Members of the Italian Brothers' youth association have been filmed making numerous fascist and Nazi gestures.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has spoken out about the matter after several weeks of silence.
An undercover reporter from the Italian news site Fanpage has filmed at several meetings with the youth association National Youth (GN). On June 13, published clips where members, among other things, are seen making fascist salutes with their right arms, chanting "sieg heil" and shouting slogans in support of the former dictator Benito Mussolini.
Since the revelations, Italy's opposition parties have demanded an answer from the ruling Moderate Party. Italian Brothers (FDI) have to varying degrees tried to distance themselves from the roots that lead to fascist Italy.
"In the wrong place"
Those who express racist, anti-Semitic or nostalgic views are in the wrong place, as those views are not compatible with Italian Brothers, says Prime Minister and FDI leader Giorgia Meloni when she comments on the revelations for the first time, in front of a press gathering in connection with the EU summit in Brussels.
There is no ambiguity from my side on that issue.
However, the Prime Minister criticizes the revelation itself, questioning the use of hidden cameras at closed meetings. That's dictatorship methods, according to Meloni.
It's classic journalism under cover, Fanpage objects.
Mocking their own senator
In one of the film clips, a member of the youth association shouts that the social democratic opposition leader Elly Schlein should be impaled on a pole.
This week, further revelations came from Fanpage, where GN members make derogatory comments about Jews and dark-skinned people, among other things, in relation to "the Aryan race". They mock, among others, Ester Mieli – one of FDI's own senators who is Jewish and who previously was the spokesperson for the Jewish community in Rome.
Two people have been forced to leave their FDI positions due to the revelations.
When Italian fascism was defeated in World War II, several of dictator Benito Mussolini's followers went on to form a new party: the Italian Social Movement (MSI). The party continued to play a role on the Italian right flank, occasionally as a support party to Christian democratic governments.
In the early 1990s, the Italian party system was split due to large corruption scandals. New parties were formed, also on the far-right flank where MSI in 1995 merged with the explicitly conservative National Alliance (AN), where there were other more moderate parties.
In 2009, AN merged with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia. A few years later, a far-right group broke out of AN and formed Italian Brothers. In that group was Giorgia Meloni, who had joined MSI's youth association at the age of 15 in 1992. She became party leader in 2014.
As a party logo, FDI uses the same tricolor flag in red, white, and green as MSI and AN previously used. The party also holds its meetings in the premises in Rome where MSI had its headquarters from the start in 1946.
