The Meloni Way
How Italy’s prime minister uses lawsuits and intimidation to reshape the culture.
JUNE 4, 2024
On April 16, a trial between two unlikely participants opened: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and an 81-year-old historian named Luciano Canfora. Canfora’s alleged crime had taken place two years previously, when he was talking to a high school class. At the time, Meloni, leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, was just a parliamentarian known for her positions on migration and surrogacy. Canfora had described her as a “neo-Nazi at heart.” Although the talk was neither streamed nor uploaded, it was recorded. Some in attendance formally complained to the school district. Meloni quickly filed a lawsuit asking for 20,000 euros in damages.
Canfora had plenty of examples to use in his defense. Since becoming a politician, Meloni has championed “Italian values” and embraced an anti-migration stance. When she was 19, Meloni praised the legacy of Benito Mussolini, telling a French interviewer he was “a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy,” and she has resisted calls to remove the tricolor flame, a symbol of neo-fasciscm, from her party’s logo. She has also called for celebrations normally held on April 25, when Italy marks its liberation from fascism, and on June 2, the day Italy became a republic, to be replaced by a “national unity day” in November to mark Italy’s victory in World War I. Canfora’s next hearing is set for October 7.
The intention is not only to intimidate those being sued but to shut up dissenters entirely.
The lawsuit is part of a larger pattern in Meloni’s Italy. Since becoming prime minister in 2022, Meloni has used lawsuits and intimidation to reshape the country’s culture to match her ideals. Last year, the anti-mafia author Roberto Saviano was fined 1,000 euros for calling her and her coalition partner “bastards” in a 2020 television interview after a migrant boat sank near Lampedusa, killing several people, including a 6-month-old baby. She is also suing the lead singer of the British band Placebo for calling her a “fascist, racist piece of shit” at a concert near Turin last summer.
Donatella Di Cesare, a professor of political science at the Sapienza University of Rome, said the legal proceedings — many of them against intellectuals whose politics oppose Meloni’s — are a political strategy. The intention is not only to intimidate those being sued but to shut up dissenters entirely. During any legal defamation hearing, the defendant must abide by a strict gag order and risks immediate jail time if he or she breaches it. Italy’s archaic judiciary system is notoriously slow — cases often drag on for years. “Meloni has been very keen to lend the post-fascist movement a new, more acceptable face,” Di Cesare said recently in an interview. Through her electoral success, Meloni has reinvigorated the Italian far right, often thought taboo after Mussolini. “Those who draw attention to the movement’s fascist roots are being punished,” Di Cesare said. This is a process Di Cesare knows well: She was sued for defamation by Meloni’s brother-in-law, Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, for referring to his calls to stop migration as “neo-Hitlerism.” A judge acquitted her on May 15, saying the facts of the case did not constitute a crime.
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Meloni became prime minister in October 2022, after her Brothers of Italy party won 26 percent of votes in the snap election that was called after the collapse of Mario Draghi’s technocratic government. Her campaign promised to embrace national identity, enact more stringent border control measures, defend the traditional family and protect cultural heritage. One of Meloni’s political consultants during the period between the 2018 and 2022 general elections was Steve Bannon. He was often spotted in Rome while she campaigned and spoke at her party’s conferences, urging her to embrace an “Italy first” platform along the lines of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Many of her battles have been cultural ones. During a rally last summer in Rome, Meloni promised to “liberate Italian culture” from “a system” that she claimed had for many years been run largely by leaders of the left.
Much of her fight concerns the leadership of major museums. In 2015, Italy’s left-wing Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini came up with the idea of recruiting foreign candidates to run the country’s top museums. The intention was to bring new perspectives and ideas to heritage sites. Within a few years, 10 of Italy’s 20 top museum directors did not have Italian passports — something the country’s far right promised to change.
Since her election, Meloni has gone on a firing spree, pushing for foreign museum directors to be replaced with Italians who belong to political parties in the ruling coalition. Gone are German-born Eike Schmidt from the Uffizi in Florence (who has since become an Italian citizen and is now running for office in Florence on a ticket backed by Meloni’s party) and British Canadian James Bradburne from the Pinacoteca di Brera. Cecile Hedwig Mathilde Hollberg is leaving the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence this summer.
She further campaigned on promises to transform Italy’s arts sector. This would also mean changing the country’s strict rules on loaning pieces to museums abroad. Meloni’s government wants to loan out only less valuable pieces and keep the most valuable artifacts at home. Parliament is still debating her proposed ban of English and other foreign-language words in Italian official documents, which could be punished with fines of up to 100,000 euros.
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She also promised to “defend Italy’s historic memory” and to “criminalize cancel culture and iconoclasm.” Her government introduced legislation that would forbid journalists from criticizing national symbols. The laws would protect things like the massive obelisk in front of Rome’s Olympic Stadium that has Mussolini’s name written on it and would allow the government to go after journalists who make statements it finds disagreeable.
She and her culture minister are embroiled in a media fight with Christian Greco, an Italian Egyptologist who runs the prestigious Egyptian Museum in Turin. Since taking over the museum in 2014, Greco has been credited with bringing nearly 1 million visitors a year to the museum through innovative programs. Some of these involve diversifying attendance: The museum offers discounts to proven Arabic speakers and gives passes to Turin’s Arab residents, a practice Meloni has called “anti-Italian.”
