ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Tuesday pledged to fight “every kind of discrimination and anti-Semitism” as she unveiled a plaque for 35 Jewish journalists persecuted under fascist-era racial laws.
Meloni, who joined a neo-fascist youth movement in her teenage years, is trying to show that her Brothers of Italy party belongs to the conservative mainstream, despite its far-right roots.
In her maiden speech to parliament in October, Meloni said she has “never felt any sympathy for regimes, fascism included,” and that Italy’s anti-Semitic racial laws of 1938 had been “the lowest point of Italian history, a shame that will taint our people forever.”
She used the same words on Tuesday during the ceremony in Rome at the headquarters of the association of journalists.
“We have not yet won the fight against discrimination and anti-Semitism,” she said, adding that the Italian government is “ready, focused to do its part to fight every kind of discrimination and anti-Semitism that threatens to be present among us.”
Those journalists honoured were barred from doing their job under fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
(Reporting by Francesca Piscioneri, editing by Alvise Armellini/Keith Weir)
