The hard-right Italian party that appears to have the best chance of winning next month’s elections is embroiled in a dispute over abortion thanks to an influential Italian.
The Brothers of Italy, the party that pollsters predict will win the country’s election on September 25th, and model and businesswoman Chiara Ferragni are at odds over abortion access.
In the Marche that it administers, “The Brothers of Italy” have rendered abortions all but impossible.
In her first open criticism of the group, Ferragni wrote, “A strategy that has the risk of becoming national if the right wins the elections.”
She sent a link to a story from The Guardian that claimed the council had given anti-abortion activists permission to work in family counselling clinics in the central Italian Marche area.
The Marche region, which is governed by the Brothers of Italy, restricts abortion to seven weeks even though national legislation permits medical abortions in Italy to be performed up to nine weeks into pregnancy.
The party’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, visited the area on Tuesday to advance her electoral campaign before the general election.
Ferragni collaborates with well-known companies like Guess and Gucci in addition to having her own shoe line.
Before Instagram, the 30-year-old Milan fashion blogger started The Blonde Salad in 2009, launching her career.
On social media, Ms. Ferragni stated, “Now is the time to act and make sure that terrible things do not happen.”
When it came to power in the Marche in 2020, according to Italian local media, the party — which depends on a largely Catholic base to guarantee its share of the vote — blocked access to the abortion pill in medical facilities.
The measure’s detrimental effects on the reproductive health of local women are denied by the Brothers of Italy.
The party is in charge of 20 other regions in Italy, and analysts are using the Marche region, which is close to Florence and San Marino, as a proxy for how it will run the entire nation.
It happens after Meloni faced harsh criticism for posting a video of an asylum seeker raping a Ukrainian lady in a city in Italy.
The asylum seeker was heard attacking a 55-year-old woman on a Piacenza sidewalk early on Sunday in a video that MailOnline is not displaying.
The video, which was released on a newspaper website with the woman’s sobs clearly audible but the image blurred, was tweeted by Meloni, who has advocated for a blockade off the coast of North Africa to halt ships delivering migrants to Italy.
“Give this woman a hug. I promise to do all in my power to reestablish safety in our cities.
Someone at a flat with a view of the street recorded the rape, and the attacker was apprehended.
The individual was being held as the investigation went on, according to the police, who also verified the arrest.
On Facebook, Meloni said that her adversaries had used the rape as a means of attack while disregarding the victim to sidestep dealing with what she called the immigration emergency.
After the current prime minister Mario Draghi declared his resignation in July after three of the government’s parties failed to support him in a vote of confidence, she announced her candidacy for office.
With just over a month until the Italian elections, recent surveys indicated that she was rapidly gaining ground on her rivals.