Italy

Free Carola Rackete!

At 7 p.m. on 28 June, Italian custom officers informed Carola Rackete, the 31 year old captain of the volunteer rescue ship Sea-Watch 3, that she faced charges of aiding and abetting illegal trafficking of refugees and illegal entry intoFree Italian waters. They demanded that she immediately leave her vessel — blocked by the Italian coastguards outside the port of Lampedusa — and report there to be interrogated and charged. She replied: “I will not leave my ship. I am exhausted , not having slept for days. But my priority is the fate of the 42 refugees on board, many of whom now ill and some...

The rise of Salvini

The ascent of Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy has no equal in Europe in its astonishing progress — from 17% in Italy’s March 2018 election to 34% in the May 2019 Euro-election. In May 2019, the Lega got three million more votes than in March 2018, though seven million fewer votes were cast overall. It advanced further on its already historic mass base in the North. It advanced significantly in the hitherto “red” centre. It quadrupled its presence in the South and the Islands. Its social bloc has now extended vastly beyond its historic hegemony among the small and medium producers of the...

Salvini, leader of the Euro-right

With rosary beads in hand, and flanked by eleven of the leaders of Europe’s most reactionary and racist political parties, Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s La Lega and Minister of the Interior in the country’s coalition government, rounded off his last Euro-election campaign rally in Milan’s Piazza Duomo. He wound up, as he had begun his campaign, with a war cry against immigrants. “With the support of my government I have replied to the appeal of the pontiff with deeds not words to reduce the deaths in the Mediterranean… A historic moment of liberation of the continent from the abusive...

Courier fight widens

Couriers and IWGB members at The Doctor’s Laboratory will strike for 48 hours from 7.30 a.m. on 23 May until 25 May, over better pay and terms and conditions and equality with non-courier staff. TDL have been trying to illegally intimidate couriers out of striking, but have not managed. Deliveroo couriers will be joining them in solidarity. The second issue of Puncture , the IWGB Deliveroo bulletin, started being distributed on Thursday 16 May. We’ve had very good reception from the first one, and we had way too much content to fit into it — a good problem to have! It’s on A3 folded, with two...

Industrial news in brief

The PCS union’s ballot for action on pay, which closed on 29 April, gained a turnout of 47.7%. That is over 6% higher than in 2018, but still about 3,000 votes short of reaching the 50% threshold required under Tory anti-union laws. This has highlighted, yet again, the extreme unevenness of our organisation on the ground. There has to be a frank and honest discussion about how we can rebuild our organisation. Involving a full autopsy of our areas of strength and weakness. In the past, the suggestion that the union leadership should be open with members about which areas are stronger or weaker...

Students go for system change, not climate change

The best guess is that one and half million students, in over 120 countries, struck on Friday 15 March to demand that their governments start emergency action on climate change. In London, the central rally of school students in Parliament Square was 4,000 or more. Everyone we talked with said there was no ongoing organisation in their school for the walkout. They’d found out about it on social media and come with their friends. There were also sizeable groups of university students at Parliament Square. The National Union of Students had officially supported the action, but did nothing to...

Macron, Salvini, and the left

On 7 February, France recalled its ambassador from Italy, the first time this had happened since Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini declared war in 1940. The recall was the latest act in a growing row between French President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s coalition government, formed of the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right National League. Macron had criticised the coalition for promoting the “leprosy” of nationalism, and Italy’s new policy of turning away migrant boats from its shores. The Italian government accuses Macron of hypocrisy for returning migrants in France to Italy...

Salvini pushes Italy to right

“The moment we have been waiting for 50 years has arrived, the cycle has of anti-fascism has closed — determinate ideas have entered the hearts of the Italian people”. Roberto Fiore, veteran fascist, and now national secretary of Forza Nuovo, one of Italy’s fast growing neo-Nazi forces, addressing a conference on “From Populism to Revolution”. Whatever one might think of the self-regarding Fiore and his posse of thugs, his estimate of the significance of the 4 March 2018 election victory of the populist Five Star Movement of Luigi di Maio and its governmental alliance with Salvini’s La Lega is...

EU fences off refugees

As the leaders of the EU countries on 27-29 June put their names to their “universal accord” on immigration policy, news arrived of another horrific tragedy off the coast of Libya. A hundred men, women, and children drowned as their rubber boat exploded and they drifted helplessly in waters where NGO rescue ships are now banned by Marco Minniti, Italy’s Minister of the Interior, not in the current right-wing Italian government, but in the previous centre-left one. Their deaths bring the total in the last months to their highest rate for a long time, despite a significant drop in the numbers...

Rome votes to name street for a fascist

There could be no clearer indication of what the coming to power of Salvini/Di Maio has unleashed in Italy than recent events in Rome’s city council. A motion from the ultra-right “Brothers of Italy” party, passed by a slim majority, committed the council to dedicate one of the city’s thoroughfares to Giorgio Almirante, the principal private secretary of Mussolini’s Minister of Popular Culture, and editor of an extreme voice of racist hatred, the Defence of Race. The vote was supported by members of the Five-Star movement and thus underlines the deepening wave of ideological and political...

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