Until a few years ago, hardly anyone in Italy knew Andrea Giambruno (42). Giorgia Meloni’s partner and father of their daughter Ginevra is a journalist at Mediaset, the media conglomerate of the late Silvio Berlusconi. In an interview in 2016, Giambruno said he didn’t like the spotlight, preferring to play a role behind the scenes.
But since Meloni is prime minister of Italy, the Italian ‘first man’ has come to the fore, and how. On Rete 4, one of the commercial Berlusconi channels, he presents a debate program that comments on current political events – which has already led to considerable criticism of a conflict of interest. Moreover, ‘Mister Meloni’ regularly turns out to be a source of news himself with his controversial statements.
It was another hit on Monday, when Giambruno opened the debate with his guests about two recent gang rapes that are causing enormous commotion in Italy.
In Caivano, a deprived neighborhood in Naples, a group of fifteen boys suspected of molesting two nieces aged ten and twelve for months. Prime Minister Meloni will visit the neighborhood on Thursday and promises strict measures to tackle the backlog. And in Palermo, Sicily, earlier this summer, a girl of nineteen raped by a group of young men. The young woman had drunk some cocktails on a night out, but an accomplice had purposefully got her so drunk that she could no longer stand on her feet.
“Of course you have the right to get drunk when you go out, but if you don’t get drunk, you don’t run the risk of running into the wolf,” said Giambruno on his television show. He was then accused of ‘victim blaming’ and he was subject to a storm of criticism on social media. The Italian opposition also fired sharply. “How difficult it is not to blame women,” said Cecilia D’Elia, senator from the center-left opposition party Partito Democratico, and vice-chairman of Italy’s femicide commission of inquiry. “Ultimately, the woman and her lifestyle are always judged. That is no longer acceptable. My message to Giambruno is that boys should be taught respect during their upbringing, not girls should be constantly urged to be careful.”
Giambruno was previously accused of being a climate denier
Both the Partito Democratico and the Five Star Movement asked Prime Minister Meloni from the opposition benches to distance herself from her partner’s statement. But the Italian Prime Minister left it to him to respond in the Italian media.
Andrea Giambruno says he has never suggested that “women look for it themselves” and speaks of defamatory allegations against him in the Italian press. He does say that it is his right to point out the dangers of alcohol and drugs to young people – boys and girls. As for girls, “I will continue to urge them to be careful, just as their own mothers always will.”
Not for the first time, however, Andrea Giambruno is caught making a striking statement. The quality paper La Stampa from Turin already compares him to “Prince Philip, the consort of the British Queen Elizabeth, who also regularly blundered, which could cause a political problem.” The same newspaper also recalls that Giambruno’s statement is reminiscent of what the arch-conservative Jorge Buxadé, MEP for the far-right Spanish Vox, said a few years ago: “We don’t want women to go home drunk and alone.”
Earlier this summer, Giambruno was also accused by critics of being a climate denier, when, in response to the extreme heat with temperatures above 40 degrees, he said with a smile that “it is warm in July, just as it is probably snow in December. So much for the news.” That mocking tone is part of the style of Rete 4, where presenters often do not mince words. But Giambruno went further than that when he slammed the German health minister for expressing concern about the heat. Karl Lauterbach, who was on holiday in Italy, had noticed that global warming could soon make holidays in the south impossible. “Then why don’t you just stay home?” said Giambruno on Italian TV. “You’re fine there, aren’t you, in the Black Forest?” As for the Germans, Giambruno felt it necessary to add that “for twenty, thirty years they have wanted to tell us how we should live here in Italy. And yet Merkel keeps coming here, and they all come. If you don’t like it, don’t come.”