The tragic shipwreck two weeks ago of a ship off the coast of four, a town located in the southern region of Calabria, has caused a political storm in Italy. With the government in the crosshairs, accused of a possible negligence in the management of the emergency, that the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating, the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, faced criticism for participating in Matteo Salvini’s birthday party only a few hours after avoiding meeting the relatives of the victims, whose provisional balance amounts to 79 dead, among them, 33 minors.
The leader of the League and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport in the Executive chaired by Meloni He turned 50 last week. The news would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the fact that the video of Salvini and Meloni singing during the party outraged a large part of Italy. The images, published on social networks by a journalist close to the right, were intended to clear up rumors about a possible crisis between the partners of the governing coalition to which Forza Italia also belongs, the party of Silvio Berlusconi, who also attended the party. However, they achieved the opposite effect.
“They did not pay tribute to the dead of Cutro, they put on a pathetic staging, they changed institutional commitments to go sing at Salvini’s party. Inhumanity, cynicism, improvisation and cruelty”, denounced the spokeswoman for the Democratic Party (PD), Simona Malpezzi. “They did not want to meet with their relatives or pay homage to the coffins, and yet they have found time to celebrate the minister’s 50th birthday,” added the mayor of Bologna, Matteo Lepore, also from the PD.
But not only the opposition denounced the scene in which Meloni and Salvini sing a song inspired by an emigrant from Calabria who was found dead in a river. “They sing on the wrong day, in the wrong place”wrote the director of the newspaper La Stampa, one of the most influential in Italy.
On Thursday, the day before the celebration, Meloni presided over an extraordinary Council of Ministers in Cutro to try to make amends for not having visited the town until then or having met with the survivors of the tragedy, but the initiative ended up being a goal at own door. At that meeting, the Executive approved a decree that toughens immigration policy with rules aimed at simplifying the expulsion process, improving repatriation centers and restricting the “special protection”, a guardianship included in the Italian legal system. However, the subsequent press conference was complete chaos and Meloni ended up confronting the journalists and even raising her voice.
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