The somewhat mis-named Sovereign and Popular Italy party – launched in July of this year it has a negligible following – intends fighting the September 2022 Italian general election. Possibly its highest profile candidate is none other than the former actress once declared to be the most beautiful woman in the world – Gina Lollobrigida, now 95 years of age.
She plans to stand as an independent candidate in city of Latina, southeast of Rome, for the alliance.
The party, which will need to reach the three per cent threshold needed to enter parliament, has brought together the remnants of Italy’s far-left including the Communist Party, Civic Action, and Socialist Homeland.
The party’s co-leader and founder is one Marco Rizzo (pictured top) an experienced politician and vice-chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, he is also the former General-Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, and is prone to quoting Karl Marx.
Somewhat predictably, given Rizzo’s political pedigree, the alliance calls for Italy’s exit from NATO and the European Union. It also opposes Italy supplying military equipment to Ukraine.
What is the need to go against the little but glorious Cuba, after they helped Italy by sending Medical Brigades during the pandemic? What is the need to provoke Russia, after Putin offered us all the gas supplies we need at pre-crisis prices?… Russia, just as China, Iran and most of the countries of the world, does not want war.
Ms. Lollobrigida has dabbled in politics before: in 1999 she was recruited by European Commission President Romano Prodi’s newly-founded Democratic Party. In that year she stood unsuccessfully in the European elections.
Her main platform in next month’s elections appears to be overturning an Italian law which allow courts to seize the wealth of the elderly if they are deemed incapable of managing it.
Given that Ms. Lollobrigida has reportedly been taken advantage of in the past on more than one occasion in matters fiscal, some may question the wisdom of her policy.
In 2015 Lollobrigida accused Javier Rigau y Rafols, her former Spanish boyfriend, who was 34 years her junior, of fooling her into marrying him to seize her fortune. An Italian court ruled that the marriage was legitimate.
More recently, in 2019, Italian magistrate Eleonora Fini alleged that Andrea Piazzolla, then 31 and Ms. Lollobrigida’s manager, syphoned hundreds of thousands of euros of her wealth into his parents’ account. Ms. Fini claims that Piazzolla bought a Ferrari with Lollobrigida’s money before selling it and giving the proceeds to his parents, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
The star’s son, Milko Skofic, claimed that she gave Mr Piazzolla assets worth €5 million.
Italian elections are special: the country has something of a tradition of technical governments or elections that have produced no clear winner, meaning the last prime minister who actually stood as a candidate for the role was Silvio Berlusconi in 2008.
In this context, it is not entirely inconceivable that Marco Rizzo’s Sovereign and Popular Italy Party could find itself a part of a coalition before the end of the year – Italy’s far-right who are polling well are also somewhat pro-Putin, and as we know, politics makes for strange bedfellows – and Gina Lollobrigida may well find herself back in the limelight!
Image (Gina Lollobrigida) By Ivo Bulanda – Ivo Bulanda, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/…
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