Italy: Meloni withdraws defamation suit against historian
Rome: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has withdrawn a defamation suit against a historian who called the far-right leader a “neo-Nazi at heart”, his lawyer said this week.
Left-wing classicist Luciano Canfora, 82, made the comments during a school debate in Bari, southern Italy, in April 2022 — six months before the Brothers of Italy leader took office.
The trial was to open October 7, with Meloni seeking 20,000 euros ($21,260) in damages.
Canfora’s lawyer Michele Laforgia said that Meloni has withdrawn her suit, without providing further details.
Meloni last year successfully sued journalist Roberto Saviano for criticising her stance against migrants in December 2020, with an Italian court handing him a suspended fine of 1,000 euros.
She has also brought a suit against the frontman of British rock band Placebo, after he called her “racist” and “fascist” during a performance in Italy in July 2023. That trial has yet to start. An Italian court approved the defamation case against Canfora in April.
Speaking ahead of that decision, Canfora – a former professor in Greek and Latin philology at the University of Bari who is well-known in Italy – was unrepentant.
“When you say neo-Nazi, you don’t think of someone who is perpetrating crimes, or murders, you think of someone who still has some ideas, some mental attitudes that hark back to the past,” Canfora said.
He noted that in her 2021 autobiography “I am Giorgia”, Meloni wrote about having “taken up the baton” of Italy’s post-war far-right leaders, including Giorgio Almirante.
Almirante was one of the founders of the now-defunct Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party formed after World War II by supporters of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
He was also an official of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a wartime Nazi-controlled puppet state.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is a political descendant of the MSI, although she told parliament when she took office that she had “never felt sympathy or closeness to undemocratic regimes… including Fascism”.
Canfora has been supported by many Italian and foreign intellectuals in his case, with French left-wing newspaper Liberation organising a petition to support him.
