Italy’s left has a xenophobia problem.

A revitalized Silvio Berlusconi, political instability, a redesigned byzantine electoral system: None of the well-publicized problems ahead of Italy’s March 4 national election feel especially new. These are just the latest incarnations of the conditions the country’s politics have operated under for years. Italians are discouraged and angry after a 10-year recession and a feeble recovery. The past four prime ministers have been unelected, the product of the parliamentary backroom dealing that Italians increasingly loathe. What does set this election apart is a disturbing rise in xenophobia and how Italy’s fractious left is responding to it.

The Northern League, Italy’s largest far-right party, has been driving much of this debate. In January, Attilio Fontana, the Northern League’s candidate for governor of Lombardy, made headlines warning on the radio that migrants would “wipe out our white race.” A week later Fontana issued a vague apology, followed swiftly by a promise to expel over 100,000 illegal immigrants if elected. Cue headlines and a poll surge.

Then on Feb. 3, a former local candidate for the Northern League shot and injured six African migrants in Macerata, a small town off the northeastern coast. The attacker, who shot his victims unprovoked while draped in an Italian flag, linked his horrific actions to an unrelated Nigerian man’s alleged involvement in the murder and dismemberment of an 18-year-old girl in the same town. The man in question had in fact only been questioned as a person of interest in the girl’s case.

Advertisement

Even before these events, immigration and xenophobia were the hottest topics in a typically farcical campaign between three main political blocs. The Berlusconi-led right-wing coalition, which includes the Northern League as well as other far-right parties, has been advocating for closed borders. This has dominated the conversation, pushing a much-needed debate on economic policy to the margins of public discourse and allowing Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party to get away with pushing for an implausible flat tax (Italy’s public debt ratio is the highest in Europe after Greece).

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

The populist, post-ideological Five Star Movement wants to curb migration too, but the fresh-faced Luigi Di Maio, the party’s new leader, has made the centerpiece of its campaign a form of universal basic income so fiscally irresponsible that many fear a run on Italian assets should the Movement win. Cautious of alienating moderates, both groups have dropped their Euroskeptic stance in the weeks leading to the election.

Advertisement

As for the left, it is beleaguered by infighting and has lacked focus on any clear issue. This likely portends an electoral defeat and leadership change within the center-left Partito Democratico (PD), which leads Italy’s current governing coalition and is led by former Prime Minister Mateo Renzi. (Renzi, an EU-approved technocrat once seen as a promising reformer, stepped down as prime minister in 2016 after voters rejected his proposed constitutional changes.) Neither the PD nor any of the other main parties seems to offer a credible way out.

In this environment, the left seems to have found appealing to fears of the far right more effective than coming up with any ideas of its own. The PD and other moderate and leftist parties have leveraged the Macerata shooting and other events warn that Italy is at risk of a return to fascism. A rally denouncing racism and decrying the risk of a fascist second coming was held in Macerata the week following the attack, with many prominent politicians in attendance. Laura Boldrini, the president of the lower chamber of parliament and one of the rally’s organizers later warned: “We are seeing an uptick in provocations and violent actions by neo-fascist groups … we can’t ignore this.” Sympathetic publications have portrayed the Macerata attack as a flashpoint of Italy’s out-of-control racism and as a taste of what could come next if populist and far-right parties gain the upper hand. A Guardian op-ed by Roberto Saviano, one of Italy’s most prominent opinion writers, was ominously titled “Fascism is back in Italy and it’s paralyzing the political system.”

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

But while raising alarm at the specter of fascism, the left has itself been flirting with the sort of ideas generally associated with the far-right In December, the PD meekly failed to back a common-sense legislative proposal to grant citizenship to children born on Italian soil and who had attended at least five years of school in the country. The matter was put to vote immediately prior to the government’s end, and the PD could easily have pushed it through. Last July, many of the PD’s voters were outraged by a party Facebook post that suggested “Aiutiamoli a casa loro”—“Let’s help them in their own countries,” a slogan typically used by the right in immigration debates.

Advertisement

The left may simply be responding to public sentiment. Since the 2008 financial crisis, anti-migrant prejudice appears to be on the rise. A 2012 Demos surveyfound 26 percent of Italians in agreement with the statement that immigrants represented a risk for public order. By September 2017, that figure had risen to 46 percent and stood at 66 percent among those with less education. The reasons for this are sad, systemic, and unsurprising. Italy is only now emerging from a crippling decadelong economic stagnation. At the same time, its location at the heart of the Mediterranean has made it the single largest point of entry for hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking a better life in Europe. But most of these people simply pass through Italy on their way to wealthier European countries. A recent IPSOS poll found that on average Italians think 21 percent of the population is composed of migrants. The real number is closer to 8 percent—low by European standards, but still enough to conjure up a scapegoat for disaffected Italian.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

The left is not immune from these views. A March 2017 poll conducted by Quorum-YouTrend (a research institute co-founded by Salvatore Borghese, this article’s co-author) found 45.9 percent of the PD’s voters, who are older than average, to be anti-immigration.

