Last Friday, the Italian deputy prime minister, the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, celebrated his 50th birthday with a surprise party at a hotel with a pool and spa in the province of Como, near Milan. His political allies from the right-wing coalition were not lacking, the former prime minister and founder of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi; and the Prime Minister and leader of the Italian Brotherhood, Giorgia Meloni, who took a plane from Rome after meeting with her Israeli counterpart, Beniamín Netanyahu, so as not to miss the appointment.
The evening left an image that has caused great outrage in Italy. This is a video, published by the deputy editor of the newspaper Il Giornale, Nicola Porro, which shows Meloni and Salvini singing together in karaoke the Canzone di Marinella by the singer-songwriter Fabrizio de Andre, inspired by the story of a young Calabrian woman who emigrated to the north and was found drowned in a river.
The video, which has spread like wildfire on social networks, has been widely criticized for having celebrated when the dead were still being found from the recent shipwreck off the Calabrian town of Cutro, in which at least 76 people died, 30 of them they minor. “Yesterday was a very painful day for all of us, we buried some coffins, including a little girl. I must say that I was very impressed by the images that I saw of both the government press conference and the karaoke of Salvini and Meloni, who did not want to meet with the families of the victims or pay tribute to the coffins, but found time to celebrate the 50th Minister Salvini’s birthday”, lamented the mayor of Bologna, Matteo Lepore, where the funeral of some of the victims of the shipwreck was held in a Muslim cemetery.
Meloni had already been questioned for taking eleven days to visit Cutro, where she organized a council of ministers on Thursday to toughen punishment for traffickers. “They did not pay homage to Cutro’s dead, they put on a pathetic staging, they changed institutional commitments to go sing at Salvini’s party. Inhumanity, cynicism, improvisation and cruelty”, said the spokeswoman for the Democratic Party (PD), Simona Malpezzi.
Everything happens while on Saturday more than 1,300 migrants were rescued by the Italian coast guard. Yesterday, the Alarm Phone organization denounced the sinking of another barge off Libya with dozens missing, despite having alerted the Italian authorities of a “dangerous situation”. “The Italian authorities have deliberately delayed the relief, leaving them to die,” denounced the NGO, which receives calls for help from boats heading to Italy.
