The Italian government, headed by the far-right Giorgia Meloni, has shaken the Olympic spirit of the Paris 2024 Games with its political comments. The Minister for Family, Birth and Equality, Eugenia Roccella, deepened this Sunday, the day of the closing ceremony, the controversy with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who the far right considers to be “biologically a man” and who some have described, without any evidence, as trans. Roccella has maintained that in these Olympic Games she has exercised “a new patriarchy that attacks women by attacking their identity, that is, by not recognizing the reality of the sexual body.”
The Italian far right has also launched a stream of criticism against the organisation of these Games. The target of the Italian ultra-conservatives is not only the International Olympic Committee (IOC), but also French President Emmanuel Macron, who has a strained relationship with his Italian partners.
Vice-president Matteo Salvini has criticised the planning of Paris 2024 and the images of athletes “sleeping on the floor in the Olympic village without air conditioning, on cardboard beds and queuing in the canteen”, and has promised “another kind of hospitality” for the next Winter Olympics in 2026, to be held in Milan and Cortina. “Forcing athletes to swim in the Seine does not seem to me to be a smart idea. There has been a bit of superficiality in the organisation,” added the leader of the far-right League.
The Paris Games have revived an old anti-French rhetoric, traditionally rooted in the Italian right and dating back to the times of fascism. Since the beginning of the competition, numerous representatives of the parties of the right-wing coalition have commented in a very controversial way on the organisation of this planetary event. The opening ceremony was the target of the most disparaging opinions. Salvini defined it as “disgusting”. “Opening the Olympics by insulting billions of Christians around the world has been a terrible start, dear French. Miserables,” said the leader of the League, referring to the performance entitled “Festivity”, which some people interpreted as a recreation of Jesus Christ’s last supper with his apostles by Leonardo da Vinci. In the scene, which was not intended to reproduce any religious episode, there were drag queens and a trans model.
Carlo Fidanza, head of the Brothers of Italy delegation in the European Parliament, described the opening ceremony as an “obscene farce”. He claimed: “The decline of morality and good manners (yes, you can still say that!) and blasphemy (yes, it disgusts us!) are married to ‘transsexualism’ raised to an absolute value, just as the entire world of sport experiences it as a threat and discrimination against women.” Federico Mollicone, a member of the same party, saw in the same scene “the decline of the West in a single image”.
Nicola Procaccini, co-president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the European group to which Brothers of Italy belongs, criticised: “I really liked the Gay Pride ceremony, do you know when the Olympics will be?”
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Another MEP from the same party, Marco Squarta, announced that the group had decided to “take the matter to Brussels with a parliamentary question”, even though the European institutions have little to do with the staging of an Olympic ceremony.
Minister Roccella, for her part, took to social media to criticise IOC President Thomas Bach for stating “that there is no ‘scientifically sound’ system to distinguish between men and women”. The minister also warned of the “risks of putting gender binarism into question”. “We assume that at this point, for the sake of consistency, starting with the next Olympic Games, the IOC will remove the distinction between men’s and women’s competitions, unifying the competitions into a single ‘neutral’ gender, because if the possibility of ‘scientifically’ distinguishing men from women is denied, it is clear that the men’s and women’s categories, and with them women’s sports competitions, lose all meaning”.
Meloni was one of the first to pour fuel on the fire after the fight between Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini, and to turn the issue into a political case by stating that it had not been “a fight on equal terms” because of “the testosterone levels in the blood of the Algerian athlete”. “Athletes with male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions”, she concluded. The Italian leader met in Paris with the president of the IOC, who reaffirmed that the Algerian boxer “is a woman and has competed in this category for six years at international level”.
A “macronada”
The prime minister’s party, the Brothers of Italy, has aroused its traditional animosity towards France and its president, Emmanuel Macron. The party’s spokesman in the Senate, Lucio Malan, has described the Olympic Games as a “macronada”, and has accused the French president of having mismanaged the preparation of the competitions and of having treated badly not only the athletes, but also the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, who was forced to attend the opening ceremony in the rain and with the only protection of a plastic poncho. The head of the Italian state received, in fact, the same treatment as the other authorities of other countries present in Paris and Mattarella’s team has not expressed any complaints about this.
The Italian far right cast a toxic cloud over the Paris Games, even before the cauldron was lit, which has hung over the entire competition. Minister Roccella had been stirring up the atmosphere for some time, even before the boxing match of discord. “It is very worrying that men who identify as women have been admitted to the women’s boxing competitions at the Olympic Games,” she declared on the eve of the match. Vice President Salvini criticised the same day the decision to admit Khelif, calling her a “trans boxer”, despite there being no evidence to point in that direction, or referring to her using the masculine. The same was done by the Minister of Tourism, Daniela Garnero Santanchè, who spoke of “an Algerian transsexual beating an Italian woman”. Both, like various conservative figures from other countries such as Donald Trump or Elon Musk, have argued about the suitability of admitting Khelif to the Olympic Games, and have linked this type of decision to the so-called “transgender ideology”. woke”.
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