Italian parties pitch abroad in trilingual election videos

Days after Italy's far-right leader made a multilingual appeal to foreign commentators to take her seriously, her main rival in September elections issued his own tit-for-tat video Saturday condemning her record.

Published: 13 August 2022 15:24 CEST

Italian parties pitch abroad in trilingual election videos

Enrico Letta attends the second edition of the Francophonie's Economic Forum in Paris. Photo: JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP

Former prime minister Enrico Letta, leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, declared his pro-European credentials in a video in English, French and Spanish, while deriding the euroscepticism of Italy’s right-wing parties.

It echoes the trilingual video published this week by Giorgia Meloni, tipped to take power in the eurozone’s third largest economy next month, in which she sought to distance her Brothers of Italy party from its post-fascist roots.
“We will keep fighting to convince Italians to vote for us and not for them, to vote for an Italy that will be in the heart of Europe,” Letta said in English.

His party and Meloni’s are neck-and-neck in opinion polls ahead of September 25 elections, both with around 23 percent of support.

But Italy’s political system favours coalitions, and while Meloni is part of an alliance with ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi and anti-immigration leader Matteo Salvini, Letta has struggled to unite a fractured centre-left.

Speaking in French perfected in six years as a dean at Sciences Po university in Paris, Letta emphasised European solidarity, from which Italy is currently benefiting to the tune of almost 200 billion euros ($205 billion) in
post-pandemic recovery funds.

“We need a strong Europe, we need a Europe of health, a Europe of solidarity. And we can only do that if there is no nationalism inside European countries,” he said.

He condemned the veto that he said right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor “Orban — friends and allies of the Italian right — is using every time he can (to) harm Europe”.

In Spanish, Letta highlighted Meloni’s ties with Spain’s far-right party Vox, at whose rally she spoke earlier this summer, railing at the top of her voice against “LGBT lobbies”, Islamist violence, EU bureaucracy and mass
immigration.

In English, he condemned the economic legacy of Berlusconi, a three-time premier who left office in 2011 as Italy was on the brink of economic meltdown, but still leads his Forza Italia party.

Letta’s programme includes a focus on green issues — he intends to tour Italy in an electric-powered bus — and young people, but he has made beating Meloni a key plank of his campaign.

Meloni insisted in her video that fascism was in the past, a claim greeted with scepticism given her party still uses the logo of a flame used by the Italian Social Movement set up by supporters of fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

In a joint manifesto published this week, Meloni, Berlusconi and Salvini committed themselves to the EU but called for changes to its budgetary rules — and raised the prospect of renegotiating the pandemic recovery plan.

Elections were triggered by the collapse of Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government last month, and are occurring against a backdrop of soaring inflation, a potential winter energy crisis and global uncertainty sparked by
the Ukraine war.

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The strike comes after Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama — who is close to Meloni — called a top RAI editor to complain about a television report into Italy’s controversial migration deal with his country.

The Usigrai trade union called the strike from May 6 to May 7 saying talks with management had failed to address their concerns.

It cited numerous issues, including staff shortages and contract issues, but in first place was “the suffocating control over journalistic work, with the attempt to reduce RAI to a megaphone for the government”.

It had already used that phrase to object to what critics say is the increasing influence over RAI by figures close to Prime Minister Meloni, who leads Italy’s most right-wing government since World War II.

However, another union of RAI journalists, Unirai, said they would not join what they called a “political” strike, defending the return to “pluralism” at the broadcaster.

Funded in part by a licence fee and with top managers long chosen by politicians, RAI’s independence has always been an issue of debate.

But the arrival in power of Meloni — leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who formed a coalition with Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing Forza Italia — redoubled concerns.

Tensions erupted at the weekend amid accusations RAI censored a speech by a leading writer criticising Meloni ahead of Liberation Day on April 25, when Italians mark the defeat of Fascism and the Nazis at the end of World War II.

Both RAI’s management and Meloni have denied censorship, and the premier posted the text of the monologue on her social media.

In another twist, Albania’s premier confirmed Thursday he called senior RAI editor Paolo Corsini about an TV report on Sunday into Italy’s plans to build two migration processing centres on Albanian territory.

Rama told La Stampa newspaper the report was “biased” and contained “lies” – adding that he had not raised the issue with Meloni.

The Report programme claimed the costs of migrant centres, which are under construction, were already “out of control” and raised questions about criminals benefiting from the project.