Meloni insults European memory says Schlein

(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 19 - Centre-left Democratic Party (PD) leader Elly Schlein said on Wednesday that Premier Giorgia Meloni during an address to the Lower House had questioned the 1941 Manifesto of Ventotene drafted by two of the founding fathers of the European Union while they were being held by the Fascist regime to hide rifts within the government coalition by offending Europe's memory.
    "Giorgia Meloni not only does not have the courage of defending the values on which the (European) Union is based from the attacks" waged by US President Donald "Trump and by Musk, but she has decided to hide in the House her government's divisions by insulting the European memory.
    "We don't accept attempts to rewrite history", Schlein wrote.
    "Meloni insulted the memory of the Manifesto of Ventotene, recognized by all as the basis on which the EU has been founded.
    "She says that Europe is not hers.
    "Then I ask her if her Italy is the one of the Constitution because the same anti-Fascists wrote it", added Schlein.
    Meloni's statement on Wednesday that the Manifesto of Ventotene did not represent the Europe she envisions 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 of the 1941 manifesto which was circulated within the Italian Resistance and soon became the programme of the European Federalist Movement.
    The small island of Ventotene off the coast of Lazio housed a Fascist prison during World War II where Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi came up with the Manifesto which encouraged a federation of European states in a bid to prevent future wars.
    (ANSA).