Italian right looking to cash in on rising anger
POLITICS: Illegal migration, loss of jobs stoking frustration
TURIN, Italy — It is a decade since the financial crisis, but Italy is still angry: from the small-town piazzas of northern Italy, to the picket lines of the old industrial heartlands around Turin, it is the smouldering rage of the people that dominates final campaigning for next weekend’s election.
There is anxiety over uncontrolled migration; dismay over children without prospects; bitterness toward Europe and its common currency and — encompassing all these grievances — fury and frustration at Italy’s political establishment for failing to act.
One candidate out stoking that rage is Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigrant League party (formerly the Northern League), who last week toured the northern industrial plains which were once the bastion of the Italian left, but where Salvini now sees a chance to make inroads.
“We need more jobs and fewer illegal immigrants,” he tells a crowd in Traversetolo, a small town. “Give me six months and I will clean house in Italy,” he adds, flirting with the imagery of fascism. “When the Lega runs Italy, then Italians will come first — jobs will go first to Italians, houses will go first to Italians.”
It is a message that polls suggest is resonating, with surveys before the March 4 vote showing the League in shouting distance of becoming the largest party in the right-wing coalition nominally headed by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
If the League did beat Forza, and the parties of the Right collected enough of the vote (about 43 per
cent) to form a government, then by convention Salvini would have claim to the premiership — a job he covets openly.
His message is straight from the European populist playbook — anti-immigrant, anti-Brussels, anti-Muslim and anti-establishment, attacking Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister who heads Italy’s shrinking centre-left Democratic Party (PD) — but it is delivered with a smile.
“People want more jobs, less taxes, less out-of-control immigration, and that’s what we’re talking about while the other parties are talking about fascism and racism,” he said.
Four years ago,only four per cent of Italians put immigration at the top of their electoral concerns; today that figure is over 33 per cent, according to surveys. The
issue is never far from the news, as last month when an Italian woman was found dismembered in a suitcase and several Nigerian immigrants were arrested for the crime. A former Lega supporter then shot and injured six migrants in apparent retaliation.
“Nigerian pushers like that one who hacked an Italian girl into pieces are going to be sent home with a kick up the ass,” Salvini tells a crowd in the pretty, pink central piazza of Sassuolo, in the hills above Parma and Bologna.
Turin’s factories are closing. On the outskirts the latest round of casualties are angrily picketing the gates of a fridge compressor factory owned by Whirlpool, which announced this month it will shut down, shifting its output to Slovakia with the loss of 497 jobs.