We are seeing in Italy a descent towards fascism.
Against the union of all nations!
If there’s one thing the far right seems to be good at,
it’s elevating middle-aged men who see themselves as tough guys
and love the sound of their own voices.
We’re building the wall, believe me.
Get ready to pack [your bags]!
You all laughed at me.
You’re not laughing now, are you?
In Italy, the birthplace of modern fascism,
this has led to one of the country’s most influential politicians
being accused of inciting serious violence...
Essentially hunting out African migrants.
and facing actual kidnapping charges.
What do you say to people who call you a racist?
No, we just want to live in peace.
[Decade of Hate]
My name’s Tim Hume, and I cover the far right in Europe.
I've reported from Italy,
where a populist politician’s scaremongering over immigration
unleashed a wave of anti-Black racism.
In February 2018,
Luca Traini, a 28-year-old Italian neo-Nazi,
went on a two-hour shooting rampage through the city of Macerata.
He deliberately targeted people of African descent,
seriously wounding six people.
Traini made a fascist salute before he was arrested.
When police searched his home,
they found a copy of Hitler’s
and other extreme-right material.
Traini reportedly told investigators
that he had decided to, “Kill them all,”
referring to African migrants.
The act was thought to be in retaliation for
the arrest of a Nigerian man last week
in connection with the murder of an Italian woman.
Traini was clearly a hate-filled extremist.
But his crimes didn't happen in a vacuum.
Many saw a clear link between the shootings
and the intensely anti-migrant climate
that had been whipped up by right-wing parties
during the ongoing election campaign.
In particular,
they pointed to the loudest of these voices,
Matteo Salvini,
a brash former talk-radio host
and the leader of the right wing populist Lega party.
The same party, as it happens,
that the Macerata gunman had previously stood for
as a local candidate.
Seeking to capitalize on growing concern in Italy
over illegal immigration from across the Mediterranean,
Salvini campaigned on a hardline “Italians First” platform.
Italians first!
He vowed to close Italy’s borders to illegal immigration
and repeatedly highlighted crimes by migrants,
including the murder that had motivated the gunman in Macerata
to carry out his rampage.
He had been on the campaign trail from 2016 to the elections in 2018,
and the climate changed.
There was a climate of hostility towards migrants,
which in 2017 became explicit—
daylight, physical aggressions, some of them armed—
against migrants and people from a migrant background.
The relationship between Italy and migrants of African origin,
so visible minorities, is a very complex one.
First of all because historically already historical fascism
was instrumentalizing a lot of this fear about the Black man.
We’ll see about that later, sir. Let’s go.
Salvini relentlessly demonized illegal immigrants,
labeling them as thieves, rapists and drug dealers.
It’s very funny to hear
in the country that invented Mafia
to hear that the migrants commit crime.
He said immigrants had turned the country into a huge refugee camp,
and vowed to deport those there illegally
in their hundreds of thousands.
Of course, all those people
who maybe before had to hide their racist prejudice
or their thinking that they don’t want foreigners,
now they can claim it.
I mean, if Mr. Salvini says it on television,
why can’t they say it in the street?
But despite warnings that
Salvini was unleashing dangerous forces in society,
his campaign worked.
In 2018,
Salvini won the influential role of interior minister.
Italy’s new interior minister
used hardline rhetoric to fire up the voters.
Now, some fear that in power,
it could lead to a return to some of the darkest days of Italian history.
He was even bold enough to brazenly flirt with
the legacy of Italy's fascist past,
specifically its most notorious strongman, Benito Mussolini.
In 2018, on the anniversary of Mussolini's birth,
he tweeted a message to his critics
that echoed one of the dictator’s famous quotes,
writing, “So many enemies, so much honor.”
No one really fears that fascism can take over
in the sense of fascism in the historical forms that we knew.
But there is a shared fear about
the hollowing out of the principles of liberal democracy.
When they call me a sovereignist and a populist, it’s a compliment.
The rabid anti-fascism that we’re seeing today, he said,
against a fascism that no longer exists
is nothing more than a deliberate distraction
on the part of the establishment.
Once in power, Salvini didn’t let up,
issuing taunting threats to migrants at huge rallies
and introducing tough new rules on migration.
During the European migration crisis,
charities started sending out rescue ships
to save migrants on unseaworthy boats from drowning in the Mediterranean.
Salvini waged a relentless campaign
to stop these boats bringing rescued migrants to Italy.
Interior Minister Matteo Salvini
says it’s a matter of national security.
NGOs are a problem and help human traffickers.
In August 2019,
a boat saved more than 100 migrants
and asked to dock in Italy in accordance with maritime law.
But Salvini refused.
Migrants, including unaccompanied children,
were trapped on board for nearly three weeks
in deteriorating conditions.
Salvini is now facing kidnapping charges
for his orders that trapped the rescued migrants
on the ship against their will,
but he’s remained completely unrepentant.
He insists that he’s not a criminal or a racist
but simply a true patriot
defending his country against illegal immigration.
He has flaunted his everyman image on social media
while all but shutting Italy’s doors to migrants.
But Black people throughout Italy say his inflammatory rhetoric
unleashed an unprecedented wave of racism and hostility towards them,
regardless of their immigration status.
There’s a climate of legitimate, open, uncontrolled,
stigmatizing name-calling of migrants and so on.
There was a climate of
a kind of legitimized public expression of hate.
I went to Milan in 2018
to speak to Black Italians about the radically changed
racial climate in their country.
Time and again, they told me that Salvini’s anti-migrant campaigning
was to blame for mainstreaming racist hate
against people of African descent.
They say it emboldened people to publicly express bigoted views,
insult, and even attack them
in a way they’d rarely experienced before.
Migrants are not dangerous.
Migrants are in danger.
And we have, every day, cases of people walking in the street
and seeing a migrant and attacking him.
In some of the attacks on Black people,
the attackers even invoked Salvini by name,
reportedly telling the victims, “This is Salvini’s country.”
Salvini also drew support
from far-right fringe groups like CasaPound,
a fascist movement whose members have attacked minorities.
We are being replaced by the mass of immigrants coming from Africa.
CasaPound and other fascist groups like Forza Nuova
were massively emboldened by Salvini’s rise to power,
as he took their brand of xenophobic politics to an entirely new level.
National pride!
And experts say that Salvini’s hardline anti-migrant rhetoric
has shifted Italian politics to the right
on matters like immigration.
All these neo-Nazi groups, neo-facist groups
started using migrants as, I would say,
electoral fuel.
The major impact of the far right in Italy
has been to radicalize the position of more mainstream parties
on issues like immigration and security.
Salvini’s popularity has built steadily over the 14 months.
Long live Italy.
Long live Salvini.
Salvini tried to exploit his party’s soaring strength in the polls
to trigger a snap election and become prime minister.
The gambit failed.
But while Salvini is no longer a powerful government minister,
his party continues to top the polls,
and he clearly covets the country’s top job as much as ever.
For Black Italians,
the fear is that as soon as he returns to campaign mode,
it will send another wave of racism surging their way.
The impact that it had on public opinions and public debates
will not be washed out.
And this is what happens very often with far-right campaigns.
They lose in practical terms,
in this case in front of the justice,
but they leave a strong cultural legacy.