Life Senator and Holocaust survivor
Lilliana Segre told German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ) Wednesday that Premier Giorgia Meloni had realised she
"got it wrong" with her initially defensive response to an
undercover exposé by leftwing new website Fanpage that caught
some members of her party's youth wing voicing anti-semitic,
neofascist and neonazi sentiments.
Segre, 93, said the leader of the rightwing Brothers of Italy
(fDI) party had eventually understood she had been wrong to
initoally "give the impression that she wanted to cover up the
rot" within National Youth (GN) by branding Fanpage's methods as
"regime-like".
Segre told FAZ: "I am very happy that our Prime Minister has
finally decided to intervene.
"I think that she as a person, even a very intelligent one, has
recognised that her first reaction was completely wrong".
To the journalist who recalled that the prime minister had
initially attacked the enquiry rather than 'the rot' that had
emerged, Segre replied: "and then, apparently, she realised that
by being indignant about the journalistic enquiry itself and not
about the rot that had been uncovered, she had given the
impression that she preferred to keep it all secret and not
touch it".
Meloni eventually branded the allegedly antisemitic GN members
as being "incompatible" with FdI and reiterated that there was
no room within her party for those who are nostalgic for
Fascism.
Fanpage recorded some GN members chanting Duce and Sieg Heil and
hailing far right terrorists, while others mocked a Jewish
Senator of their own party and voiced the hope that centre-left
Democratic Party (PD) leader Elly Schlein, who has Jewish roots,
would be impaled.
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