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Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is a political champion of traditional family values, who believes all children need “a mother and a father” and has urged Italian women to have more babies to combat the country’s looming demographic crisis.
But Meloni has proved that she values the preservation of women’s dignity — including her own — over keeping a troubled family intact when she split from her partner Andrea Giambruno last week, after he was exposed as having harassed female colleagues, even propositioning one for “a threesome or a foursome”.
Shortly after footage of Giambruno’s conduct was aired by Mediaset — the broadcast empire founded by Meloni’s ally, the late Silvio Berlusconi, now run by his heirs — Meloni declared her relationship with Giambruno, father of her seven-year-old daughter, “ends here”. Her decision won sympathy from women across Italy’s political spectrum, with some former critics even hailing her much-needed example to women in how to stand up for themselves when confronted with male transgressions. “Meloni has given a social, cultural and political message . . . that a certain kind of macho behaviour . . . is now unacceptable,” wrote Elena Tebano, a journalist focused on gender and LGBT rights. Citing the 1970s US feminist adage that “the personal is political”, Tebano called Meloni’s break-up a national turning point, which would have “a before and an after” in politics and Italian society.
Her example will undoubtedly resonate in both workplaces and homes across Italy, where casual workplace machismo is typically treated as harmless male fun and libidinous behaviour is packaged as intense Latin passion.
Simonetta Sciandivasci, editor of the essay collection “The Children I Do Not Want”, called Meloni’s dumping of Giambruno her “first political act” since taking power. Meloni, she wrote, had delivered a “firm and effective lesson’’ to a “sweetly misogynistic” society, demonstrating “how to leave someone who hurts you: immediately and without conditions”.
Even before last week’s scandal, Giambruno was already becoming a growing headache for the premier. While anchoring a daytime show at Mediaset, he sparked outrage with a series of offensive comments, from appearing to blame the victim of a brutal gang-rape for her own assault to comparing African migrants arriving in Italy to migratory livestock. Revelations of his obnoxious off-screen misconduct was the final straw.
Until now, Meloni has hardly been considered a women’s rights defender, despite being Italy’s first female prime minister. A fiery advocate of traditional family values, she has argued passionately against gay couples having children, and speaks of women as potential mothers who need support to have babies.
Italians are now speculating feverishly about how the devastating out-takes from Giambruno’s show wound up broadcast on Mediaset’s irreverent satirical news programme Striscia La Notizia. La Repubblica, the national daily, suggested that the so-called “first gentleman’s” offensive behaviour was creating such discontent within Mediaset that the company resorted to extreme measures to rein him in.
Several newspapers have also speculated whether the drama reflects tensions within Meloni’s conservative three-party coalition — of which Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, still supported by his family, is a member. Antonio Ricci, director of Striscia La Notizia, insists he decided to air the out-takes without the Berlusconi family’s knowledge. Ricci also told Italian news agency Ansa that Meloni would “one day discover that I have done her a favour”.
Not everyone is sympathetic to Meloni. Author Chiara Valerio wrote that the break-up highlights the chasm between the prime minister’s rightwing government’s “obsessive exaltation of the traditional family” and the realities of the leaders’ own messy personal lives. The novelist Nadia Terranova, however, is hopeful that Meloni’s personal heartache might lead to greater empathy and policy support for those in single-parent or non-traditional families.
“The society that our prime minister lives in is not the one she talks about and she knows it,” wrote Terranova. “Perhaps today she knows it a little more.”
amy.kazmin@ft.com
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