Fact Check: Old video of Giorgia Meloni’s party speech falsely shared as offering support to erase Pakistan

The exercise was being undertaken to assess the potential of the newly-built 3.5-km-long airstrip on the expressway as an alternative runway during times of war or national emergencies.

It assumes huge significance following the high-level security meeting chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has given full operational freedom to the armed forces to decide the “mode, timing, and target” of India's response to the recent terror attack in Pahalgam.

In the wake of the attack, social media platforms are flooded with videos showing emotional reactions and misinformation. In this charged atmosphere, a video featuring Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni began circulating widely, with users claiming that she offered to help "erase Pakistan from the world map" if requested by Indian PM Modi.

The video is being shared with the following overlay text in Telugu – “If my friend (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi tells me, we will ensure that Pakistan is erased from the (world) map.”

And, a user has shared this video with the Telugu caption, “ ఇలాంటి ఉమెన్స్ మన ఇండియా గవర్నమెంట్ లో ఉండి ఉంటే కథ వేరేగా ఉండేది కదు.” ( when translated, “If such women were in our Indian government, the story would have been different.”

The viral video has amassed over 33.6K views and reshared over 200 times on X platform.

The viral claim link is here and the archive link here.

Here’s the screenshot of the viral post.

During the investigation, the Telugupost fact check team found the claim made in the viral post is false.

Soon after the devastating terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which claimed the lives of 26 civilians, several world leaders including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the attack. Meloni shared her profound grief over the terror attack and conveyedher condolences and solidarity.

She expressed Italy’s sympathy to the affected families, the injured, and the Indian government. Taking to X, Meloni said (in Italian), “Deeply saddened by the terrorist attack that took place today in India, which caused numerous casualties. Italy expresses solidarity with the affected families, the injured, the Government, and the entire Indian people.”

We searched Google to see if Meloni spoke about the Pahalgam attack but did not find any message from her after her condolence message on April 22, 2025.

We then used the Google Lens tool to crop and searched the Meloni pic from the viral video. We found several videos with the viral visuals of Meloni posted around January 19, 2025.

The video posted by Tommy Robinson, who identifies himself as journalist in his bio on X, was captioned, “@GiorgiaMeloni: “Rome should be the capital of the European Union, because the capital of the European Union cannot be the most comfortable place to set up offices, but the place that represents its millennial identity.”

Taking cue from this information, we expanded our Google Search and came across a news article posted by a Sweden-based “NewsVoice” which debunked the claim.

As the video was widely being circulated across Europe, the media outlet posted a fact check article on January 20, 2025 stating that the “Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, gave a speech on April 14, 2019, in Torino, in which she suggested Rome should be the capital of the European Union during an electoral campaign for the Fratelli d’Italia party.”

The article also noted that some users on X were sharing Meloni’s fiery speech suggesting that it was a recent statement by her.

Giorgia Meloni: “The capital of Italy is Rome! Rome should be the capital of the EU, because the capital of the EU cannot be the most convenient place to set up offices, but rather the place that represents its millenary identity!"

Torbjorn Sassersson, CEO & Editor-in-Chief of NewsVoice, tweeted the viral video on X and translated the words of Meloni in English for the benefit of non-Italian users. [ Note: the video has been shot from a different angle ]

More videos showing the event of Giorgia Meloni’s party Fratelli d'Italia here and a similar video here.

We continued our search as the viral video has a logo of “Vista” in it. We extracted keyframes from this video and found the original video on @AgenziaVista’s YouTube channel. The video was uploaded on Vista channel on April 14, 2019, when Meloni was not even a Prime Minister.

The partial description of the posted video is: “Turin, April 14, 2019 – The electoral campaign for the 2019 European elections by Fratelli d’Italia kicks off in Turin with a programmatic conference titled "In Europe to Change Everything.”

In the light of the above investigation and media reports, it is evident that the claim made in the viral video that Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni offered to wipe Pakistan off the world map is false. The video is from 2019 when she was not even a Prime Minister.