Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced that she and her long-time partner Andrea Giambruno were separating after almost ten years together.
Meloni and Giambruno met in 2015 on the set of a TV show where Meloni was appearing. Giambruno was a writer on the show. Meloni, who started her political career in the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (ISM) party, had just then just founded her Brothers of Italy party, which would sweep her to power in 2022. That party had its roots in the ISM, which was founded to carry the legacy of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini forward.
A recording of comments by Giambruno, who’s a television presenter and personality, was broadcast last week on a satirical Italian channel.
“Can I touch my package while I talk to you?” he asked one of his coworkers in the recording. He later proposed adding a “third participant” to his relationship. “You want to join our working group, would that please you?” he asked, reported the French new website 20minutes.
“My relationship with Andrea Giambruno … ends here,” Meloni announced in a Facebook post on Friday. “I thank him for the wonderful years we spent together, for the difficulties we went through, and for giving me the most important thing in my life, which is our daughter Ginevra.” Meloni and Giambruno, who aren’t married, have a seven-year-old daughter together. Meloni campaigned as a “Christian mother” and against the adoption rights of same-sex couples.
“I will defend who we were, I will defend our friendship, and I will defend, at all costs … [our daughter] who loves her mother and father, the way I could not love mine,” Meloni wrote.
Meloni’s father, Francesco Meloni, abandoned Meloni when she was a year old before moving to the Canary Islands and starting a new family.
Francesco was arrested in Spain 1999 for smuggling 1,500 kilos of hashish on a yacht. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in the crime, reported the Spanish newspaper Diario de Ibiza.
“Nothing more to say about this one,” Meloni wrote in her Facebook post, before warning in a P.S. that nobody should try to attack her household over the breakup.
“As much as a drop of water might hope to dig out a stone, a stone remains a stone and the drop is just water.”
Meloni took Sunday off from her party’s political conference.
“I’m sorry not to be with you in person, but I too, am human,” she said, according to the Telegraph.
