This is the translation of the Italian version of the speech, released by the press office of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), originally delivered in Spanish, on Sunday, October 9, 2021 by Giorgia Meloni, leader of FdI, at the event Viva21, organized in Madrid by the Spanish conservative party Vox. Why is iFamNews publishing this speech? Because it’s beautiful and good. Because it contains many elements in which we recognize ourselves. Does publishing it makes us take sides? Of course, but we have never hidden the fact that we are sided, that we are absolutely biased: we are on the side of the non-negotiable principles, which has always been “the right side”, and not because of our skill but because of the truth of things, and when we meet someone, anyone, be they Pier Paolo Pasolini concerning abortion or Pope Francis, Donald J. Trump or Platinette and Mario Capanna on the so called Zan law, we give them space and we echo their words. So let us wait for more interventions like this and we will publish them.
Marco Respinti
Good morning, patriots! Dear Santiago, dear Jorge, dear friends from VOX, thank you! Thank you for this invitation, for the emotion that you give me today with this wonderful event full of patriots.
I feel at home here today. I feel at home because I am immersed in the magnificent heritage of traditions that have forged Spanish civilization over the centuries. I feel at home here because there is an air of culture and national pride, of roots and future, of history and identity. And it is precisely identity that constitutes the core of our common commitment, and the fundamental battleground of our time. Identity is the main enemy of the globalist mainstream and all of us who defend it are the target of “devotees” of progressivism. Everything that identifies us is under attack.
The person is under attack, and with it the very value of human life. Of every single human life, because each of us is a bearer of a unique and unrepeatable genetic code, and this, like it or not, is sacred. And all the while the supposed “good” people want to impose on us the culture of discarding, of lives that are not worthy of being lived according to subjective canons, of lives that can be selected, sold or bought as if they were supermarket products, of lives that can self-destruct with drugs. We don’t accept that. And the monsters are not us, but those who in the name of a supposed freedom propose abominable practices such as renting the uterus or free drugs. They’re the monsters.
The family is under attack, the essential nucleus for procreation, education and training of our children, the center of affection and solidarity between generations, the first place of belonging. Sexual identity is under attack. LGBT lobbies would like to force gender propaganda into schools, into the media, into institutions with that principle of “self identification”–I am not what I am, but how I feel–which first and foremost affects all the rights and achievements of women.
Our spirituality, our sense of the sacred and our Christian roots are under attack, in the name of an absolute relativism and an aggressive atheism that end up paving the way for fundamentalist proselytism. Thus the secularity of the State is being used as a club against the symbols of Christianity while people pretend not to see that in Europe, by now, entire districts are under the rule of Islamic law.
The work of our people is under attack, crushed by monstrous taxation that stifles the freedom of enterprise, by downward competition caused by unregulated globalisation, by speculative finance that takes over the real economy and reduces workers’ rights.
The borders of our nations and of Europe are under attack, subjected to appalling pressure from the immigrationist rhetoric of the left, which feeds a shameful traffic in human beings to fill us with new desperate people, who in too many cases end up fueling crime or sharing breadcrumbs with our poor in the suburbs of large metropolitan cities.
Our history is under attack, cowardly attacked by the “cancel culture” of the Left, which wants to forget everything and destroy everything. Of course, the history of Europe and the West is full of complex and tragic events, but this history has shaped the democracies we know today and the solution is not to erase it, but to make memory a lesson. I want to go on and discuss Christopher Columbus with you, my Spanish friends and brothers, but I will not accept his statues being torn down because some Black Lives Matter barbarian considers him a dangerous slaver. In Europe, statues are not torn down, the Taliban are the ones tearing down statues!
Our freedom of expression is under attack, censored every day in real life, in the media, and on social networks, from the dictatorship of political correctness in the hands of Silicon Valley oligarchs, who with their multibillion dollar “digital states” impose their rules on the whole world, depriving people of their wealth and sovereignty. And I don’t know if one day they will be able to stop us from expressing ourselves on their platforms, but what I do know is that they will never be able to stop us from thinking for ourselves! And from saying what we believe! Never!
