Italian head of government Giorgia Meloni and her older sister Arianna, both committed to the far right, separately filed a defamation suit this week against the singer of the British group Placebo Brian Molko and an Italian press cartoonist.
Giorgia Meloni, founder and president of the post-fascist party Fratelli d’Italia, has filed a complaint against Brian Molko, leader of the alternative rock group, who insulted her and called her “fascist, racist”, during a concert on July 11 at the Sonic Park festival in Stupinigi, near Turin (north).
Arianna Meloni, approached according to the press to stand in the next European elections on the Fratelli d’Italia list, has for her part taken legal action against Mario Natangelo, cartoonist for the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, very critical of the government.
The cartoonist himself announced it on Instagram on Friday by publishing a partial copy of the report drawn up by the carabinieri, as well as the incriminated drawing.
“I will not comment on the case. I prefer that my drawings speak for me. And my lawyers,” he wrote.
Indignant reactions
The vignette depicts Arianna Meloni, wife of Francesco Lollobrigida, Minister of Agriculture in her sister-in-law’s government, in bed with a colored man. He asks his lover: “And your husband?”, who replies: “Don’t worry, he spends his days outside fighting against ethnic replacement”.
This drawing had provoked indignant reactions from members of the government, Fratelli d’Italia and the Lega, an anti-immigration party which is part of the executive who took office in October 2022.
“Attacking the adversary also justifies destabilizing the lives of people and their families”, had regretted Arianna Meloni.
Giorgia Meloni and her party are the heirs of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party created after the Second World War from which she took over, at the foundation of Fratelli d’Italia at the end of 2012, the tricolor flame.
“The Demographic Winter”
Georgia Meloni has made the fight against immigration a priority of her mandate, while wishing to promote the birth rate in her country struggling with the decline in births and aging.
During a conference on this theme in May, Francesco Lollobrigida said he was concerned about the “demographic winter” facing the peninsula, “because we want to safeguard the culture, the languages of Italy”.
He denied it had anything “to do with race”, after warning a few weeks earlier of “ethnic replacement” he said was occurring as a result of immigration.
Original article published on BFMTV.com