Trapped in an awkward position on European defense and the transatlantic crisis, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made her escape on Wednesday, March 19, via a memory-trawling polemic attacking a founding text of anti-fascism and the European ideal. Presenting to Italy's lower house of parliament the position that Italy would take at a defense-dominated European Council meeting on Thursday, the head of the far-right Italian government harshly criticized the opposition's supposed adherence to the "Ventotene Manifesto" for European unity.

"I don't know if that's your vision of Europe, but it's certainly not mine," Meloni quipped as she concluded her speech, while chaotic curses emerged from the left-wing benches before a recess. The PM was referring to a text drafted in 1941 by anti-fascists Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli while under house arrest by the Mussolini regime on the small island that gave the manifesto its name.

Earlier, Meloni had quoted passages taken out of context, implying that the European unity defended in Ventotene and presented as the benchmark for her opponents was authoritarian and hostile to private property. Accusing her opponents of following in the footsteps of a dogmatic and liberticidal Europeanism, she failed to mention the passages devoted by this manifesto to criticism of totalitarianism, doctrinaire communism, economic oligarchies and racism. All evils which, according to this critique, ought to be banished from a united Europe with a common armed force, something which its authors hoped would emerge after the war and the defeat of the fascist and Nazi regimes.

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