On the Monday, August 28 edition of his new TV show, "Diario del giorno" (daily news), Andrea Giambruno, partner of the far-right president of the Italian council, Giorgia Meloni, made comments that caused considerable controversy in a country still reeling from several cases of gang rapes, particularly of minors, in Naples and Palermo. Summing up the words of one of his guests, eager to give advice to young women, he said: "If you go dancing you have every right to get drunk. But if you avoid getting drunk and passing out, maybe you would also avoid certain problems because that's when you run into trouble." These words were immediately interpreted as victim-blaming. He denied this, calling it a political ploy.
Giambruno had already sparked off another controversy by trivializing the extreme heat in July and downplaying the impact of climate change. This summer, he attacked German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach: On July 13, while on vacation in Italy, Lauterbach warned of the country's heatwave via the social network X (formerly Twitter), writing: "I'm in Bologna and today I'm off to Tuscany, where the heatwave is spectacular. If things continue as they are, these vacation destinations will have no long-term future. Climate change is destroying southern Europe. It's the end of an era." Giambruno replied on television: "If you don't feel well, go home. Go to the Black Forest, you'll be fine there, won't you?"
Born in Milan in 1981, Giambruno met Meloni in 2015 while working as a writer for a TV program which the future prime minister was a guest on. Meloni, a native of Rome, was then confined to the fringes of the political spectrum. Despite their repeated support for the traditional family, the couple are not married, and has one daughter, Ginevra, born in 2016. Giambruno also takes different moral stances to Meloni, notably on end-of-life issues.
Andrea Giambruno started on television at the age of 22, while still a student at the Catholic University of Milan. In recent years, he has moved from the sidelines to the set, becoming one of the faces of Mediaset, the Berlusconi family media group. After the parliamentary elections of September 2022, which brought Meloni to power a month later, he left his position as a host of the "Studio Aperto" show and the Milan studios to settle in Rome for good. Since then, he has taken over a news commentary talk show on the Rete 4 channel called "Diario del giorno."
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.