Meloni breaks silence on his youth wing’s fascist comments

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday condemned offensive comments made by members of her far-right party’s youth wing to an undercover journalist, breaking weeks of silence on the scandal.

The investigation published this month by the Italian news site Fanpage included a video of members of the National Youth, the junior wing of the Brothers of Italy, which has post-fascist roots, showing their support for Nazism and to fascism.

In footage secretly filmed by an undercover journalist in Rome, members are seen performing fascist salutes, chanting the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil” and shouting “Duce” in support of the late Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Opposition parties have been calling on Meloni to denounce this behaviour since the first part of the investigation was released on June 13.

Those calls intensified after the publication this week of a second part containing new, highly offensive comments directed at Jews and people of color.

The party’s youth particularly mocked Ester Mieli, a senator for the Brothers of Italy and former spokesperson for the Jewish community in Rome.

“Anyone who expresses racist, anti-Semitic or nostalgic ideas is in the wrong place, because these ideas are incompatible with the Brothers of Italy,” Meloni told reporters in Brussels.

“There is no ambiguity on my side on this issue,” she said.

Two leaders of the movement resigned following the investigation, which also revealed that a member of the youth party had called for the leader of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), Elly Schlein, to be “impaled”.

But Meloni also criticized journalists for filming young people making offensive comments about Jews and people of color, calling them “methods… of an (authoritarian) regime.”

Fanpage responded that it was “undercover journalism.”

Meloni was a teenage activist in the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by supporters of Mussolini after World War II.

The Brothers of Italy have their roots in the MSI.

The most right-wing leader since 1945 has sought to distance herself from the heritage of her party without completely denying it. It has retained the party’s tricolor logo, also used by the MSI and which inspired Jean-Marie Le Pen when he created the National Front in 1972.

According to some analysts, the base of the logo represents Mussolini’s tomb, which tens of thousands of people visit each year.

Several senior party officials do not hide their admiration for the fascist regime, which imposed anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

Ignazio La Russa, co-founder of the Brothers of Italy and president of the Senate, collects statues of Mussolini.

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