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A lawmaker from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's far-right Fratelli d'Italia party is at the center of a controversy for bringing a firearm to a New Year's Eve party where a guest was injured. Illustrative photo of a firearm.
INTERNATIONAL – A recording in the new year. In Italy, this Tuesday, January 2, MP Emanuele Pozzolo, member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's far-right Fratelli d'Italia party, found himself at the center of an extremely embarrassing controversy. On New Year's Eve 2024, the elected official took his firearm, injuring one person.
The scene occurred 70 km from Turin during a party organized in the premises of a cultural association in Rosazza, a hamlet of about a hundred inhabitants. Emanuele Pozzolo admits bringing his 22-caliber mini pistol there but denies being responsible for the shot that wounded a 31-year-old man in the leg. “I confirm that the shot was fired accidentally with a legal pistol that belonged to me, but it was not I who fired,” he said in a statement quoted by the left-wing daily La Repubblica.
Refusal of powder screening
However, the events are under investigation and not everything is clear yet. Initially, Emanuele Pozzolo is said to have told the investigators who arrived on site that he did not spend New Year's Eve in Rosazza, but with his family in the neighboring town of Campiglia Cervo. The next time he went to the party it was after half past one in the morning. According to La Repubblica, he said he “took out the gun to show it when a shot was fired.”
According to the Italian news agency Ansa, the weapon was seized when the police arrived on the night of January 1st. The elected official was subjected to a screening test to see if he had traces of powder, a sign that he could be the perpetrator of the shot. The sample was taken from both hands, the jacket, fleece jacket and jeans he was wearing. However, he claimed his parliamentary immunity in order not to hand over his clothes to the authorities.
Political outrage on the opposition side
The opposition parties did not fail to stigmatize the irresponsible behavior of the MP, whose party proposed in December to lower the minimum age for obtaining a permit to carry hunting weapons to 16 years. In Italy, the possession of weapons is strictly regulated through a weapons license. Hunting and sport shooting permits limit carrying to the shooting range and hunting area, and only permits issued for personal defense allow carrying anywhere on the person.
“We could not imagine that the passion for the weapons of Giorgia Meloni's party was so great that the MPs brought them loaded to the New Year's parties,” denounced the leader of the Democratic Party (PD, left) Elly Schlein and called out the First Minister to take “measures against Pozzolo”. The same outrage under former centrist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi: “Why bring weapons to a New Year's party in the presence of MPs and members of the government?” Meloni's ruling class is not one: it is unsuitable, incompetent, unpresentable. And dangerous,” he wrote on X.
Emanuele Pozzolo, who opposed vaccinations and health passports during the Covid pandemic, has also been accused of sexist and discriminatory comments in the past. Neither Giorgia Meloni nor Fratelli d'Italia have officially responded at this time.
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