It’s not just immigrants that Salvini has in his crosshairs. His Lega, today in government with the Five Star Movement, has discussed closing down many of Italy’s mosques, and his ministry has announced plans for a census of Roma camp sites throughout the country. He has also set his sights on immigration lawyers, liberal journalists, and NGO volunteers, claiming that they peddle fake news and engage in humanitarian activity for profit. The attack on perceived “foreigners” also targets NGO missions as representative of foreign capital: “foreign ships with foreign money.” [...]
By 2013, the route proved so deadly that large numbers of Syrians refused to take it, preferring to wait in North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey for other routes to open. Under Matteo Renzi’s center-left government, the Italian state’s own Mare Nostrum rescue operation was axed. As the state left people to drown, humanitarian maritime missions run by NGOs tried to save them. Even so, as deaths at sea mounted during 2014 and 2015, this did not deter hundreds of thousands from daring the route: indeed, more than 150,000 made the crossing each year between 2014 and 2016. [...]
In spring 2017, Italy’s center-left government, led by Paolo Gentiloni and then-interior minister Marco Minniti, fleshed out a deal with the Serraj government in Libya to effectively arm and fund Libyan militia to seize departing migrant boats. The plan was finally implemented at the end of the summer. By the time of the march 2018 elections, there had already been a 75 percent drop in the number of migrant landings, and a campaign of racist rhetoric and violence outran the efforts of the progressive left-wing and Catholic forces, which had previously sustained rescue operations. [...]
The Salvini Plan might also be designed to break the Five Star Movement’s own coalition of support and consolidate the Lega’s power, both through ongoing local votes and any snap general election that might be called. Recent local elections have indeed seen the center-right win mayoral seats across Italy, often with 60 percent of the vote. The Five Star Movement, which came in first across the South in March’s general election, no longer seems to be polling well after allying with the Lega, whose anti-migrant rhetoric used to be matched by hatred for Southerners (it only recently dropped the name “Northern League” from its propaganda at the national level). A fresh election, likely resulting in gains for the Lega, would allow Salvini’s party greater control of state finances and satisfy the conservative capitalist interests that stand behind it, without having to give in to some of the Five Star’s (limited) demands for welfare reform. [...]
Yet the power of the extreme-right hate speech does not only draw from its radicalism or the leverage of the capitalist powers financing it. Matteo Salvini is not only a result of the Left’s failure, but ironically, the success of past revolt. The fear he stirs up is based on very real acts of resistance against the border regime. Without the mass breakthrough of 2015, in which migrants scaled and dissolved Europe’s eastern and southern borders, the new European right would not have had the basic material from which to construct its hatred and lies.
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