The Italian prime minister’s brother-in-law, who is the government’s minister of agriculture, has sparked outrage with statements about the declining birth rate in the Mediterranean country. Francesco Lollobrigida warned against seeing migration as a solution to Italy’s demographic problems, speaking of a “population exchange”.
Italy has recorded the lowest number of births since 1861. According to the National Statistical Office (Istat), the EU member had a population of about 58.851 million on January 1, 2023, 179,000 less than a year earlier. The number of deaths was 713,000 and the number of births 393,000, a new all-time low, Istat said. In 2022, births fell below 400,000 for the first time since Italy’s reunification in 1861, the agency said.
This development obviously has negative effects on the labor market and the pension system. Lollobrigida told a trade union meeting in Rome on Tuesday: “The way is to build a social security system that enables people to work and raise families. We must not succumb to the idea of ethnic replacement: Italians are having fewer children, so we replace them with foreigners.” That is not the right way, said the top politician of the post-fascist governing party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy).
Opposition shocked: ‘The words are disgusting’
The opposition was stunned: “Minister Lollobrigida’s words are disgusting, they are unacceptable for someone in his position. They take us back to the 1930s, words that smell of white supremacism. I hope Meloni and the government move away from these statements,” protested opposition leader Elly Schlein.
Social Democratic Senator Filippo Sensi commented on Twitter: “A minister who invokes the pseudo-doctrine of ethnic replacement on the serious and central issue of the falling birth rate is unworthy of office. I don’t think there is more to say. I am ashamed of him.”
Source: Krone
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