Who is Federico Mollicone, founder of Fratelli d'Italia: from the controversy over Peppa Pig to the Dotto case

This is not the first time that Federico Mollicone has “conquered” the news for a controversy. Certainly not as significant as today’s on the Bologna massacrethere have in fact been even Peppa Pig and the Dotto case. Romano, 53, is among the founders of Fratelli d’Italia, the party for which he was elected to the Chamber for the first time in 2018 and then in 2022 in the proportional list of Lazio 1. Until 1995 he was a member of the Msithen in National Alliance until 2009 and in the People of Freedom until 2012, when with Giorgia Meloni, Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto he contributed to founding the right-wing party which today has a relative majority.

High school diploma in linguistics, he set up a communications company which he left in 2008. Today he is President of the Culture Committee of the Chamber. In the last election campaign, Mollicone made headlines for sparking an anti-gender controversy over an episode of the cartoon Peppa Pig featuring a homosexual family of polar bears.

On June 12, during the discussion in the Chamber of Deputies on the government bill for differentiated autonomy, he was accused of having participated in a brawl, together with his colleague from the League Igor Iezzi (then suspended from the Chamber for 15 days), in which the Five Star Movement parliamentarian Leonardo Donno reported having been insulted and beaten.

On several occasions Mollicone has relaunched the idea of a new parliamentary commission of inquiry on the massacres, signing and filing bills to create investigative tools with the aim of ‘shedding light on the many torn pages of internal terrorism, from the Moro case to the Bologna massacre up to Ustica, ‘to trace this fresco of the Italian Cold War, little known, little written and unfortunately little publicised’ according to him.