Italy

Salvini threatens to deport 500,000

“The entertainment is over, now we mean business”, declared Matteo Salvini, leader of the racist National League and Italy’s new Minister of the Interior. He has threatened to deport 500,000 “illegal” migrants and usher in a new regime of repressive” civil protection”. Then news arrived of the coldblooded murder in Calabria of a young activist of the country’s United Base Union, long active among the half million or so migrant workers in the fields of the south picking fruit for 20 Euro a day and forced to live in hovels and shantytowns. Sacco Soumalyla, from Mali and long settled in Italy...

Italy: Salvini sets the pace

Italian President Sergio Mattarella has refused to confirm the appointment of Euro-critic Paola Savona as Minister of Finance in the new coalition government of the populist Five Star Movement and the Lega Nationale. With Mattarella’s decision (taken, he said, “to save the constitution”) and the subsequent resignation of the newly-appointed Prime Minister, the obscure Professor Conte, the government has collapsed. As the markets took fright after the government’s fall, the cost of financing Italy’s two trillion dollar public debt has risen alarmingly, to its highest point since 2014...

Star says: trust the Tories, trust the League

Editorials in the Morning Star on 23 May showed what wretched depths the Star is brought to by its Europhobia. The Morning Star, continuation of the old Stalinist lie-sheet the Daily Worker, is much faded journalistically, but still gets money from some union leaders: the 23 May issues boasts of subsidies from PCS, Unison, and Unite. It has some influence in Momentum. No, says the first editorial, there is no risk of the return of a “hard’ Irish border. A report by MEPs has proposed a “smart border”. “Technology” can do the trick. Which is just what the Tories say. The Star feels a need to...

Food delivery workers unite across Italy

On Sunday 15 April in Bologna the first national assembly of food delivery workers took place. Organised by the “Riders’ Union Bologna”, it drew delegates from nearly all of the largest cities as well as delegates from similar collectives in Belgium and France; and from Italy, observers came from the main trade unions, federal and otherwise. The initiative was the culmination of a series of actions involving militants from Bologna over the last 18 months, collectively addressing the needs of the thousands of workers in the gig economy increasingly at the mercy of the multinational corporate...

Italian election shows impasse of left

Italy’s election (4 March) resulted in hung parliament, with no party getting enough votes to form a government. It will take weeks and maybe months for a government to emerge. The election highlighted in the most dramatic way the politically disastrous state of the country’s trade-union movement. The crisis of the reactionary centre-left government and the ruling Matteo Renzi-led Democratic Party (PD) has been consummated in an historic rejection by the mass of the Italian people; in a triumph for the two most virulent “anti-system” populist forces, rivals united in their anti-working class...

Italian elections: fascist menace grows

The horrific act of fascist violence on the 3 February in the central Italian town of Macerata, where eight young west Africans were gunned down by a neo-fascist thug, has highlighted the level of putrefying decadence of the major political contenders for office. All of them, from the inveterate xenophobes and the racist (northern) Lega, to the now-not-so-populist 5 Star Movement, through to the resurrected corpse of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and rounded off by the Renzi-led Democratic Party of government, instinctively chorused that the answer to the ever-more palpable violent presence of neo...

Italian fascism feeds on xenophobia

On Saturday 3 February, exactly one month before Italy’s 3 March general election, an armed rampage took place in the Italian town of Macerata. Eight people, African migrants to Italy, were shot by a white Italian — Luca Traini. Traini, 28, is a fascist; his motivations were political. Following the attack, he draped himself in an Italian flag, and headed straight for a fascist-era war memorial, where he gave a fascist salute. On the way, he visited the spot where the remains of a young white Italian woman, Pamela Mastropietro, had been found a few days previously. A Nigerian man had been...

Is Renzi heading for a lash-up with Berlusconi?

Recent regional elections in Sicily, with less than 50% voting, saw a close-run victory for Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition, Forza Italia. There was an unanticipated setback for the Five-Star Movement, although it remained the largest party with a 25% vote-share. The Democratic Party (PD), currently in government in Rome, suffered a heavy defeat, and the so-called radical left bloc, MDP-SI-PRC, saw a modest improvement. These results underline the decline of the once aggressive would-be Bonapartist project of PD leader Renzi split the social bloc of the centre-right, and steal the populist...

Anti-migrant racism and Italy’s “morbid symptoms”

Soon after the racist, lying campaign initiated by a magistrate in Catania aiming to discredit the humanitarian work of the network of NGOs who have been rescuing refugees, a crowdfunding appeal has been launched in Italy to raise money to buy a boat to, it is said, “defend Europe from the plot to substitute the Italian population with the masses from Africa.” The first task of the 40-metre long boat will be to “confront in the waters of Libya the NGO 'Fifth Column' and drive the refugees back to Libya. While it is highly unlikely that the exercise will get beyond media headlines, it exposes a...

Socialists and digital liberties

Digital liberties and free use of the internet are facing new threats in Britain, while there are increasing efforts by campaigners to establish a framework of rights that can safeguard online civil liberties. In response to the London Bridge terror attack, Theresa May called for new measures to regulate and monitor the internet, claiming that social networking was a potential breeding ground for the ideology of “Islamic extremism”. Shortly after, in the general election the Tory manifesto contained a section on “Prosperity and Security in a Digital Age”. It made vague promises to restrict...

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