First stirrings in the Italian political ranks. The new president of the council, Giorgia Meloni, appointed to the government on Monday a far-right deputy, photographed in 2005 with a Nazi armband, sparking Tuesday 1er November the condemnation of the opposition.
Galeazzo Bignami, elected to the Chamber of Deputies in September 2022 on the Fratelli d’Italia list, the post-fascist party of the Prime Minister, has been appointed Minister Delegate for Infrastructure. This 47-year-old lawyer was photographed at a party in 2005 in a black outfit and wearing an armband stamped with the swastika on his left arm.
His appointment is “an offense, an indecency vis-à-vis the Constitution, the memory, the history and the victims of the [croix gammée] »emblem of the Nazis, reacted on Twitter Democratic Party deputy Marco Furfaro. “Shame on you, Giorgia Meloni”he added.
Other appointments criticized by the opposition
The person concerned condemned, in a press release, “any form of totalitarianism, liberticidal and anti-democratic expression”calling Nazism a ” pure evil “. The 2005 photo was taken “in a private context” and “I apologized more than once”he pointed out.
Other appointments of deputy ministers announced on Monday have been criticized by the left-wing opposition. Claudio Durigon, at the Ministry of Labor, had proposed in 2021 to rename a park, south of Rome, bearing the name of the murdered anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, to give it that of Arnaldo Mussolini, the brother of the dictator. The controversy had forced him to resign.