Falcon powers – Philosopher being sued by Giorgia Meloni’s brother-in-law says such trials are part of a political strategy.
The government of Giorgia Meloni is making strategic use of defamation suits to silence public intellectuals, a philosopher who is being sued by the Italian prime minister’s brother-in-law has claimed.
In the latest of a series of lawsuits drawing on Italy’s comparatively harsh defamation laws, Donatella Di Cesare of Sapienza University in Rome will appear at a criminal court in the Italian capital on 15 May, after a complaint by the agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, over comments she made comparing one of his speeches to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Lollobrigida, who is married to Meloni’s sister and considered one of the PM’s closest allies, sparked controversy in April 2023 when at a trade union conference he called on the country not to “surrender to the idea of ethnic replacement”, which he described as “Italians are having fewer children, we replace them with someone else”.
The trial centres on comments Di Cesare made the same day on the talkshow DiMartedì in which she perceived there to be white supremacist connotations in the term “ethnic replacement”, saying it could be found in the pages of Mein Kampf and in National Socialist ideology.
The philosopher, who has written books on continuities between Nazi thinking and modern-day conspiracy theories, said Lollobrigida spoke “like a gauleiter”, a regional leader of Hitler’s party.
In his criminal complaint, Lollobrigida said Di Cesare had portrayed him as “a Nazi who glorifies concentration camps and espouses extermination camps as a solution to immigration issues”, which was “not only defamatory but also shameful”.
“I fail to understand how my words could even remotely be likened to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” the minister said. Di Cesare’s remarks, he continued, were “solely aimed at destroying a person and smearing both myself and my associates”.
Di Cesare, 67, said her comments were not intended as a slur but as political criticism. “I said Lollobrigida spoke like a gauleiter, not that he was one,” she told the Guardian. “What we are seeing here is legal proceedings against a historical comparison.”
She said she believed the legal proceedings were part of a political strategy. “The aim of defamation trials like mine is not just to intimidate, but to push leftwing intellectuals outside the public discourse,” she said. “Meloni has been very keen to lend the post-fascist movement a new, more acceptable face. Those who draw attention to the movement’s fascist roots are being punished.”
Meloni and Lollobrigida did not reply to requests to comment for this article.
Defamation in Italy can be tried at civil or criminal courts. At the latter, the crime of aggravated defamation can be found punishable by six years in jail, the harshest sentence of this type in the EU after Slovakia, where it can lead to seven-year jail sentences.
A court hearing in Rome on 15 May will decide whether Di Cesare’s case will be settled at a civil court or criminal trial.
During Meloni’s first year in power in Italy, Europe’s highest number of strategic lawsuits against public participation – so-called Slapp cases – were brought in the country, according to a recent study by the European parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs (LIBE).
In parallel to the suit against Di Cesare, the classicist historian Luciano Canfora, 81, is facing an aggravated defamation trial in Bari, Puglia. In April 2022, before Meloni was appointed prime minister, Canfora described the politician as “a neo-Nazi at heart”, which Meloni’s complaint said was “apt to distort and falsify her political identity”.
