At a press conference in Vilnius after last week’s NATO summit, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni denied that from her point of view there is a “conflict with the magistracy” in Italy. “Whoever, let’s put it this way, trusts in the return of the clash between politics and justice that we have seen in other times, I fear will be disappointed,” she told reporters.
His perception, however, is not that of the judges. The National Association of Italian Magistrates (ANM), which brings together 96% of the country’s judges, has publicly denounced the “very serious” accusations of politicization by the Executive. “Imprecise government sources accuse us of being politicized. It is a very serious accusation that hits the heart of the judiciary, because a biased judge, who defends a political party, is not a judge. It is a very harsh accusation that we reject”, assured the president of the ANM, Giuseppe Santalucia.
The clash comes as a result of two controversial cases in which weighty exponents of the government majority are involved. One of them, the most notorious, is the investigation against the Minister of Tourism, Daniela Santanchè, one of the women closest to Meloni in Hermanos de Italia, for alleged irregularities in her companies. The case began after an investigative program on Rai, public television, which revealed that the Milan Prosecutor’s Office has been investigating Santanchè for months for alleged falsified balance sheets, fictitious capital gains and irregular transfers. In an appearance before Parliament, the minister denied that she was being investigated. However, judicial sources confirmed shortly after that she had been under investigation since October.
Asked in Vilnius, Meloni defined this case as “extrapolitical” because “it does not concern her activity as a minister, which she is doing very well”. “The anomaly is that the minister is not notified of the investigation, but that the investigation is notified to a newspaper on the same day that she goes to Parliament,” added the prime minister.
Added to the Santanchè case is the accusation of the undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Andrea Delmastro, also from Hermanos de Italia, for revealing confidential information about the anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito, who spent six months on hunger strike in protest against the harsh isolation prison regime to which he was subjected, despite the fact that the Rome Prosecutor’s Office had asked to archive the case.
After learning of his accusation, Palacio Chigi, the seat of the Italian Executive, leaked a note to Italian journalists in which he assured that “it is legitimate to wonder if a part of the judiciary has chosen to play an active role in opposition.” Furthermore, they suggested that they may have decided to “launch the electoral campaign ahead of time for the European elections” next year.
Maurizio Gasparri, a senator from Forza Italia, who is part of the right-wing government majority, went a step further and assured that some judicial sectors want to “question the autonomy and power of the executive and legislative powers,” and denounced a “very serious injury to the underlying principles of the Constitution.” Matteo Salvini, now deputy prime minister and leader of the League, has already attacked the judges several times. He himself is being tried for having blocked the landing of the Open Arms ship in 2019, when he was Minister of the Interior.
According to the general secretary of the ANM, Salvatore Casciaro, this climate and these accusations cause the risk of undermining the confidence of citizens in the magistracy.
To all this has recently been added the controversy over the case involving the son of the president of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa, co-founder with Meloni of Brothers of Italy. His 21-year-old son Leonardo is being investigated after a 22-year-old girl denounced him for sexual assault. The girl, who had been her classmate, recounted that in May, during an evening at a nightclub in Milan, she drank a drink and later woke up naked and confused in Leonardo La Russa’s bed. In a clinic with an anti-violence department they found bruises on her neck and a wound on her thigh, and she had also tested positive for cocaine taken before the disco.
The president of the Upper House, the second authority of the Italian State, responded by sowing doubts about the complainant’s version, arguing that she had filed the complaint 40 days later, something that left “many question marks”, and stressing that she had taken cocaine. After speaking with his son, La Russa justified in a statement, he was sure that he had not committed “criminally relevant” acts. “In addition, although fleetingly, my wife and I saw her that morning, and the young woman seemed absolutely calm,” he added, indicating that the reprimand he gave his son was for “having brought home a girl with whom he did not have a consolidated relationship.” In this case, Meloni did distance herself from the co-founder of her party and defended that “the problem of the times” does not arise when filing a complaint, although she said she understood “as a mother, the suffering of the president of the Senate.”
