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ITALIAN ELECTIONS

Far-right Brothers of Italy party suspends candidate for praising Hitler

Just a few days before general elections, Italy's biggest party confirmed on Tuesday it had suspended a candidate over Facebook posts praising Hitler.

Published: 20 September 2022 17:28 CEST
Far-right Brothers of Italy party suspends candidate for praising Hitler
Supporters of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party hold banners featuring the tricolour flame. Photo by Piero CRUCIATTI / AFP

A candidate for the far-right Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI), which is tipped to come out on top in the September 25th elections, has been suspended for praising Hitler, the party said on Tuesday.

FdI leader Georgia Meloni, who could lead Italy’s first far-right government after Sunday’s vote, has sought to distance herself from her party’s post-fascist roots without renouncing them entirely.

READ ALSO: Italy’s far right set for easy victory under Giorgia Meloni

Calogero Pisano, the head of FdI in Agrigento, Sicily and a member of the party’s national leadership, has been “suspended with immediate effect”, the FdI said in a statement.

“[He] no longer represents the party at any level and is forbidden from using its logo,” the statement added. Pisano is expected to appear before the party’s leadership in the coming days.

Brothers of Italy's campaign poster.

Giorgia Meloni has sought to distance her Brothers of Italy party from its post-fascist history. Photo by MARCO BERTORELLO / AFP

In 2014, Pisano had posted a photo of Meloni featuring the slogan “Italy Above All” on Facebook.

He had then commented underneath, “This reminds me of a great statesman from 70 years ago”, adding that he was not referring to Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini but to a “German”.

Pisano has reportedly published other comments supporting fascism since then.

READ ALSO: ‘Tired of the controversy’: Why Italy’s ‘Hitler wines’ are being discontinued

Peppe Provenzano, the deputy leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, was the first politician to react after the Facebook post was brought to light by Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

“Deep roots never freeze,” he tweeted, noting that Brothers of Italy’s logo still uses the tricolour flame once used by the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI), which was formed by Mussolini supporters after World War II.

Ruth Dureghello, the head of Rome’s Jewish community, said it was “unacceptable for someone who praises Hitler to sit in parliament”.

READ ALSO: How would victory for Italy’s far right impact foreigners’ lives?

Meloni, who was an activist with the MSI as a teenager, has so far maintained that there is no place for fascist nostalgia in her party.

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POLITICS

‘Worrying developments’: NGOs warn of growing pressure on Italian media freedom

Media freedom in Italy has come increasingly under pressure since Giorgia Meloni's hard-right government took office, a group of European NGOs warned on Friday following an urgent fact-finding summit.

Published: 17 May 2024 17:40 CEST
‘Worrying developments’: NGOs warn of growing pressure on Italian media freedom

They highlighted among their concerns the continued criminalisation of defamation – a law Meloni herself has used against a high-profile journalist – and the proposed takeover of a major news agency by a right-wing MP.

The two-day mission, led by the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), was planned for the autumn but brought forward due to “worrying developments”, Andreas Lamm of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) told a press conference.

The ECPMF’s monitoring project, which records incidents affecting media freedom such as legal action, editorial interference and physical attacks, recorded a spike in Italy’s numbers from 46 in 2022 to 80 in 2023.

There have been 49 so far this year.

Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, took office as head of a hard-right coalition government in October 2022.

A key concern of the NGOs is the increased political influence over the RAI public broadcaster, which triggered a strike by its journalists this month.

READ ALSO: Italy’s press freedom ranking drops amid fears of government ‘censorship’

“We know RAI was always politicised…but now we are at another level,” said Renate Schroeder, director of the Brussels-based EFJ.

The NGO representatives – who will write up a formal report in the coming weeks – recommended the appointment of fully independent directors to RAI, among other measures.

They also raised concerns about the failure of repeated Italian governments to decriminalise defamation, despite calls for reform by the country’s Constitutional Court.

Meloni herself successfully sued journalist Roberto Saviano last year for criticising her attitude to migrants.

“In a European democracy a prime minister does not respond to criticism by legally intimidating writers like Saviano,” said David Diaz-Jogeix of London-based Article 19.

He said that a proposed reform being debated in parliament, which would replace imprisonment with fines of up to 50,000 euros, “does not meet the bare minimum of international and European standards of freedom of expression”.

The experts also warned about the mooted takeover of the AGI news agency by a group owned by a member of parliament with Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party – a proposal that also triggered journalist strikes.

READ ALSO: How much control does Giorgia Meloni’s government have over Italian media?

Beatrice Chioccioli of the International Press Institute said it posed a “significant risk for the editorial independence” of the agency.

The so-called Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) consortium expressed disappointment that no member of Meloni’s coalition responded to requests to meet with them.

They said that, as things stand, Italy is likely to be in breach of a new EU media freedom law, introduced partly because of fears of deteriorating standards in countries such as Hungary and Poland.

Schroeder said next month’s European Parliament elections could be a “turning point”, warning that an increase in power of the far-right across the bloc “will have an influence also on media freedom”.

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