A granddaughter of Italy’s wartime dictator Benito Mussolini said on Thursday she was leaving Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party because it was too rightwing.
Rachele Mussolini, a city councillor in Rome, said she was moving to the group of Forza Italia, which is part of Italy’s ruling coalition but seen as more liberal on civil rights.
“It is time to turn the page and join a party that I feel is closer to my moderate and centrist sensibilities,” the 50-year-old told the Ansa news agency.
Mussolini, who won the most votes of any candidate at the last council elections in Rome in 2021, recently took issue with the Brothers of Italy’s stance on minority rights. She is known for her support for LGBTQ+ rights and has said that she “never liked” the fascist salute, which some party members and supporters still perform during commemorative events.
Last month she took issue with Meloni, the prime minister, in a dispute over the gender of Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer who fought against Italian Angela Carini at the Olympic Games.
After Carini gave up during her bout against Khelif – who later won the gold medal – Meloni said it had not been a match between equals because the Algerian had failed a gender eligibility test at the World Championships last year. “Until proven otherwise Imane Khelif is a woman. And she has suffered an unworthy witch-hunt,” Mussolini said.
She took her name from her grandmother, Rachele Guidi, Benito Mussolini’s second wife. Guidi and Benito Mussolini had five children together, including Rachele Mussolini’s father, Romano, a jazz pianist who died in 2006.
The Brothers of Italy traces its roots to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party formed in 1946 by supporters of Mussolini’s regime and former high-ranking members of his fascist party. Meloni’s party still shares its party logo with MSI, an Italian tricolour in the form of a flame.
Meloni has tried to present her party as a mainstream conservative group and declared in 2022 that the Italian right had “handed fascism over to history”. Since taking office that year, her government has pursued hardline policies on immigration, abortion and same-sex parenting.
Ansa and Reuters contributed to this report
