The appointment to the Italian government of a far-right lawmaker pictured in 2005 with a Nazi armband sparked controversy on Tuesday, and condemnation from the opposition.
Galeazzo Bignami, elected to the chamber on the Fratelli d’Italia list, the post-fascist party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, was appointed Minister Delegate for Infrastructure on Monday. This 47-year-old lawyer was photographed at a party in 2005 in a black outfit and wearing an armband stamped with the swastika on his left arm.
His appointment is “an offense, an indecency vis-à-vis the Constitution, memory, history and the victims of the swastika”, emblem of the Nazis, reacted on Twitter the deputy of the Democratic Party Marco Furfaro. “Shame on you, Giorgia Meloni,” he added.
Other nominations criticized
The interested party condemned in a press release “all forms of totalitarianism, liberticidal and anti-democratic expression”, describing Nazism as “absolute evil”. The 2005 photo was taken “in a private context” and “I apologized for it more than once,” he said.
Other appointments of deputy ministers announced on Monday have been criticized by the left-wing opposition. Claudio Durigon, at the Ministry of Labor, had proposed in 2021 to rename a park in Latina, south of Rome, bearing the name of the murdered anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, to give it that of Arnaldo Mussolini, the brother of the dictator. The controversy had forced him to resign. “When the past does not pass. Dark shadows on the choice of deputy ministers ”, headlined the center-left daily La Repubblica on Tuesday.