Italy

Whitewash on Regeni

At the end of February, a month after the disappearance in Cairo of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni, the official Egyptian investigation into his torture and death has reported. The murder, so the Minister of the Interior claimed, was “most likely” due to a “personal vendetta”, in a context of “young Arab/ foreign contacts” where drugs freely circulated. This cynical nonsense was of a piece with the same minister’s claim, when Regeni’s body was first found, that death was “most likely” due to the victim being struck by a car. The autopsy in Italy revealed no evidence of any drugs, but that...

Giulio Regeni: murdered by Sisi’s cops

On 25 January, during celebrations in Cairo of the fifth anniversary of the rising against the Mubarak dictatorship in 2011, Giulio Regeni disappeared. He had been seized by the thugs of the secret services of the Al Sisi government. On 4 February, his tortured and broken body was found in a ditch outside Cairo. Giulio Regeni, aged 28, was a doctoral student from Cambridge University, a socialist militant, and a freelance writer for the Italian left-wing paper Il Manifesto, for which he wrote extensively on the Egyptian trade union and labour movement. His last article, “In Egypt, second life...

“We are not going back”

Earlier this month hundreds of migrants made their way, against state resistance, to the Italian-French border town of Ventimiglia, aiming to get into France. The French authorities, like the Swiss, the Austrians and the Hungarians have denied them entry. But the migrants have had enough of being at the mercy of an increasingly warring collection of chauvinists. They refused to budge from the town , occupying the rocky shore of the little nearby locality, Ponte San Ludovico. Their courage and determination brought solidarity action not just from political organisations, trade unionists and...

Italy: “Renzismo” hits the buffers, right gains ground

In Italy's 31 May regional elections, the results signalled a crisis, or dramatic curtailment of what so far has seemed the irresistible rise of Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party. From its extraordinary success in last year's European election, when it took 41% of the vote, the Democratic Party plummeted to 23%, in the seven regions contested, while still securing victory in five other regions. The result underlines once more the increasingly unstable and volatile profile of the political situation here. There was also a further significant increase in the number of abstentions — 1 in 2 didn't...

Italian school reforms spark revolt

Having wiped the floor with the major Italian unions over the Jobs Act, and blew away what passes for the "left" in his own party with a display of ruthless, cynical contempt for the niceties of bourgeois parliamentary procedure and the countries constitution, with the successful passage of his new and profoundly reactionary electoral law, the "Italicum", Matteo Renzi believed he could make it a hat-trick of victories with his latest bill to reform the countries decrepit and dilapidated educational system. Of course he had every right to feel confident — his counterparts in the schools and...

Open the borders!

After hearing news of the latest drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean sea on Saturday 18 April, Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi asked, “How can it be that we daily are witnessing a tragedy?” Why does Renzi ask, “How can it be”? As if the 950 deaths had nothing to do with the Renzi government cancelling the Italian navy’s search and rescue operation, Mare Nostrum, late last year, an operation which covered a vast expanse of the Mediterranean and in the year from October 2013 rescued 150,000 from drowning. As if Renzi had not realised the EU replacement for Mare Nostrum would be a much...

Italy: retreat and resistance

Reports of an economic revival in Italy produced the predictable whoop of euphoria and triumph from the political and cultural establishment, only too happy to laud the passing of the (anti-worker) Jobs Act as the miracle to put the country on the yellow-brick road to full recovery. The news that employers like Fiat are taking on hundreds of workers, that unemployment is falling, investment rising and the public finances getting the nod of approval from Brussels are all true. Why wouldn't they be? The Jobs Act alone has pulverised the conditions of protection workers won 40 or so years ago...

300 migrants drown in Mediterranean

Over 300 migrants, thought to be from sub-Saharan Africa, drowned earlier this month, in an effort to reach Europe. It is thought that three inflatable boats each carrying around 100 people, on waters with temperatures barely above zero with waves as high as eight metres, capsized between North Africa and Sicily. The news came shortly after 29 migrants froze to death trying to make the same journey. There have been many similar stories over the past months. Last year, 3,419 migrants lost their lives in this way. At the end of last year, the Italian government gave in to anti-immigrant pressure...

Will Italy follow Greece?

With the stirring victory for Syriza and the subsequent 100,000-strong anti-austerity demonstration in Madrid, socialists might have hoped, for similar in Italy. It is, after all, second only to Greece in the parlous state of its public finances and the battering inflicted on its working people by pro-austerity governments. All the more so having witnessed the joyful “bella ciao” greeting of 500 or so of the Italian left present in Athens to greet Tsipras's victory. Alas, they would be disappointed. Just as these events were taking place, the leaders of Italy's left “progressive” forces...

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