Italy minister shocks with 'ethnic replacement' warning

ROME – Italian Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, one of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s closest allies, sparked outrage on Tuesday by warning against the “ethnic replacement” of Italians by migrants.

“We cannot resign ourselves to the idea of ethnic replacement: Italians have fewer children, so let’s substitute them with someone else. That’s not the road to go down,” Mr Lollobrigida said during a Congress in Rome.

Ms Meloni’s Brothers of Italy won elections in 2022

on a pledge to boost the flagging birth rate and curb sea arrivals in Italy, which has long been a key destination for boats crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa.

Some 32,700 people have landed so far in 2023, compared to 8,400 in the same period in 2022 – an increase which prompted Ms Meloni’s right-wing coalition to call a six-month state of emergency last week.

Mr Lollobrigida is the agricultural minister and a senior member of far-right Brothers of Italy party, as well as being Ms Meloni’s brother-in-law, and his comments were slammed by opposition parties.

Ms Elly Schlein, head of the centre-left Democratic Party, said they were “disgusting words” that have “a flavour of white supremacism about them”.

She noted that Mr Lollobrigida made the comments while Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella was attending a memorial at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the camp between 1940 and 1945 along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.

Critics say Ms Meloni’s coalition, which includes Mr Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, has been fuelling anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy.

The left has repeatedly accused the government of undermining rights.

Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, another Brothers of Italy member, came under fire in February for saying he would be disappointed if his son came out as gay.

He said he would “accept the news with regret, as if he were an AC Milan supporter”. AFP