Advertisement

Teresa Talò, a migration expert at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs who has led public attitudes studies on the topic at the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre, has a more nuanced view: “Attitudes on migration are actually fairly stable, and tend to change slowly anyway. What has changed is the salience of immigration in public discourse, which in turn mobilizes public opinion,” she said when asked to interpret this data.

Advertisement Anti-fascist rallies and rhetoric can be as much about nostalgia and dusting off old Che Guevara merchandise as anything else.

Indeed, anti-immigrant sentiment has rapidly shaped the political landscape. Parties touting anti-immigrant platforms have been polling strongly ahead of this year’s election. Averaging across polls, the Northern League and Fratelli D’Italia—another far-right party—combine at 18 percent of likely voters and are key partners in the center-right Berlusconi-led coalition.
Berlusconi’s own party, Forza Italia, while not openly xenophobic, has emphasized border control as an issue. It is polling at 16 percent. The Five Star Movement, whose stance on immigration is now ambiguous but which has often lent itself to outlandish far-right causes, is placed to be Italy’s largest party in the election at 28 percent. (Whether they will be asked to form a government is, like so many aspects of Italian politics, an arcane constitutional matter, requiring its own article. This year’s electoral outcome is really anyone’s guess, and many experts quietly expect a three-way hung Parliament and repeat election later in the year.)

Advertisement Advertisement

Italy has a long history of racially tinged discrimination and stereotyping it has never reckoned with. Centuries-old blackface costumes and children’s lullabies about a scary “black man” remain widespread. Television representations of minorities that would be deemed too offensive to air in most European countries are sadly commonplace.

These disturbing stereotypes may be old news, but large-scale immigration is not. Mass arrivals only began 20 years ago, too recently for racial discrimination to have become endemic or systematized to the extent seen in former colonial melting pots such as France or Britain. Recent developments in the economy and migrant flows have released a powerful, latent xenophobia.

Advertisement

On balance, it is probably not one worth conflating with a full-blown racially-tinged fascist revival. In the months preceding the election, the left and right are vying for political relevance in the face of mounting populist anger. Both have exploited emergent xenophobia for political theater in different ways, and each with varying degrees of irresponsibility.

Advertisement

Forza Italia and the Five Star Movement’s muted response to the Macerata attack is part of a broader European trend of center-right and populist parties tacitly acquiescing to or even encouraging xenophobia. The attack itself demonstrates that fomenting anti-immigrant sentiment to score political points, as Fontana and others on the Italian right are doing, can be a precursor to racist violence.

Advertisement Advertisement

The left’s scaremongering, while less dangerous, is equally cynical and more duplicitous. The left’s lack of a winning strategy makes anti-fascism a comfortable, if somewhat outdated, red herring issue. Progressive organizations supporting minority rights abound within the Italian left, but for the middle-aged former communists who constitute the backbone of its electorate, anti-fascist rallies and rhetoric can be as much about nostalgia and dusting off old Che Guevara merchandise as anything else.

Advertisement

Creating a panic about fascism serves mainly to shore up votes while distracting from the more pressing and tangible issues, of xenophobia and migration policy, on which the left’s supporters increasingly agree with the right.

Since the “aiutiamoli a a casa loro” post, the PD has quietly acknowledged its aging voters’ conservative tilt. In January, a secret deal negotiated by the PD-appointed minister for the interior with Libyan factions to curb immigration across the Mediterranean was criticized by international watchdogs for knowingly leading to human rights violations against refugees and aspiring migrants in Libya.

For the left, exaggerating the risk of resurgent fascism sidesteps the uncomfortable truth of their lurch toward anti-immigrant politics. Digging up an obsolete ideological divide creates useful headlines in the short term, putting on ice until after the election the difficult and very real internal reckonings over migrant policy—and how inclusive Italy wants to be as a society. Cabinet ministers typically race to visit victims and their families, usually the next day. But of the many left-wing politicians who attended the Macerata rally only Andrea Orlando, who does not sit in the cabinet, visited any of the victims. He did so four days after the attacks and with minimal press coverage. Much seems familiar about this election, but the shift the campaign has brought in terms of tolerance for xenophobia could be its most notable legacy.

Tweet Share Share Comment

• Europe
• Politics
• Italy