In a video discovered after her accession to power, Giorgia Meloni, the current president of Italy’s ministerial council, criticizes France’s policy in Africa.
As a realm of immediacy and spontaneity, the Internet is also a repository of files that some would like to see disappear. Supporters of the current head of the Italian government were confronted with a video in which she described fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as a “good politician” in 1996, one of many mistakes of her youth that she regrets.
Another interview with Giorgia Meloni in January 2019 was unearthed from the digital drawers. The far-right party’s community managers Fratelli d’Italia published an interview in which the Italian politician criticizes, while the public applauds, the presence of France in Africa.
on the italian channel LA7Meloni deploys a CFA franc that he presents as “colonial currency” designed to exploit “14 African nations”, including children in Burkina Faso who “slide into tunnels” to mine gold that “much of it ends up in the coffers of the French state”.
Re-posted online last Friday by the American far-right, the video demonstrates the opportunism of the nationalist international. A diplomatic crisis arose between Paris and Rome following verbal ping-pong over the ‘Ocean Viking’ ship carrying illegal migrants from Africa.
In addition to being a cheap mockery of Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni’s compassion for Burkinabe children is less a gesture coming from an afrophilic humanity, but rather an attempt to demonstrate the effects of French policy on migratory vocations. Once again, the anguish of certain Africans is used in Euro-European debates with the ultimate intention of blocking the path of the very immigrants they claim to pity.
anachronistic legacy
In addition to ideological opportunism, the video demonstrates the blatant use of ‘alternative truths’ by populists. Even in 2019, when the deposit of 50% of the foreign exchange reserves of countries using CFA francs in a French Treasury account had not yet been abolished, there was no talk of introducing the type of ‘tax’ that Meloni denounces. The French treasury never absorbed the sums deposited.
The CFA, originally called the ‘franc from the French colonies of Africa’, is in fact an anachronistic legacy of France’s colonial past. However, this kind of outrage hardly helps peaceful attempts at currency transformation. As for the example of the mines whose wealth accumulates mainly France, the content of this speech was not well investigated.
While gold mining certainly doesn’t help Burkina Faso’s GDP, the precious metal is mainly exported to Switzerland, India, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium. However, it is not exported to France, which is the target of this viral video.
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