Meloni begins a purge after the defeat in the constitutional referendum
The Italian prime minister dismisses two senior government officials but fails to force the resignation of a minister accused of alleged tax fraud against social security.
RomeGiorgia Meloni is experiencing her lowest point since being elected in 2022. The defeat at the polls of her controversial reform of the judiciary, which More than 54% of Italians rejected the proposal in a constitutional referendum held this Sunday and Monday.This has caused an earthquake in the hitherto stable Italian government.
Just 24 hours after the polls yielded the first results, the Prime Minister dismissed two high-ranking members of her government, both embroiled in various legal scandals. This is the table Meloni seems determined to use to clean house in her increasingly questioned government. So much so that on Tuesday night, she went so far as to publicly call for the resignation of the Minister of Tourism, Daniela Santanchè, in an unprecedented statement. Santanchè has thus far refused to step down. This challenge further highlights Meloni's weakness.
This Tuesday of election hangover in Italy began with the mea culpa Justice Minister Carlo Nordio has acknowledged his responsibility for the failure of the constitutional referendum and announced that he will leave politics once the legislative term ends. But the real earthquake came when the Undersecretary of Justice, Andrea Delmastro, Meloni's right-hand man, announced his resignation.
The fall of Delmastro, one of the heavyweights of Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni's party, is not related to his involvement in the referendum, but to his alleged connection to a mafia front man. According to the Italian press, which reported the story shortly after the vote, Delmastro is a shareholder in a Rome restaurant along with the eighteen-year-old daughter of a man linked to a well-known Camorra clan. The politician defended himself by claiming that he sold his stake months ago, but a recent video contradicted his version of events. "My fight against the mafia is clear and evident," insisted Delmastro, who had already been at the center of another political scandal for which he was sentenced in the first instance to eight months for revealing official secrets to attack the opposition.
Meloni publicly defended who her right-hand man was. "If this is the worst they can say about my government, I'm at peace," she asserted two days before the referendum. But she soon changed her mind.
Untouchables indicted
However, the fall that caused the greatest shock was that of the chief of staff of the Ministry of Justice, the Berlusconi loyalist Giusi Bartolozzi, responsible for some unfortunate remarks during the campaign in which she compared judges to a "shooting guerrilla." "I appeal to all citizens who suffer at their hands [the judges'] expense. Vote yes and we will get rid of this judiciary that acts as a firing squad," she said on a television program, provoking outrage from the opposition, which demanded her immediate dismissal.
The influential chief of staff of Minister Nordio seemed untouchable, especially after Italy released Libyan criminal Osama al-Masri last year—arrested in Turin and repatriated on a state flight several days later—despite the International Criminal Court's (ICC) ruling on humanitarian grounds. Nordio justified the strange operation by citing a procedural flaw in the order from the ICC, but the Public Prosecutor's Office is maintaining an open investigation into the case, in which the main defendant is Bartolozzi, suspected of having provided false information to Parliament regarding the release of the Libyan torturer in order to defend her boss.
"From today on, I will not cover for anyone: whoever makes a mistake, must pay for it," Meloni told her inner circle, according to the Italian press. But the head of the Italian government had not counted on the determination of her Minister of Tourism, Daniela Santanchè, a former student of Silvio Berlusconi who left for the Brothers of Italy in 2017, and who is accused of allegedly defrauding the Social Security system of more than 100,000 euros with the funds.
In 2024, the governing coalition as a whole saved Santanchè from a no-confidence vote brought by the opposition, but now Meloni has made it clear that she is prepared to let it fall in order to get ahead. clean in the elections scheduled for 2027. This Wednesday, the minister submitted her resignation, following a request from the prime minister.
