After weeks of silence, Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has spoken out on the scandal that has shattered the image she sought to project of her party, Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy). Meloni was keen to make a firm statement following the publication of a two-part video survey on June 13 and 26 by Fanpage media outlet, which showed that racism, anti-Semitism and apology for fascism had free rein in the youth sections of her party.
In a letter published on Tuesday, July 2 she said she was "angry and saddened," asserting that there was no place for "racist, anti-Semitic, nostalgic stances of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century or for manifestations of stupid folklore." After an emphatic disengagement on building an alternative to the "European and Western social-democratic swamp," Meloni declared, "Our task is too great for those who have not understood its scope to spoil it."
Recorded on hidden camera, the footage shows that the neo-fascist roots of the Melonist right are still very much alive among the youngest of its representatives. In both reports, activists from Gioventu nazionale (National Youth, Fratelli d'Italia's youth movement) shouted "Duce!" with their arms outstretched – a fascist salute in honor of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini –and sang songs to the glory of the Blackshirts. The far-right terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s was also praised by these militants, cursing the "negroes," Arabs who should be "burned" and Jews forming "a caste living off the rent of the Shoah."
Supposedly 'detoxed' generation
In a fragment of conversation recorded by Fanpage, a Fratelli d'Italia senator of the Jewish faith, Ester Mieli, was referred to ironically by a Gioventu nazionale official joking about swastikas. On several occasions, leading figures from Fratelli d'Italia, including Arianna Meloni, sister of the Prime Minister, were filmed meeting and interacting with these young people, who nonetheless remained presentable in their company.
For Giorgia Meloni, the controversy is all the more devastating given the particular importance of youth activism for her. This is the world she was born into politically in 1992 at the age of 15, where she built herself as an activist and asserted herself as a leader. She never misses an opportunity to remind us of this, with her rhetoric exalting the taste for ideological combat and the spirit of sacrifice.
Meloni is affected in many ways. Her party's fascist legacy is manifesting itself within the very generation that was supposed to have been "detoxed," as one Fratelli d'Italia fellow traveler put it. Recruits who were to form the vanguard of the great conservative party that Meloni aspires to build are proving to be the guardians of radicalism that their elders had to abandon to become institutionalized.