Italian MP caught wearing Nazi armband appointed as minister by Giorgia Meloni

An Italian politician who was once pictured wearing a Nazi armband emblazoned with a swastika has been appointed as a junior minister by Giorgia Meloni.

The Brothers of Italy party leader was sworn in as Italy’s new prime minister in late October, becoming the country’s first female leader and heading its first far-right government since the Second World War.

Among a series of junior ministerial appointments handed out on Tuesday, Galeazzo Bignami was named as undersecretary at the infrastructure ministry.

Mr Bignami has for a several years been the target of controversy after a photograph of him wearing the armband was leaked to an Italian newspaper in 2016.

The photo originates from a his own stag party in 2005. At the time it was published, the politician brushed off the offensive costume as “lighthearted” fun.

On Monday, the 47-year-old former lawyer expressed “profound shame” over the photo while denouncing “any form of totalitarianism” and branding Nazism as “the absolute evil”.

A second controversial incident in 2019 saw Mr Biganmi share a photo on social media of the names of foreign residents listed on the intercom of a council-owned apartment building in Bologna, saying he “couldn’t give a shit” about their privacy.

His appointment has been met with widespread condemnation, with one senior Partito Democratico official calling it an “offence” to victims of the Holocaust.

“A massacre, an offence, an indecency towards the Constitution, the memory, the history and the victims of that swastika. Shame, @GiorgiaMeloni,” Marco Furfaro, a politician in Italy’s social democratic party, wrote on Twitter.