In 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 judiciary” in Italy. “Whoever, let’s put it this way, trusts in the return of the clash between politics and justice that we’ve seen in other times, I’m afraid will be disappointed,” he assured reporters.
His perception, however, is not that of the judges. The Italian National Association of Magistrates (ANM), which brings together 96% of the country’s judges, has publicly denounced the “very serious” accusations of politicization by the Executive.
“Inaccurate government sources accuse us of being politicized. It is a very serious accusation that attacks 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 collision originates in the wake of two controversial cases in which important 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 Germans d’Italia, for alleged irregularities in her companies. The case began after an investigative program on Rai, the 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 in Parliament, the minister herself denied that she was being investigated. However, judicial sources confirmed shortly after that she had been under investigation since October.
When asked about it in Vilnius, Meloni defined this case as “extra-political”, because “it does not concern his activity as a minister, which he 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 attends Parliament,” added the prime minister.
In Santanchè’s case, the undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Andrea Delmastro, also from Germans d’Italia, has been accused of revealing confidential information about the anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito, who spent six months on hunger strike to protest the harsh prison regime of isolation to which he was subjected, despite the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office in Rome had asked to file the case.
After his imputation was made public, the Chigi palace, seat of the Italian Executive, leaked a note to Italian journalists in which he assured that “it is legitimate to ask whether a part of the judiciary has chosen to develop an active opposition role”. What’s more, they suggested that they may have decided to “open early the electoral campaign 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 power and the legislative power”, and denounced a “serious injury to the basic 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 ship Open Arms in 2019, when he held the portfolio of Minister of the Interior.
According to the general secretary of the ANM, Salvatore Casciaro, this climate and these accusations cause the risk of undermining citizens’ trust in the judiciary.
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 woman reported him for sexual assault. The girl, who had been his classmate, explained that in May, during an evening at a nightclub in Milan, she had 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 the girl’s neck and a wound on her thigh, and she had also tested positive for cocaine use before the disco.
The president of the Upper Chamber, the second authority of the Italian State, responded by casting doubt on the complainant’s version and argued that she had filed the complaint 40 days later, which raised “many questions”, and emphasized that she had taken cocaine. After speaking with his son, La Russa justified in a statement that he was certain that he had not committed “criminally relevant” acts. “Also, albeit fleetingly, my wife and I saw her in the morning, and the young woman seemed absolutely calm,” he added, and indicated that the reprimand he gave his son was for “bringing home a girl with whom he had no established relationship.” In this case, Meloni did distance himself from the co-founder of his party and defended that he does not consider “the problem of time” when filing a complaint, although he said that he understood “as a mother, the suffering of the president of the Senate”.
