Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
ROME / POLITICS & NEWS – A political and legal clash has erupted between Ciro Grillo and Lega following statements made by the son of the former Five Star Movement leader in an interview with the broadcaster Telenord. Sentenced at first instance to eight years in prison for group sexual assault over events in Sardinia, Grillo put forward a reconstruction in which there is a direct link between the M5S decisions on the Open Arms case, the collapse of the first Conte government and the subsequent involvement of the senator Giulia Bongiorno as the lawyer for the young woman who reported him.
[Image: Palazzo Madama, seat of the Senate of the Republic in Rome]
Ciro Grillo’s statements to Telenord
In the interview, Ciro Grillo connected the political events of 2018–2019 to his own legal and media ordeal, also pointing the finger at the current institutional role held by the lawyer and Lega MP:
“We are in 2018–2019 and the Five Star Movement had formed a government with Lega. Following the Open Arms trial, the Five Star Movement granted the authorisation to proceed, which then caused the collapse of the yellow-green government. In that government, Giulia Bongiorno was a minister, the minister for public administration. After the government fell, Giulia Bongiorno took the side of the girl who reported me. From there, a considerable media siege also began. I think there is a causal link between this conduct by the Five Star Movement and Giulia Bongiorno’s involvement”, he claimed.
Grillo then added a criticism related to the senator’s parliamentary role:
“She is currently the chair of the Senate Justice Committee, which has the bill on the offence for which proceedings are under way. I am competing against someone who can change the rules of the game while the game is being played; that is not fair. And this is regardless of whether it is legal”.
Lega’s flat denial: “Chronologically impossible”
Lega’s response was swift and firm. Through party sources, it dismantled point by point the reconstruction put forward in the interview, highlighting a chronological discrepancy between the end of the yellow-green executive and the parliamentary vote on the Open Arms case:
“The political reconstruction proposed in the interview contains an obvious chronological error. The Lega–M5S government fell in August 2019, with the resignation of the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, on 20 August. The Senate vote on authorising proceedings against Matteo Salvini over the Open Arms case took place on 30 July 2020, almost a year later, when the second Conte government, backed by M5S and the Democratic Party, was already in office”.
According to Lega, therefore, any cause-and-effect link between the two political events is fundamentally flawed:
“It is therefore chronologically impossible that that vote caused the fall of the yellow-green government, as Ciro Grillo claims. The hypotheses of political connections put forward in the interview are not borne out by this reconstruction of the facts”, Lega sources clarified, reiterating that Giulia Bongiorno now represents the young civil party and describing Grillo’s political correlations as groundless.
