Italy's Meloni breaks silence on youth wing's fascist comments

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday condemned offensive comments made by members of her far-right party's youth wing to an undercover journalist, breaking weeks of silence over the scandal.

The investigation published this month by Italian news website Fanpage included video of members of the National Youth, the junior wing of Brothers of Italy, which has post-fascist roots, showing support for Nazism and fascism.

In images secretly filmed by an undercover journalist in Rome, the members are seen performing fascist salutes, chanting the Nazi "Sieg Heil" greeting and shouting "Duce" in support of the late Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Opposition parties have been calling on Meloni to denounce the behaviour since the first part of the investigation aired on June 13.

Those calls intensified after a second part was published this week with fresh highly offensive comments directed at Jewish people and people of colour.

Party youths in particular mocked Ester Mieli, a Brothers of Italy senator and a former spokeswoman for Rome's Jewish community.

"Whoever expresses racist, anti-Semitic or nostalgic ideas are in the wrong place, because these ideas are incompatible with Brothers of Italy," Meloni told reporters in Brussels.

"There is no ambiguity from my end on the issue," she said.

Two officials from the movement have stepped down over the investigation, which also caught one youth party member calling for the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Elly Schlein, to be "impaled".

But Meloni also told off journalists for filming young people making offensive comments directed at Jewish people and people of colour, saying they were "methods... of an (authoritarian) regime".

Fanpage responded that it was "undercover journalism".

Meloni was a teenage activist with the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by Mussolini supporters after World War II.

Brothers of Italy traces its roots to the MSI.

The most right-wing leader to take office since 1945, Meloni has sought to distance herself from her party's legacy without entirely renouncing it. She kept the party's tricolour flame logo -- which was also used by MSI and inspired France's Jean-Marie Le Pen when he created the far-right National Front party in 1972.

The logo's base, some analysts say, represents Mussolini's tomb, which tens of thousands of people visit every year.

Several high-ranking officials in the party do not shy away from their admiration of the fascist regime, which imposed anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

Brothers of Italy co-founder and Senate president Ignazio La Russa collects Mussolini statues.