The granddaughter of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has left Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s ‘Brothers of Italy’ party as she believes it is too right wing on LGBTQ+ and other minority rights.
Rachele Mussolini, who is a city councillor in Rome said she was joining the centre-right Forza Italia.
Forza Italia is part of the Italian government’s ruling coalition, but is seen as more liberal than Meloni’s party.
‘It is time to turn the page and join a party that I feel is closer to my moderate and centrist sensibilities,’ the 50-year-old told the Ansa news agency.
Mussolini is known for her support for LGBTQ+ rights, and has said that she ‘never liked’ the fascist salute that some of the party’s supporters still use at commemorative events.
Mussolini was at loggerheads with Prime Minister Meloni over the gender of Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who defeated Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics.
Carini gave up in the fight against Khelif after just 46 seconds.
Meloni claimed that it had not been a fair fight, because Khelife had failed a gender eligibility test at the World Championship’s last year.
‘Until proven otherwise Imane Khelif is a woman. And she has suffered an unworthy witch-hunt,’ Mussolini said.
She took her name from her grandmother, Rachele Guidi, Benito Mussolini’s second wife. Guidi and Benito Mussolini had five children, including Rachele Mussolini’s father, Romano, who was a Jazz pianist.
The Brothers of Italy has its roots in the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist party formed in 1946 by supporters of Mussolini’s regime and former high-ranking members of his fascist party. Meloni’s party still shares its party logo with MSI, an Italian tricolour in the form of a flame.
Meloni has gone to great lengths to present Brother’s of Italy’ as a mainstream, centre-right conservative group and said in 2022 that the Italian right had ‘handed fascism over to history’.
In a speech in Spain in 2021 Meloni said: ‘Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology… no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration… no to big international finance… no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!’
Since coming to power in 2022, Meloni’s government has pursued hardline policies on immigration, abortion and same-sex parenting.