The Italian Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, dismissed two of his close collaborators on Monday following, in particular, an outcry around the financing of a documentary, the latest episode of tensions within a ministry already shaken for months by a succession of resignations and internal political struggles.
According to Italian media, Alessandro Giuli thanked both Emanuele Merlino, head of the technical secretariat of the ministry, and Elena Proietti, his chief of staff. There was no official statement but senior government officials later confirmed the information.
Since coming to power in 2022 at the head of a right-wing coalition, Council President Giorgia Meloni has strived to increase the influence of her camp on the country’s main cultural institutions, believing that the latter are dominated by the left.
Emanuele Merlino is said to have paid the price for the Culture Ministry’s refusal to grant funding for a documentary on Giulio Regeni, an Italian student kidnapped, tortured and killed in Cairo in early 2016 – a death that Italy blamed on Egyptian security forces.
Alessandro Giuli described this refusal of funding as “unacceptable”, adding that he had not been informed of this decision.
The dismissal of Elena Proietti would be linked to a separate incident: she did not show up at the airport for a ministerial mission to New York last month.
The Ministry of Culture refused to comment on these cases, as did the two people concerned.
CULTURAL WARS
Emanuele Merlino and Elena Proietti are leading figures of the right and opposition representatives immediately interpreted their dismissal as a sign of growing internal dissensions within Giorgia Meloni’s coalition, fueled by the government’s defeat in the referendum on reform of the justice in March.
“It is the sign of a coalition torn apart by internal wars, score-settling, clashes between factions and rivalries between leaders,” declared Sandro Ruotolo, spokesperson for culture for the Democratic Party (center-left).
The Ministry of Culture had already been shaken in September 2024 by the resignation of Gennaro Sangiuliano, the predecessor of Alessandro Giuli, following an affair of adultery, an episode which had led to a wave of layoffs and departures.
Outside the walls of the ministry, controversy never seems far away.
Last month, the famous La Fenice opera house in Venice dismissed its future musical director and conductor, Beatrice Venezi, thus putting an end to a conflict which had pitted the latter, close to Giorgia Meloni, against the establishment’s staff for several months.
The Venice Biennale, which opened its doors at the beginning of the month, also found itself plunged into controversy by authorizing Russia to reopen, in a restricted manner, its pavilion in the gardens of the lakeside city hosting its 61st edition of the contemporary art exhibition, for the first time since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
This decision, defended by the president of the Biennale Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, was strongly criticized by both the Italian government and the European Union.
(Crispian Balmer, version française Benoit Van Overstraeten, edited by Bertrand Boucey)
