Giorgia Meloni files a complaint against the singer of Placebo who called her a “fascist”

Italian head of government Giorgia Meloni and her older sister Arianna, both committed to the far right, separately filed suit this week for defamation. The first against the singer of the group Placebo Brian Molko, the second against an Italian press cartoonist. The founder and president of the post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party has filed a complaint against the British artist, leader of the alternative rock group, who insulted her and called her a "fascist, racist" during a concert on 11 July at the “Sonic Park” festival in Stupinigi, near Turin (north).

Arianna Meloni, approached 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, which is 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 matter. I prefer that my drawings speak for me. And my lawyers,” he wrote.

The vignette entitled "Objective: to increase the birth rate" shows Arianna Meloni, wife of Francesco Lollobrigida, Minister of Agriculture in the government of her sister-in-law, in bed with a man of color. He asks his lover: "And your husband?" She 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 which took office in October 2022. "Attacking the adversary also justifies destabilizing the lives of people and their families," Arianna Meloni said.

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 forty-year-old has made the fight against immigration a priority of her mandate, while wishing to promote the birth rate in her country, which is 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 had denied it had anything "to do with race", having warned a few weeks earlier of "ethnic replacement" he said was occurring as a result of immigration.