Friday, March 29

Controversy in Italy over the video of a League councilor against a Roma woman: “Vote for us to never see her again”


“On September 25, vote for the League to never see it again. To never see her again”, a man with dark glasses is heard saying, ending the sentence with a broad smile. Behind him you can see a woman wearing traditional gypsy clothing, who first approaches with a smile and says “don’t say that”. Later, when the man continues to repeat her appeal to the camera, she changes her face and adds: “I’m not afraid.” The man’s name is Alessio Di Giulio and he is a district councilor for the League in Florence. He is the same person who published the video on Facebook last Sunday, from where he has jumped to other social networks, becoming in the last few hours one of the topics of debate in the electoral campaign for the elections on September 25.

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“I ask that you stop with what is happening. Let’s stop, stop. From the tweet of [Giorgia] Meloni with the image of a raped Ukrainian woman or the scene of the councilor of the League of Florence. It has gone beyond decency, beyond imagining. all this must be denounced”, commented the leader of the center-left coalition Enrico Letta, referring to another episode of this electoral campaign very marked by the declarations on the social networks of politicians and candidates. In that case it was Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who found herself at the center of the controversy for having shared the video of the rape on her Twitter account, at the end of August in Piacenza, in the north. from Italy, of a woman, in the middle of the street. The faces of the aggressor and the victim could not be recognized, but the voice of the woman who was screaming desperately was clearly heard, allowing her to be identified. Meloni was accused of instrumentalizing the violence against the victim to relaunch her heavy-handed policy against immigration. The aggressor, arrested, was a man from Guinea and an asylum seeker in Italy and the case served to reinforce the message, contrary to data and evidence, that gender-based violence is a problem linked to immigration.

Neither Meloni’s tweet is already on Twitter – the social network has removed it because it violated its publication rules – nor is the councilor’s video on Facebook, but the controversy over the degeneration in the use of networks in the electoral campaign continues . Di Giulio justified himself by saying that it was a case of “harassing begging” and that whoever branded him a racist did not know him. “He has been wrong, he has done a foolish thing, because the problems are solved with the laws and the security forces. You can’t solve the problem of the Roma camps with a video and against a person”, said the leader of the League Matteo Salvini, who for years, with a propaganda device nicknamed “The Beast”, has told Skytg24. made social media one of his favorite campaign grounds. The example was the direct one he made a few days ago from the hotspot, the first reception center for immigrants, on the island of Lampedusa, where he arrived with a surprise visit.

Housewives and Tik Tok

A video published by a Forza Italia candidate in Tuscany in which he promoted a bill to “give a salary and a pension to our women and our mothers” also generated a stir in the last few hours, he said, while at his side was a young woman ironing and another vacuuming, in an image that seemed more like an advertisement than an electoral video and that brought together many stereotypes in a few seconds.

Stereotypes and a certain paternalism is what is seen in the first videos of the political leaders who have landed last week on Tik Tok in an attempt to reach the youngest who have become the meat of memes. Silvio Berlusconi’s premiere video, that at 85 years old he is running for the Senate elections and that he appeared sitting at his office table in a blue suit, was popular on networks: “Hello guys. Here I am. I welcome you on my official Tik Tok channel. On this platform you guys are 5 million and 60 percent of you are under 30 years old. I envy you a little but I congratulate you”.





www.eldiario.es