We can notice how violence helped Mussolini to gain more and more power with the pass of the time. Matteotti, a public enemy of Mussolini gave a speech in Rome declaring that the 1924 elections were a fraud and that the Fascist had won by using violence. So on June 1924 Matteotti disappeared and on August that same year his body was found outside of Rome, however the murder was never linked directly to Mussolini. Even though the murder was never linked to him, the people thought it was him who killed Matteotti, so Mussolini´s popularity began to decrease since the people didn’t want violence anymore.
In order to recover the lost popularity he had to kick out of the Fascist Party any member who was violent, so three Ministers of his cabinet were kicked out. The people inside the Party started to question if Mussolini was the best person to dictate. Later in 1925 Mussolini gave a public speech in which he said, “Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.” By saying this he won support again and he could continue his career as future Dictator.
Another good strategy that Mussolini used was the use of Propaganda. He started to introduce new Censorship Laws in which basically all newspapers that were not on the side of the Fascist Party had to be banned. The state controlled what the papers said and did not say. The reporting of most crimes, disasters, unemployment and disorder was forbidden, another law was that all journalists had to be registered as members of the Fascist Party, otherwise they can not be part of he newspaper. By 1926 the last opposition party papers had been suppressed, others conformed through a commitment or fear of the consequences of criticism.
Some historians say that Mussolini read about 30 newspapers everyday to approve them or to send them back if something was saying anything against his Dictatorship. By doing all this his popularity increased since the people was only listening from the media good things about Mussolini.
Since Italy has always been a religious country Mussolini´s plans included to unite the Catholic Church with his government. In 1923 he started to talk with the Secretary General of the Vatican to create a new relation in the future.
By doing this union Mussolini would gain more popularity since the majority of the people in the country were Catholics.
