Italian rivals pitch abroad in trilingual vote videos
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Former PM Enrico Letta, head of the center-left Democratic Party, reaffirmed his pro-European credentials in a film while mocking Italy's right-wing parties' Euroscepticism.
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Italian right wing leaders Giorgia Meloni, Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini (archive)
Days after Italy's far-right leader published a multilingual appeal to foreign media to take her seriously, her biggest opponent in the September elections issued his own tit-for-tat video attacking her record on Saturday.
Former Prime Minister Enrico Letta, leader of the center-left Democratic Party, reaffirmed his pro-European credentials in a film in English, French, and Spanish, mocking Italy's right-wing parties' Euroskepticism.
It echoes Giorgia Meloni's trilingual film released last week, in which she sought to separate her Brothers of Italy party from its post-fascist roots. Meloni is expected to take control in the eurozone's third largest economy next month.
"We will keep fighting to convince Italians to vote for us and not for them, to vote for an Italy that will be in the heart of Europe," Letta said in English.
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His and Meloni's parties are neck and neck in opinion polls ahead of the September 25 elections, each with approximately 23% support.
However, Italy's political system favors coalitions, and although Meloni is part of a coalition with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and anti-immigrant leader Matteo Salvini, Letta has failed to unite a split center-left.
Letta, who spent six years as dean at Sciences Po in Paris, stressed European solidarity, from which Italy is currently benefiting to the tune of around 200 billion euros ($205 billion) in post-pandemic recovery funding.
"We need a strong Europe, we need a Europe of health, a Europe of solidarity. And we can only do that if there is no nationalism inside European countries," he said.
He condemned the veto that he said right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor "Orban -- friends and allies of the Italian right -- is using every time he can (to) harm Europe".
Letta emphasized Meloni's ties to Spain's far-right Vox party, at whose rally she appeared earlier this summer, ranting at the top of her lungs about "LGBT lobbies," Islamist bloodshed, EU bureaucracy, and mass immigration.
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In English, he criticized Berlusconi's economic legacy as a three-time premier who left government in 2011 as Italy was on the verge of economic collapse yet still heads his Forza Italia party.
Letta's platform includes a focus on environmental issues (he plans to travel to Italy on an electric bus) and young people, but he has made defeating Meloni a crucial plank of his campaign.
Meloni emphasized in her film that fascism was a thing of the past, a remark that was met with suspicion given that her party still utilizes the flame insignia used by the Italian Social Movement, which was founded by supporters of fascist leader Benito Mussolini.
Meloni, Berlusconi, and Salvini pledged to the EU but urged for revisions to its budgetary rules in a unified manifesto released this week, raising the risk of renegotiating the pandemic recovery plan.
Read next: Italy's right-wing parties ready for September polls
The collapse of Prime Minister Mario Draghi's cabinet last month forced the elections, which are taking place against a backdrop of skyrocketing inflation, a probable winter energy crisis, and global instability caused by the Ukraine war.
