Lazio Communications Chief and spokesman for rightwing Governor Francesco Rocca, Marcello De Angelis, must quit over one of his band's songs saying Jews are a "merchant race" and over a December 21 Instagram post of a candelabrum allegedly echoing one made in the Dachau death camp with which Nazi Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler greeted the winter solstice, the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) said Thursday.
"The De Angelis case is a national problem because it is a wound to our democracy and for our anti-Fascist Constitution," said PD culture and memory pointman Sandro Ruotolo, saying that De Angelis's claims to have changed ways from his "antisemitic past" were untrue.
Ruotolo, a former TV journalist, said Premier Giorgia Meloni, the leader of rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party to which both De Angelis and his boss Rocca are close, "must not dismiss this affair as a local matter".
De Angelis caused a furore earlier this month by saying that those convicted of the 1980 Bologna train station bombing, which killed 85 people, were innocent.
One of those convicted is related to him by marriage.
De Angelis, who has a long history of membership in hard right or centre right parties, is also a singer songwriter whose band plays the song about Jews as merchants.
De Angelis said Thursday that "I now feel horror over the text of my song" and said he had buried his past antisemitic comments as part of the mistakes of youth.
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