Photo: Giorgia Meloni on Facebook
Once again, Giorgia Meloni did not mince her words in the Parlamento italiano as she spoke in the debate ahead of this week’s European Council meeting. Her remarks sparked such outrage among opposition MPs that the session had to be twice suspended by House Speaker Lorenzo Fontana. But what was she saying that provoked such emotionally unhinged reactions—with some MPs yelling at Meloni, barely able to hold back their tears?
Meloni’s speech crime was bringing up the so-called Ventotene Manifesto, named after the small island of Ventotene, located off the coast of Lazio.
Ventotene housed a Fascist prison during the Second World War, and two of the founding fathers of the European Union, Altiero Spinelli—after whom a European Parliament (EP) building is named—and Ernesto Rossi were held there under Mussolini’s dictatorship. It was there that the duo drafted the manifesto in 1941.
On the sidelines of the debate dedicated to discussing von der Leyen’s ReArm Europe plan and Italy’s position on it, Meloni reminded her opponents of the gist of the manifesto, that a federation of European states was necessary in order to prevent future wars. But the manifesto also said much more.
“The European revolution will have to be Socialist”, Italy’s EU ‘founding fathers’ said, adding
Private property will have to be abolished, limited, corrected … The political democratic methodology will be a dead weight in the revolutionary crisis.
Statements that resonate eerily today, in light of what the von der Leyen Commission and the European People’s Party-dominated EP are up to these days regarding farming, and its climate policies in general, the Romania crisis, or circumventing the will of the European electorates with their undemocratic tactics.
What most mainstream media reports fail to mention regarding the incident in the parliament is that Meloni did not bring the manifesto up out of the blue. She spoke up in reaction to the fact that several speakers at a pro-EU demonstration held in Rome last Saturday—including members of the opposition in the Lower House—cited the Manifesto. Meloni remarked in parliament that she was not really clear on what kind of Europe opposition voices keep referring to.
“I don’t know if this is your Europe, but it’s certainly not mine,” Meloni said of the 1941 manifesto, circulated at the time within the Italian Resistance and soon to become the programme of the European Federalist Movement. Referring to those who referenced the manifesto at the Saturday protest, she added she hoped “they haven’t read it, because the alternative would be scary.”
Opposition MPs lost it completely when Meloni dared to quote the Manifesto verbatim. Many yelled “Shame!”, and one representative even called on her to “kneel before the founding father[s]” of Europe instead of denigrating them.
The Italian (and European) Left is still hellbent on defending the indefensible, in the name of the erstwhile sacred cows of the progressive European elites—taboos that cannot be talked about and even less broken. As the Italian Communist outlet Il Manifesto argued, Meloni “took the quotes out of their historical context,” prompting the former Italian minister of health to shout “This is an apology of fascism!”
Once again, the tired old accusation of fascism is the last resort for progressives unable to rebut valid arguments on the Right. It highlights the core flaws of their ideas. And in Italy, they have still not recovered from the shock of having a prime minister who is not afraid of taking them on, and coherently and consistently speaks her mind on issues that were swept under the carpet for so long.