Fini was succeeded by Ignazio La Russa, who managed the merger of the party with Forza Italia (FI) into The People of Freedom (PdL) in 2009.

National Alliance was launched in 1994 when the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the former neo-fascist party, merged with conservative elements of the former Christian Democracy, which had disbanded in 1994 after two years of scandals and various splits due to political corruption at its highest levels, exposed by the Mani pulite investigation, and the Italian Liberal Party, disbanded in the same year.

[17] He also referred to the Italian Social Republic as belonging to the most shameful pages of the past, and considered fascism part of an era of "absolute evil", something which was hardly acceptable to the few remaining hardliners of the party.

[22] Finally, on 8 February, Berlusconi and Fini agreed to form a joint list under the PdL banner, allied with Lega Nord (LN).

National Alliance's political programme emphasised: Distinguishing itself from the MSI, the party distanced itself from Benito Mussolini and fascism, and made efforts to improve relations with Jewish groups.

The shift was also present in the rhetoric of the party's leader Fini, who went from declaring himself as "fascist for the 2000s" in 1987 when at the head of the MSI, to describing himself as a conservative at the time of the AN's launch in 1994.

[25] Although the party approved the market economy and held favourable views on liberalisation and the privatisation of state-owned companies, AN was to the left of Forza Italia on economic issues and sometimes supported statist policies.

Fini, a moderniser who saw Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron as role-models, impressed an ambitious political line to the party, combining the pillars of conservative ideology like security, family values, and patriotism with a more progressive approach in other areas, such as stem cell research and supporting voting rights for legal aliens.

[18] National Alliance was a heterogeneous political party and within it members were divided in different factions, some of them very organised: In the party there was also a group named Ethic-Religious Council, whose board members included Gaetano Rebecchini (founder, ex-DC), Riccardo Pedrizzi (president), Franco Tofoni (vice-president), Luigi Gagliardi (secretary-general), Alfredo Mantovano, Antonio Mazzocchi, and Riccardo Migliori.

Sometimes the group criticised Fini for his liberal views on abortion, artificial insemination, and stem-cell research, which led some notable ex-DC members as Publio Fiori to leave the party.

In the 1996 Italian general election, when Fini tried for the first time to replace Silvio Berlusconi as leader of the centre-right, the party grew its support to 15.7%.