23 February 2018

The Local: Italy is 'steeped in hate', Amnesty warns amid toxic election campaign

Against this background, the campaign for Italy's election on March 4th has only aggravated the problem, Amnesty said. The group has been monitoring comments made on social media by political leaders and candidates nationwide and in the past two weeks alone has identified more than 200 that it flagged as hateful or discriminatory on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. 

Virtually all were made by members of the centre-right alliance that the latest polls show leading, comprised of Forza Italia centrists, the populist League and far-right Brothers of Italy. [...]

Meanwhile the Brothers of Italy, while making fewer discriminatory statements about migrants, refugees and Roma people, made the highest number of negative comments about women and LGBTI people. While the party has a high-profile female leader, Giorgia Meloni, it promotes "traditional family values" that tend to exclude orientations other than heterosexual.  [...]

Amnesty's Rufini warned that Italy is more polarized than ever before, saying that part of the public believes itself to be "great, pure, Italian while the rest don't deserve to share the country [...] creating an impossible climate in this country and killing all chance of debate". 

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