Members of the centre-right ruling
coalition and the centre-left opposition clashed in the Senate
on Thursday, a day after Premier Giorgia Meloni's statement that
the Manifesto of Ventotene did not represent the Europe she
envisions sparked a political controversy.
The first to intervene at the beginning of the session was
Senator Raffaella Paita of the centrist Italia Viva (IV) party
in the opposition who said she wanted to "stigmatize the words"
used by the premier in her speech at the Lower House, in which
she questioned the 1941 manifesto which was circulated within
the Italian Resistance and soon became the programme of the
European Federalist Movement.
"What happened yesterday is grave for democracy and Europe, I
consider taking sentences of the manifesto written by exiled
heroes out of context to be shameful", said Paita amid the
protest of rightist Senators.
"What happened yesterday dishonours the country and does not
give justice to Europe and the anti-Fascist Resitance", she
said.
Tino Magni from the Green-Left Alliance (AVS) and Sario Parrini,
of the largest member of the opposition, the Democratic Left,
also criticized the statement amid the protest of centre-right
Senators.
On Wednesday, Meloni's statement during a Lower House debate
ahead of this week's EU Council sparked a protest by opposition
members that led Speaker Lorenzo Fontana to temporarily
interrupt the session.
"I don't know if this is your Europe, but it's certainly not
mine", Meloni said.
"I hope they haven't read it, because the alternative would be
scary", she also noted.
The small island of Ventotene off the coast of Lazio housed a
Fascist prison during World War II, and three of the founding
fathers of the European Union were held there by the Mussolini
dictatorship.
This was where Spinelli Rossi and Colorni came up with the
Ventotene Manifesto.
The Manifesto encouraged a federation of European states in a
bid to prevent future wars.
Later on Wednesday, Meloni posted her address to the House in
which she spoke about the Manifesto to her social media channels
writing: "You judge".
Meloni's three-minute-long speech on the Manifesto quoted
experts from the 1941 text, which was written during the Fascist
regime, saying that "the European revolution in order to respond
to our needs must be Socialist" and "in revolutionary eras in
which institutions don't need to be administered but created,
the democratic practice sensationally fails", among others.
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