Defamation Suits In Italy 'Being Used To Silence Intellectuals'

The government of Giorgia Meloni is making strategic use of defamation suits to silence public intellectuals, a philosopher who is being sued by the Italian prime minister's brotherin-law has claimed.

- Philip Oltermann, Lorenzo Tondo

In the latest of a series of lawsuits drawing on Italy's comparatively harsh defamation laws, Donatella Di Cesare of Sapienza University in Rome will appear at a court in the Italian capital on 15 May, after a complaint by the agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, over comments she made comparing one of his speeches to Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Lollobrigida, who is married to Meloni's sister, sparked controversy in April 2023 when at a trade union conference he called on the country not to "surrender to the idea of ethnic replacement".

The trial centres on comments Di Cesare made to a talkshow in which she perceived there to be white supremacist connotations in the term "ethnic replacement", saying it could be found in the pages of Mein Kampf and in National Socialist ideology.

The philosopher, who has written books on continuities between Nazi thinking and modern-day conspiracy theories, said Lollobrigida spoke "like a gauleiter", a regional leader of Hitler's party.

In his criminal complaint, Lollobrigida said Di Cesare had portrayed him as "a Nazi who glorifies concentration camps and espouses extermination camps as a solution to immigration issues", which was "not only defamatory but also shameful".

"I fail to understand how my words could even remotely be likened to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf," he said.