The War on Immigrants

The riot police in full metal gear kept pushing the crowd back trying to get them to disperse. But every time the crowd dispersed only to reform again and attack the immigrant dormitory with stones and bats. Inside social workers barricaded themselves all night, manning barred doors and first floor windows, while refugees, many of them unaccompanied minors, huddled in fear in their rooms.

A scene from a movie? Children of Men? Or a dystopian novel on like Ink? No. This scene was all too real and happened last week at a refugee relocation center, a "welcome" center in Italian, on the outskirts of Rome. Tor Sapienza, the neighborhood is called, Tower of Knowledge.

Abandoned and decaying buildings dot the periphery of Rome.

The battle raged for three nights, and was followed by a major demonstration in which locals pelted the mayor of Rome with insults and demanded the closing of the center. Authorities decided to move the children to another facility, in another blighted neighborhood, Infernetto, or Little Hell, for their own protection. But this prompted a similar violent outburst in that neighborhood as well, and the frightened kids were bused back to Tor Sapienza.

At first, the Italian press depicted the violence as a spasm of racism. And, there is plenty of racism to go around -- from the demonstrators' descriptions, to the press, of black people as animals; to the targeting of all brown and black people for abuse and retaliation; to the chanting of the racist mantra that Italy is for the Italians, meaning whites only.

A Rom (Gypsy) camp in the outskirts of Rome.

But soon, the public discussion took a different turn, that of analyzing the incident as a war of poor against poor. A second set of neighborhood voices tried to tone down the racialist tones and emphasize that Italy, and the Italian State, has failed them. The pointed to rising crime in the neighborhood, the lack of public transport, the decaying infrastructure, the garbage that never gets picked up by the city... Locals complained that, in addition to the refugee dormitory, there was a Rom (ie Gypsy) camp nearby, which adds to the density of displaced, jobless, men floating through the area.

After three days of riots, and a couple of headlines noting his absence, the Mayor of Rome, Mayor Clown people are calling him,  finally visited the neighborhood to met with the angry locals. He immediately caved to demands to close the center to all except women and children. Prompting anger from both pro-immigration groups who want the center's work to be validated and protected and locals who want it shut completely.

Mayor Clown blamed the Government, that is, the Ministry of Justice which runs immigration policy. The Minister of Justice called Mayor Clown a ... well, clown, and also blamed the European Union for its inflexible immigration and refugee policies.

The right has doubled down on it's National Front-like strategy of riding the anti-immigrant wave to votes in the next election. The Left is torn between defending the migrants and rending their garments over the loss of working class (white) support.

But, in my opinion, to dismiss this violent spasm as a poor person's movement ("war between poor and poor") or a protest against the failure of the Italian State, or a popular rejection of immigration ("the illegal invasion" the right calls it), is to miss it's essence.  This is, I believe, a fundamental battle over the shape of Italian society and it's future. And I will spend the next few blog posts, teasing my ideas out.

Italian Politics Take a "Game of Thrones" Turn

Italy gained a new government this past weekend, and did so with all the intrigue and drama of "Game of Thrones" (minus the bloodshed and the chain mail armor, but not the sex).

Matteo Renzi has used is position as Mayor of Florence
to showcase a problem-solving, ideology-lite approach.

The new Prime Minister is Matteo Renzi, the ambitious 37 year-old mayor of Florence, who has made a career by running against the leadership of his own center-left political party, the PD. In this, Renzi has been absolutely brilliant. He recognized, much like Berlusconi before him, that the old guard that ruled the PD were not only out of touch with Italian voters, but also unrepentant, even proud, of that fact. He pushed for internal party primaries to determine it's leadership and, though he lost, did well enough to go from relative nobody to political star. And when the old guard's candidate ran a disastrous campaign, squandering a once-in-a-lifetime sized lead to cross the wire essentially tied with a discredited Berlusconi and comedian-turned-political-gadfly Beppe Grillo, Renzi was the only figure left standing in the wreck of the left.

Well, not the only one. One of the princes of the PD, Enrico Letta, was able to put together a deal with Berlusconi to form a coalition government, one that joined center-left and center-right, representing two-thirds of the electorate. In theory, this would give Letta a broad mandate to govern; in practice, all the government's energy was spent, it seemed, holding itself together. It's biggest achievement was to survive an attempt by Berlusconi to tumble the house of cards and call for an early vote. Stability was Letta's byword. Not change. Not reform. Stability.

This might have worked, if Italy were not going through the biggest economic crisis in its history. And, if Matteo Renzi were less ambitious. While Letta fiddled, Renzi took control of the shattered PD. He handily beat the candidate of the old left, to become party president and, soon after, started turning up the pressure on Letta to do something.  But, of course, as all could plainly see, Letta had no space to maneuver. Like a junkyard car, his awkward coalition of enemies could only hold together at rest, in the absence of sudden moves.

Renzi had always vowed that he would not become Prime Minister without winning a national election. (This is why enemies within in his own party have blocked an electoral law from passing, so there can be no new elections to win.) He also promised to "help" his "friend" Letta but, as Letta slowly sank in public opinion, with European elections looming, Renzi, perhaps sensing that he was caught in a trap, engineered a palace coup, replacing Letta's unelected government with his own posse.

Mired in a deep legitimacy crisis, Italy's
political class fear that the bells toll for them.

Renzi'a new cabinet is young, most of the ministers are under 40. A full half of the ministers are women. Both are revolutionary developments in a country heretofore dominated by old men. The media, both left and right, responded with horror and sexism and disdain. Talking heads commented and criticized the clothes the new women ministers wore to be sworn in...too bright, too tight, too too...  None of the ministers was a heavyweight, pundits sniffed.  And Renzi's inaugural speech to congress, left pundits and pols aghast. It was actually directed at the Italian people and not at the parliamentarians and journalists, the horror, the horror.

The Italian political elite's rejection of Renzi, and this includes the big left and right newspapers, has much to do with their mistrust of popularity and elections.  For the Left, elections are what they lose because the Italian voters are befuddled by too much TV and too much soccer.  Each of the major figures of the PD, each a grey party apparatchik with no aptitude or respect for modern electoral politics, has been defeated by Berlusconi in an election. Each of them, instead of retiring to the Italian equivalent of Kansas (Emila Romagna?), has hung-on to their political retainers and chunk of political turf. And they spin webs and scheme their return while ostensibly selecting the next center-left champion to serve as Berlusconi fodder. That is, until all this primary nonsense spoiled the party.

One the right, there is the fear that there are no conservative voters in Italy, only Berlusconi voters. The former premier looms over everything, consuming all the oxygen in the room. Because he is a convicted felon, guilty of tax fraud, and also of paying for sex with a minor, and perhaps soon of bribing a Senator, Berlusconi cannot run for office. But he seem determined to not let anyone else run in his stead. The center-right is his soccer ball, as it were, and no one else is allowed to score.

So, Renzi makes everyone nervous. He is too ambitious, moves too fast, is too young and too popular. He represents a threat to the usual game of thrones. Or he did, at least, before he assumed power. Now that he is Prime Minister, he has to do what Letta could not: Act.

Much like bayonets, one can do anything with power except sit on it.