An Instagram post celebrating a fascist naval commander has been deleted from the account of a Brothers of Italy senator who could be given a ministerial post in Giorgia Meloni’s government.
Lavinia Mennuni, an anti-abortion campaigner who has also spoken out against gay people being parents, was elected senator in the recent general election won by a coalition led by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist origins.
Mennuni is reportedly among the candidates expected to lead what would be a newly created ministry of births as part of the alliance’s plans to enact policies to reverse Italy’s declining birthrate.
In an Instagram post dating back to 8 September 2019 – the anniversary of Italy’s surrender to the Allies after the downfall of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943 – Mennuni’s account shared a photo of Junio Valerio Borghese, a decorated naval commander during Mussolini’s regime, alongside a quote in which he lamented the Armistice.
The Armistice was announced on 8 September 1943 by Pietro Badoglio, Italy’s prime minister after Mussolini’s downfall. In part of the quote by Borghese shared by Mennuni, he said: “I, on 8 September, on the announcement of Badoglio, cried. I cried and have never cried again in my life. They can send me to Siberia, they can shoot me, but I will never cry again.” In the fuller quote, Borghese goes on to say that he made a choice [to join Mussolini’s pro-Nazi troops] and never regretted it. “In fact, that choice marks the climax of my life, of which I am most proud.”
Nicknamed the Black Prince, Borghese went on to join Mussolini’s pro-Nazi troops, and in postwar Italy was an ardent fascist and member of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the party in which, decades later, Meloni began her political career.
In 1970, Borghese was involved in planning a neofascist coup, called Golpe Borghese, that was abandoned after being discovered by the press. He fled to Spain, where he died in 1974.
Menunni’s Instagram post was deleted after the Guardian sent her a screenshot. Neither Mennuni nor Meloni’s spokesperson have responded to a request for comment.
Meloni, poised to become prime minister, has tried to distance Brothers of Italy from its neofascist roots, issuing a video targeted at the foreign press in August saying the party had “handed fascism over to history” decades ago. Last year she said there were no “nostalgic fascists, racists or antisemites in the Brothers of Italy DNA” and that she had always got rid of “ambiguous people”.
Days before the elections in September, Brothers of Italy suspended one of its senatorial candidates, Calogero Pisano, after La Repubblica reported that he had praised Adolf Hitler as “a great statesman” in a social media post in 2014. In a later social media post, Pisano described Meloni, who in the past has praised Mussolini, as a “modern fascist”.
Within a few hours of the posts, Brothers of Italy issued a statement saying Pisano had been suspended with “immediate effect” and would be “referred to the party’s supervisory board” for any further action.
Pisano said: “Years ago, I wrote things that were deeply wrong and deleted my personal profile on Facebook because I was ashamed. I don’t know how La Repubblica found the posts, but I unambiguously condemn those expressions and apologise to anyone offended by them.”
Menunni, a Rome councillor, met Meloni after joining the National Alliance, an offspring of MSI that morphed into Brothers of Italy in the late 1990s.
“She praised a very shady character, which is not a good look, especially as Meloni is doing everything to make the party look acceptable,” said Luciano Cheles, a professor emeritus of Italian studies at the University of Grenoble. “Meloni is especially targeting international opinion. But the fact that these social media posts happened in the past doesn’t mean that in the meantime she or the party have changed, they are simply adapting to the context.”
Meloni and her coalition allies, which include Matteo Salvini’s far-right League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, are putting together a cabinet list for a government expected to be sworn in by the end of October.
