Centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) leader Elly Schlein accused the Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Minister of using supremacist language today. Francesco Lollabrigida had said Italy was enduring “ethnic replacement”.
Schlein criticised Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Minister Francesco Lollobrigida for saying Italy’s low birth rate meant Italians were enduring “ethnic replacement”. She said the minister’s words smacked of “supremacist” tropes and took Italy back to the days of fascism.
“Minister Lollobrigida’s words are disgusting; they are unacceptable words from someone in his position.
“They take us back to the 1930s, they are words that have the flavour of white supremacism”.
“I hope that Giorgia Meloni and the government will distance themselves from these statements,’ she concluded, “made on the day that President (Sergio) Mattarella is visiting Auschwitz.”
Lollobrigida is a senior member of Meloni’s rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. He said earlier that “births cannot be incentivised by persuading people to spend more time at home, so that relations intensify, as some people have said.
“The way (to boost Italy’s flagging birth rate) is to build a welfare that enables (women) to work and have a family; support young couples to find jobs. We can’t give in to the idea of ethnic replacement: The Italians are having fewer children, so we’ll replace them with someone else. That’s not the way”.
Mussolini urged fascist women to have many children
Fascist dictator Bentio Mussolini urged loyal fascist mothers to have as many children as they could and gave awards to parents with large families.
Before becoming Prime Minister, in some of her election campaign speeches, Meloni paid lip service into the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This claims there are plots to substitute historical populations with migrants. Meloni has not, however, repeated these statemenet since becoming PM.
In his speech at Auschwitz, President Mattarella said: “hate, prejudice, racism, extremism and indifference, raving and the will to power are waiting in ambush”.
