Italy: the specter of bunga bunga catches up with Meloni
The pardon granted to Nicole Minetti, a convicted figure from the Berlusconi era, has thrust Justice Minister Carlo Nordio into a political storm — and tested, for the first time, Giorgia Meloni’s image of untouchability.
At a glance
Italian President Sergio Mattarella granted a pardon on February 18, 2026, to Nicole Minetti — a former dental hygienist turned regional politician convicted in the Berlusconi bunga bunga prostitution scandal — citing humanitarian grounds linked to an adopted child’s health.
Italian investigative media subsequently challenged the factual basis of those humanitarian grounds, prompting Mattarella to take the unusual step of publicly calling for an urgent review from Justice Minister Carlo Nordio.
For the first time since taking office in October 2022, Meloni’s government is facing a convergence of setbacks: a lost referendum on judicial reform in March 2026, internal resignations at the Justice Ministry, and now this politically toxic revival of Italy’s most infamous corruption-era scandal.
A pardon granted in the shadows, exposed under the spotlight
Nicole Minetti is not a name widely recognized outside Italy. Inside the country, however, a whole generation knows it. Between 2010 and 2013, she was one of the central figures in the trials surrounding the so-called bunga bunga parties — gatherings hosted at former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore, in the northern Lombardy region, that involved young women, including a minor: Karima el-Mahroug, known by her alias “Ruby Rubacuori,” or “Ruby the Heart-Stealer.”
Minetti was at the time Berlusconi’s dental hygienist, and later became a regional councilwoman in Lombardy under his political patronage. Her role in the scandal was not peripheral. According to court findings, she recruited women for the parties and was specifically tasked with taking custody of Ruby after police detained the minor in May 2010 — to prevent her from talking, prosecutors argued. Berlusconi himself faced trial on related charges but was ultimately acquitted. Italy’s Court of Cassation, the country’s highest court of appeal, confirmed Minetti’s conviction in April 2019: two years and ten months for inciting prostitution, and one year and one month for embezzlement of public funds.
President Mattarella granted the pardon on February 18, 2026, with a favorable recommendation from Justice Minister Carlo Nordio — a former Venice prosecutor who joined Fratelli d’Italia in 2022 and was appointed to the role by Meloni. The official justification cited humanitarian grounds: Minetti’s adopted son reportedly required continuous specialized medical care. The pardon was first brought to light by Mi Manda Rai3, a program on Italy’s public broadcaster Rai 3, Italy’s equivalent of PBS in terms of public-service mandate. The investigative outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, a Rome-based left-leaning daily, subsequently published a detailed counter-investigation challenging the factual basis of the clemency request point by point.
Among the disputed elements: the biological parents of the child — adopted in Uruguay in 2023 by Minetti and her partner Giuseppe Cipriani Jr., heir to the Cipriani luxury hospitality empire — would reportedly be alive, contradicting what is said to have been presented in the pardon application. Minetti has categorically denied any wrongdoing, calling the reporting “unfounded and gravely damaging to her personal and family reputation,” and announcing legal action against the newspaper. The Italian presidency, for its part, issued an official statement confirming that the pardon had been granted on the basis of “serious health problems affecting a minor close relative of Ms. Minetti requiring special assistance and care in highly specialized hospitals” — a position the Quirinal Palace, the presidential residence and seat of Italy’s constitutionally independent head of state, stood by even as it called for an urgent ministerial review.
Nordio on the front line, Meloni in calculated retreat
The institutional mechanics here matter — and are rarely well understood outside Italy. In the Italian system, the power to grant a presidential pardon belongs exclusively to the head of state. The justice minister instructs the file and transmits a recommendation, but the final decision rests with the president alone. Think of it as a system where a state governor holds sole pardoning authority, but must rely on the state attorney general to vet the application before signing — the political responsibility for a flawed vetting process falls on the latter, even if the final pen belongs to the former.
Mattarella did not simply absorb the controversy. He took the highly unusual step of publicly requesting an urgent review from the Justice Ministry, signaling that he believed he had been given an incomplete picture. It was a rare display of institutional displeasure from a president known for his measured restraint.
Nordio finds himself in an uncomfortable position: responsible for instructing the file, yet without the power to have decided the outcome. He insists that every procedure was followed to the letter. Giorgia Meloni, meanwhile, has chosen the posture of principled distance: this is not her file, she has said, and she fully supports her minister. Constitutionally, this is defensible — the pardon is a presidential prerogative, not a government one. Politically, it is increasingly costly, as the opposition, led by the center-left Partito Democratico (PD), Italy’s Democratic Party, has called loudly for Nordio’s resignation.
The Berlusconi era as permanent political debt
What makes Meloni’s position genuinely uncomfortable is not the Minetti affair in isolation. It is what it reveals about the deeper geology of Italian right-wing politics. Forza Italia — the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi and now led by Antonio Tajani, who currently serves as Meloni’s foreign minister — is the direct institutional heir to that era. The judicial reform that was rejected in the March 2026 referendum was precisely the kind of overhaul that the Berlusconi right had championed for three decades: separating the careers of judges and prosecutors, and restructuring the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (CSM), the independent body that oversees Italy’s judiciary — roughly comparable to the judicial oversight function of the U.S. Judicial Conference, though with far greater constitutional weight.
This continuity is not incidental. It speaks to the structure of the governing coalition itself. Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), Meloni’s national-conservative party, Forza Italia, and Matteo Salvini’s Lega form an alliance whose histories, networks, and political debts are deeply intertwined. The Minetti affair, in this light, is not an intrusion of the Berlusconi past from outside Meloni’s government. It emerges from within the very political ecosystem she chose to govern with.
Analysis: when durability becomes a liability
Three and a half years without a major crisis had given Giorgia Meloni a degree of political invulnerability that few Italian leaders can claim. Italy has had 69 governments since the founding of the Republic in 1946 — an average of less than fourteen months per administration. Against that backdrop, Meloni’s coalition this spring became the second longest-serving government in the history of the Italian Republic.
That durability rested on three pillars: a loyal electorate — Fratelli d’Italia has remained stable at around 30% in polls — a more pragmatic governing style than her pre-election rhetoric suggested, and an opposition too fragmented to mount a coherent challenge.
The spring of 2026 may mark an inflection point. The lost referendum in March, internal resignations at the Justice Ministry — earlier this year, both a junior minister and the ministry’s chief of staff stepped down, leaving Nordio exposed well before this affair broke — and now the Minetti pardon crisis form an accumulation that, taken separately, would be manageable. Together, they begin to erode the image of control that Meloni has so carefully constructed. Her opponents see, for the first time, something that looks like an opening.
The deeper question the affair raises goes to structure itself. Meloni built her authority in part by differentiating herself from the Berlusconi style — the flamboyance, the personal scandals, the blurring of private interest and public office. Yet she governs with Berlusconi’s heirs, relies on their electoral base, and is now managing the institutional fallout of their era’s most notorious legal legacy. That tension, long invisible, is becoming harder to ignore.
The bottom line
The Minetti affair is not, at its core, a judicial story. It is a strategic one.
How long can a leader whose credibility rests on a clean break from the past continue to absorb the consequences of that past — before the distance she has worked to establish begins to close, not by her own choice, but by the weight of the coalition she needs to govern?
Sources: RTBF · Il Messaggero · IRIS · Euractiv