Meloni, Canadian slap. Trudeau’s attack on LGBT guarantees: “Your position worries us”

HIROSHIMA. Giorgia Meloni speaks good English, but at first she doesn’t seem to understand. You hear Justin Trudeau distinctly pronounce the term “rights”, rights, and the acronym 2SLGBTQI +, in the formula used by the Canadian government to protect sexual orientations and gender identities. The prime minister is visually bewildered, because, as sources at Palazzo Chigi will explain, the topic was not foreseen in the preparation of the dossiers for the bilateral. Especially since Trudeau goes so far as to give an opinion on the government of the Italian right.

To understand Giorgia Meloni’s amazed reaction to say the least, just look at the photo, or the progression of the images. The meeting is about to begin, the first of the morning in Miyajima, the island of Hiroshima where the big seven meet. Her prime minister has just sat down in her chair when Trudeau, sitting in front of her, begins to speak: “Canada is concerned by some positions that Italy is taking regarding 2SLGBTQI + rights”. The prime minister turns to the delegation, makes a slight face, displaced. She was taken aback but she is still forced to give an answer: “The government is following the decisions of the courts and is not deviating from previous administrations”. It is a timid reply, according to a plot that Meloni continues to use as a shield against the accusations of wanting to restrict gay rights. “I can’t wait to talk to you about it,” Trudeau insists.

The premier does not defend the historical theses of the right, she refers to the sentences of the magistrates, she does not take political responsibility towards her Canadian colleague. You know that on these issues internationally, and among Western democracies, your government is isolated, unless you want to take as an example the traditional friends of sovereignty, the Poles or the Hungarian Viktor Orban. Italy’s historical allies, all those sitting at the summit table, are light years away from her ideas, from those of her party and her coalition. Only Japanese premier Fumio Kishida belongs to a centre-right force, all the other five are left-wing, progressive, or in any case very liberal leaders on rights. Trudeau is completely in line with his American neighbor Joe Biden who, for reasons of interest and geopolitical balances – because he needs the shores of Rome to contain the Russians and Chinese – has never yet directly addressed Meloni’s political choices which limit the civil guarantees of homosexual couples. Limitations that have instead ended up several times in the crosshairs of the European institutions. Trudeau knows about the European Parliament which warned the Italian government after the circular from the Viminale addressed to the Municipalities that still allowed the registration of the children of rainbow families. Canada has very advanced legislation on rights, even more than in the US it is a theme that ignites public opinion, and Trudeau has certainly read Meloni railing against surrogacy, proposing “the surrogate uterus as a universal crime” and daring a comparison between children born with these practices and “over-the-counter products”. For a leader who leads a country where surrogacy is legal, but only if it is altruistic and without payment, to hear it treated like a business is too much. In the conflict between democracies and autocracies, which the G7 countries have placed at the top of the agenda, the defense of LGBT rights is a distinction. And according to the Western allies it must also be the same for Meloni’s Italy.

It is not a secondary detail, then, that it was the Canadians who filtered the exchange. It had already happened at the G20 in Bali, and this unleashed a tirade from Xi Jinping in front of Trudeau and a television camera. From the Italian delegation everything is silent for hours. When the official note arrives, which reconstructs that initial passage of the meeting, Meloni’s staff has not yet commented. We try to minimize, without however hiding the annoyance and irritation for what in Palazzo Chigi they consider to all intents and purposes an ambush. Also for the place and the moment in which it happens. “This was not the context – Meloni explains to his collaborators – and it was not planned to talk about it”. The fact is that only late, after dinner, does the first and only Italian comment arrive, attributable to sources close to the premier: «It was a surprising sentence, in the sense that it took us by surprise. It wasn’t among the key points of the bilateral agreement, but it was just one episode and it ended there”.