In Italy he is best known for the bill that bears his name and which aimed to increase penalties for hate crimes motivated by homophobia. And now that he has been elected to the European Parliament, Alessandro Zan promises to continue his battles for the expansion of civil rights in Italy. “In our country the situation has been at a standstill for too many years, in fact it has been regressing heavily since Giorgia Meloni has been in government”, he says in an interview with uisjournal.com. “We will try to have an impact also from Europe, which is very sensitive and very attentive to the issue of civil rights. We will try to impose a change in Italy too, using all the tools we have at our disposal, from regulations, to directives and resolutions to try to improve the Italian situation”, he says.
Italy Says No to EU Declaration on LGBT Rights: “Like the Zan Bill”
In the Parliament of Brussels and Strasbourg, the representative of the Democratic Party was elected vice-president of the Libe commission, which deals specifically with civil liberties, and whose president will be a popular, the Spanish Javier Zarzalejos. “On some issues you can also work with the right, which in Europe is often liberal and much less ideological than in Italy”, he claims. And there are several EU countries where even the popular have supported the advancement of civil rights. Like in Ireland, the first country in the world to decide to legalize same-sex marriage after a referendum, won by the yes vote in 2015, and which had a homosexual prime minister, Leo Varadkar, who is a member of Fine Gael, a party that is part of the EPP.
“In Italy, on the other hand, there is an ultra-reactionary right. Which, precisely because it is ideological, wants to impose a social model based on its own diktats. And this creates a schizophrenic society, because it is evident that the population follows the evolution of customs like all contemporary societies. Yet from the point of view of rights we are taking steps backwards and the Meloni government is eroding those conquered such as abortion or civil unions, which in themselves are a second-rate institution compared to marriage and which should be overcome. It is not doing so by attacking these rights directly at a legislative level but with a whole series of actions, for example by imposing anti-abortionists in counseling centers or by prohibiting mayors from transcribing the birth certificates for children of rainbow families”.
And furthermore, the government “does not intervene with a law to punish hate crimes, while in Italy there is an ever-increasing need for it and we saw it with the beating of the two boys guilty only of holding hands in Italy”. And the fight against hate crimes was Zan’s great battle, lost also because of ‘friendly fire’. The 2020 Zan bill aimed to extend the Mancino Law to homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and ableism (discrimination against disabled people). Despite approval at first reading by the Chamber of Deputies, the measure was then rejected by the Senate in October of the following year. “Matteo Renzi scuttled it by arguing that such a measure should have been approved also with the support of Lega and Forza Italia, which at the time were forces that supported Mario Draghi’s government, but it’s absurd”.
Zan draws a parallel with the 1970s and 1980s to explain what he believes has been a weakening of Italian politics. “At the time there was more courage, the opposition parties, leveraging civil society, led to the approval of measures such as divorce or abortion even against the will of the Christian Democrats, who were in government. Now there is a degeneration according to which laws can only be made if the government agrees. But this is exactly the opposite of parliamentary autonomy and the separation of powers. And with the premiership wanted by Meloni, things can only get worse”.