The cartoon lampooned Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a senior member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy party, for saying that Italy’s low birth rate meant Italians risked “ethnic replacement” by migrants.
The cartoon features Lollobrigida’s wife, who is also Meloni's sister, in bed with a black man under the caption “Objective to boost the birth rate”.
In reply to the question “Your husband?”, the woman tells the black man “Don't worry, he's out all day fighting ethnic replacement”.
The cartoon was condemned as sexist, disgusting and shameful, and as going well beyond the realm of satire.
“The (person) portrayed in the cartoon is Arianna, a person who does not hold public office, guilty above all else of being my sister,” wrote Meloni on Facebook.
“Slammed onto the front page with shameful allusions, with total disregard for respect for a woman, a mother, a person whose life is used and torn apart simply to attack a government that is seen as an enemy,” continued the premier.
The cartoon also drew condemnation from the journalists’ union Associazione Stampa Romana.
“The right to satire guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be the tool for gratuitous offenses,” said President Paolo Tripaldi.
“To involve the wife of a minister with sexist jokes, as in the case of the publication of a cartoon by a national newspaper with reference to Minister Lollobrigida, violates the ethical principles of journalism to which our profession must always refer,” he said.
“I can't spend my time explaining jokes to people who don't understand them,” Il Fatto Quotidiano editor Marco Travaglio told ANSA.
ANSA
