Italy’s Matteo Salvini trolled with same-sex kiss
Matteo Salvini next to two women kissing. (Instagram)
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, known for his anti-LGBT views, has been photobombed by two women sharing a kiss.
Salvini, who once called same-sex parenting “unnatural,” was taking part in a rally for Sicilian mayoral candidate Oscar Aiello when he invited attendees to “take a selfie.”
Gaia Parisi and a friend, known only as Matilde, decided on the spur of the moment to kiss as they posed with the politician.
“When the minister urged those present to take the stage and take a selfie with him, we had this idea,” Parisi told Euronews.
“We made a provocative instinctive gesture, not at all premeditated. Salvini did not expect us to take a picture like this.”
“Salvini did not expect us to take a picture like this.”
—Gaia Parisi
A video widely shared on Twitter shows Salvini shaking his head as he realises what is going on next to him.
Matteo Salvini involved with anti-LGBT group
Parisi said that she decided to protest the deputy PM due to his involvement with the World Congress of Families, whose goal is to restore the so-called “natural family order.”
Salvini gave a key note at the group’s March 2019 conference in Verona, an event which drew mass protests.
After the kiss Parisi said that “an agent” separated her and Matilde “sharply.”
“Salvini then told us ‘I wish you luck’ so we took off thanking him ironically,” she continued.
The photograph, which Parisi shared on Instagram on Thursday (April 25), has attracted more than 13,000 likes.
For a while the hashtag #GaiaeMatilde trended on Italian Twitter.
Matteo Salvini grimaces at two women kissing. (Facebook)
On Facebook, the left-wing activist Marco Fufaro shared the original image and a second version, which shows Salvini grimacing next to the kissing pair.
Fufaro wrote: “Love beats hate 3-0. Trolling Savini live: extreme level.”
During the rally, Salvini was heckled with cries of “shame.”
He had been criticised for choosing to attend the event over memorials for Italy’s Liberation Day, which celebrates the end of the country’s Nazi occupation.