The leader of her main opposition, Elly Schlein, recently accused Meloni of having a “mania for control” when it comes to her government’s attempts to stifle both cultural and media entities. “When the right governs, national and regional, it always has the same obsession: occupy seats, promote friends, control through their own people the articulations of the country,” Schlein said. “When this is done to our cultural heritage, it means that we have surpassed the alarm level.”
Meloni’s culture wars may change freedom of the press in the country. In April, during a talk show on a channel owned by RAI, Italy’s national public broadcaster, the bestselling writer Antonio Scurati planned to address Canfora’s case and, in doing so, accuse Meloni of never repudiating fascism.
But before he could deliver it, his monologue was cut, with no explanation from RAI’s editorial director. When Scurati published the monologue on social media, several rebellious RAI journalists read it on air. The event took on its own media backlash. Meloni, trying to tamp down the crisis, even published the entire monologue on her own Facebook page. There, she wrote that Scurati had been cut because his speaking fee was so expensive.
Since 2015, ruling Italian governments have chosen the board of directors that controls what the public stations broadcast, which means RAI always reflects the current leader’s views. Meloni’s handpicked board of directors doesn’t allow RAI to broadcast certain content, including anything that puts her government in a bad light, according to the RAI journalists’ union, which has lodged a formal complaint with the European Commission and asked it to launch an investigation.
RAI journalists have been protesting Scurati’s cancellation on air by resigning and filing complaints. The journalists’ trade union claimed Meloni is forcing RAI to become a “government megaphone” and dubbed the network “TeleMeloni.” RAI journalists went on strike in May to protest the increasing control.
During a May 6 press conference at the Foreign Press Association, the union said it wasn’t allowed to broadcast certain mafia trials that involved defendants from any of Meloni’s coalition parties, or to show anti-government protests except in short news bulletins. Further, RAI’s editorial director wouldn’t allow any of the network’s channels to cover Meloni’s neo-fascist early career.
“The right is intimidating journalists and intellectuals,” he said. “Italy no longer has democratic antibodies.”
Italy is a country where people of all ages still watch broadcast television, which makes control over the state broadcaster’s content vital. According to the national statistical agency ISTAT, some 90 percent of Italy’s population watches traditional television as opposed to streaming content on demand. On average, RAI gets around 38 percent of the market share of viewers on its multichannel platform.
The pressure has changed the station’s coverage, the RAI journalists’ union said. Late last year, RAI canceled its contract for the second season of the documentary series “Insider: Face to Face with Criminality,” hosted by Saviano, the author who complained about Meloni’s anti-immigration policies. Saviano told The Dial that Meloni has enabled the right wing to target intellectuals now more than ever. “The right is intimidating journalists and intellectuals,” he said. “Italy no longer has democratic antibodies. This happens in authoritarian governments. In their vision, the intellectual is defeatist.”
Journalists have been leaving RAI to protest the changes. Lucia Annunziata, anchor of a popular prime-time news analysis show, left RAI in May 2023, saying she and her colleagues were not allowed to be independent. The anchorman and multiplatform media star Amedeo Sebastiani, known professionally as Amadeus, announced in April that he would be leaving the state broadcaster at the end of his contract in August because of Meloni’s stifling of press freedom. Meloni called the RAI CEO to try to stop his exit as rumors swirled that other big names were planning to bail in protest of her grip on the network.
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Several opposition parties, including the social-democratic Partito Democratico and Verdi, Italy’s green party, and the European Center for Press and Media Freedom are urging the European Commission to investigate Meloni’s clutch on the media. They have specifically cited the rapid change in management at RAI after Meloni came to power. The groups have also called for an investigation into the criminal defamation charge against three journalists from the publication Domani who are on trial for publishing damning financial information about Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto. The European Federation of Journalists and the European Center for Press and Media Freedom signed a joint statement expressing their “growing alarm” about what was happening at RAI, accusing Meloni’s government of using strong-arm tactics and “intimidation” to influence content.
The outrage over RAI has become Meloni’s biggest internal political problem. One of the RAI journalists’ complaints is that they have not been allowed to cover migrant arrivals or a new plan to offshore migrants to Albania, which has drawn attention from human rights groups.
Scurati, for his part, said he has suffered an onslaught of abuse since entering the battle with RAI. Someone dumped a bag of feces outside his home on the day he was supposed to appear on the public broadcaster. “When it comes to selective memory, Meloni continues to toe the line of the MSI [neo-fascist party] and never fully being antifascist,” he said. “Because of all of this, I feel like I have a target on my head.”
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Meloni is polling stronger than she was on the day she was elected, and she is often presented as a strong representative of Italy. She is hosting the G7 in Puglia later this month. Joe Biden recently kissed her on the head.
At home, she is showing progress on all her campaign promises. She is stopping migrant ships, mostly with new legislation that makes it easier for the government to fine nongovernmental organizations that rescue people at sea. She has also bolstered Italy’s relationship with the leaders of Libya and Tunisia to get them to stop boats from launching. Meanwhile, the lawsuits have become a family business. Meloni’s sister, who is now climbing the ranks of the Brothers of Italy party, is now suing a local newspaper for a political cartoon.