The Homeland is under attack, the highest value that holds all others together, because it brings together the community, borders, history and identity. A Homeland that we want to save from the drift of the single globalist model, liquid and standardized, but also from internal secessionism, not by chance financed and incited by the great financial speculation, which needs to disarticulate the States to make them weak and bend them. We, like you, believe in one nation, one people, one language and one flag! And as an Italian I apologize to you for the sad spectacle that Italy has given in the affair concerning the arrest of Puigdemont in Sardinia. I do not want to go into the merits of the case, but I have to say one thing: Italy and Spain are friendly countries, Spain is a democratic country and if Spain asks to be able to prosecute a defendant according to its own penal code, no one has the right to prevent it!
Our whole identity is under attack, but we will not allow it! I am Giorgia. I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian: you will not take this away from me!
Let it be clear that loving the Homeland does not mean not believing in Europe, because nation and Europe are not values that contradict each other. Only the left can claim this in bad faith, because they have always hated the Homeland and only began to love Europe when they became orphans of the Soviet Union. In fact, they have tried to turn the Europe of peoples and diversities into a kind of Soviet state, all bureaucracy, top-down impositions and standardization.
We love Europe much more than many fake pro-Europeans. We love it because we love its differences and specificities. I am proud to be an Italian patriot and a European patriot. But this does not prevent me from criticizing the current European Union, which is a caricature of European civilization, with its need to cancel out differences, to impose absurd directives on the most particular aspects of our lives, to tell us how we should educate our children, to strike at the products of our excellence. We will not be told by Brussels bureaucrats whether we can eat our parmesan or your pata negra. We will continue to say what we do not like about this Union and we will not accept to be called the enemies of Europe. We will continue to say, for example, that a more pragmatic and less ideological approach is needed on ecological transition.
To love the Homeland means to love the land of the fathers, which is not only the land as a place of affection and identity, but also the territory in which we live and in which we want to continue to cultivate, breed, drink, breathe and enjoy the beauty of nature. These are guarantees that neither Greta Thunberg nor the multinational lobbies directing her rhetoric will give us, using ecology as a trap to lead us towards an energy transition that–when done in this way–will have very high environmental and social costs for us and very high profits for them. And it will hand us over hand and foot to China, which will sell us electricity produced from coal-fired power stations, while hundreds of thousands of European companies will be put out of business and millions of workers will lose their jobs.
We will continue to say that we want Europe to play a leading role in major international issues. To stop uncontrolled immigration from Africa and Asia, to defend ourselves against Islamic terrorism, to face the challenges that come to us precisely from China, to build bridges to Latin America which is going through a very difficult period. And I want to publicly thank Santiago Abascal for wanting to promote the Madrid Charter, which I wholeheartedly signed. It is an extraordinary manifesto of values to join forces and help our brothers in Latin America to free themselves from the yoke of social-communist-inspired governments that are starving their peoples.
They are brotherly peoples, because in their veins runs a lot of Spanish and Italian blood. We must help and support them until the tyrants are defeated, the drug lords are in jail, and freedom and democracy return.
We want a Europe with a greater presence in the Mediterranean, which was the cradle of our civilisation and from which today Europe is increasingly marginalized, while other countries are taking over. I am thinking of Erdogan’s Turkey which, while we are divided, is carrying out its aggressive expansionism, threatening European nations such as Greece or Cyprus, controlling Libya, blackmailing Europe with illegal immigrants and financing political Islam throughout the Old Continent. And Europe is still considering the possibility of Turkey joining the European Union. We won’t allow it!
There is, my friends, another possible Europe. And in order to build it, our firm alliance will be fundamental; Spaniards and Italians, side-by-side, together with brotherly peoples who are united with us by our same Latin matrix. Then we can build a more balanced Europe. And we can rediscover the true values that founded Europe.
These days all commentators are wondering what post-Merkel Europe will look like. They talk about Draghi, Macron and a few other personalities. Well, I think that we, on the other hand, must work together so that the Europe of the post-Merkel era is a Europe of conservatives; a Europe of patriots.
And if I am convinced that Spain is needed to revive Europe, I am happy today because I know that here in front of me, is the best part of Spain. Made of honest and proud people, who claim for their own land a destiny worthy of its history.
Dear brothers of VOX, dear Spanish patriots, I am here today to promise you that in this battle you will not be alone. In this battle, at your side, you will have millions and millions of Italian patriots.
Long live Spain! Long live Italy! Long live our alliance!