The 50-year-old American-British artist - who grew up in Luxembourg and studied at the AISL - was taking part in the Sonic Park festival in Stupinigi, near Turin, on 11 July when, in front of thousands of spectators, he shouted “Giorgia Meloni, you fascist, racist piece of shit, fuck off”.
Giorgia Meloni, founder and president of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, has filed a complaint against Brian Molko, leader of the rock band. Article 290 of the Italian criminal code punishes with a fine between €1,000 and €5,000 any person who “publicly defames the Republic” as well as Parliament, the government, the Constitutional Council, the judiciary, or the army.
Giorgia Meloni, who became head of the Italian government in October 2022, and her party are the heirs of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party founded after the Second World War, whose tricolour pennant she took over when Fratelli d’Italia was founded at the end of 2012.
Since taking office, Ms Meloni has avoided speaking on the subject, but even before last year’s parliamentary elections she acknowledged that the dictator Benito Mussolini had “achieved a great deal”, without exonerating him of his “mistakes": the anti-Jewish laws and the entry into the war.
She also asserts that in her party “there is no place for those nostalgic for fascism, or for racism and anti-Semitism”.
Several people in her political entourage have no hesitation in claiming their affiliation with this dark period in Italian history, such as Senate President Ignazio La Russa, a collector of busts of Mussolini, while insisting that the fringe of the Italian conservative right to which they belong is democratic and made a definitive break with authoritarian temptations after the war.
