Minister lashed out at medical students during Atreju event in Rome.
Italy’s minister for university and research, Anna Maria Bernini, engaged in a heated exchange with small group of students on Thursday during a public talk in Rome.
Bernini, 60, was addressing the audience at Atreju, the annual political festival organised by the right-wing Frateli d’Italia party of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, held this year at Castel Sant’Angelo.
The students began heckling Bernini, protesting her medical school reform, in particular the new open-entry ‘filter’ semester and national merit ranking system.
The filter semester was designed to abolish the limited number of places in medicine however the move is causing discontent among students due to alleged irregularities in the exams which have resulted in a very low pass rate.
As she began her speech, several students from the UDU student union stood up and shouted: “We can’t take it anymore, there are young people who are sick, who have started going to the psychologist again, who are taking their own lives, who risk losing a year with the filter semester”.
From the stage, the minister invited the crowd to join in a derisive applause, saying: “Here are our friends, the protesters, let’s give them a big round of applause,” before wheeling out a catchphrase beloved of former Italian prime minister and founder of her centre-right Forza Italia party, Silvio Berlusconi.
“You know what [party president] Berlusconi used to say? You’re still poor communists”, Bernini charged, adding: “Before you protest, let me speak. This shows your uselessness. You are useless.”
É inaccettabile che a degli studenti in evidenti difficoltà la Ministra Bernini risponda che “sono dei poveri comunisti”. Ministra chieda scusa e ammetta il fallimento del semestre filtro per l’accesso alla facoltà di medicina pic.twitter.com/sxirikTvLe
— Italia Viva (@ItaliaViva) December 11, 2025
Bernini was backed by the audience at Atreju, with the reference to Berlusconi prompting wild applause from the crowd.
“The students’ strategy is chaos: they talk but don’t listen” – Bernini claimed – “I start to worry when some political parties echo them.”
The minister then made her way into the crowd, microphone in hand, confronting the medical students and defending her reforms, saying that she had “invested €9.4 billion in universities and more than €800 million in scholarships”.
Footage of Bernini’s “poveri comunisti” comments was shared proudly online by her Forza Italia party however it wasn’t long before her remarks triggered a political backlash from the opposition.
“In front of young men and women legitimately protesting a reform that has proven to be a colossal flop, the minister thought it best to respond not on the merits, but by insulting them,” accused Irene Manzi and Francesco Verducci of the centre-left Partito Democratic (PD).
The small centrist Italia Viva party shared video of the “unacceptable” comments on X, calling on the minister to “apologise and admit the failure of the filter semester for access to the faculty of medicine”.
“How dare she? Apologise and resign,” said Elisabetta Piccolotti of the Green and Left Alliance (AVS), while Giovanni Barbera of the Communist Refoundation Party said: “Better communists than Berlusconi supporters”.
Photo credit: Pierre Teyssot / Shutterstock.com.
