24.10.2013
Italy: M5S racism exposed
Confused left populism should not blind us to the natsure of Beppe Grillos party, writes Toby Abse
The last fortnight has brought the question of immigration across the Mediterranean to the forefront of Italian, and arguably European, politics, as hundreds of desperate migrants have drowned before their rickety boats reached the shores of the island of Lampedusa. It is estimated that at least 390 died in the first two weeks of October.1
This death toll is, of course, the inevitable consequence of the repressive and restrictive legislation passed by the last Berlusconi government in July 2009 and universally referred to not by its official title, but as the Bossi-Fini law after its principal authors.2 And the latest shipwrecks were by no means unique - dozens of other boats have sunk crossing the Mediterranean from the coast of north Africa to Sicily or Malta and many thousands have drowned or died of disease, hunger or thirst on such vessels over the last two decades.
While on October 12 Italian prime minister Enrico Letta finally instructed the Italian navy to take an active role in saving any migrants in danger of drowning, the Italian state’s previous record is not a good one; in the majority of cases it was a matter of failing to assist those in danger, but there have been occasions when the official desire to prevent boats carrying migrants from landing on Italian soil has led to actions that have actually increased the death toll. Nor should it be forgotten that the bizarre friendship between former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Berlusconi was in large part founded on an agreement between Italy and Libya to stop the movement of migrants across the Mediterranean, which often entailed the use of more overtly murderous tactics on the north African shore.3
Some might see an element of hypocrisy in the sudden willingness of large sections of the Italian establishment to show some concern for the wretched of the earth - those fleeing from the vicious civil war in Syria, harsh conscription in Eritrea4 or the dire poverty so prevalent elsewhere south of the Sahara. After all, governments dependent on the goodwill of Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin are unlikely to challenge the whole concept of Fortress Europe, without which such harsh measures as the Bossi-Fini law would have met with far more international opprobrium. Nonetheless the reality of the shift must be acknowledged.
In the Italian context, the vigorous response of pope Francis was crucial. This Argentinian son of Italian migrants showed far more concern for the refugees arriving at Lampedusa than his Polish or German predecessors had ever been able to muster; his very first voyage as pope in July was to Lampedusa. His reaction to the shipwreck on October 3 was immediate: “It is a disgrace.” He was as ready to see it in a wider context of the general crisis of the world economy as any Marxist: “Speaking of peace, speaking of the inhuman world economic crisis, it is a great symptom of the lack of respect for man., I cannot but recall with great sadness the numerous victims of the umpteenth tragic shipwreck that occurred today near Lampedusa.”
Rebellion
As a result the Italian government - led by a man who started his political career as a Christian Democrat and is therefore particularly susceptible to papal influence - had little choice but to call for a day of national mourning on October 4.5 On October 8 Stefano Rodotà, the maverick Partito Democratico (PD) constitutional expert and defender of civil liberties, who had been the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement- M5S ) candidate for the presidency of the republic in April, wrote an article calling for the immediate abrogation of the Bossi-Fini law.6
On October 9, two M5S senators, Maurizio Buccarella and Andrea Cioffi, used their position on the Senate Justice Commission to act on Rodotà’s heartfelt plea.7 They successfully moved an amendment in the committee to repeal article 10b of the Bossi-Fini law. The repeal, if passed into law by parliament as a whole, would turn the criminal offence of ‘clandestine immigration’ into an administrative offence under civil law. The M5S senators inserted their amendment into a draft law about punishments alternative to imprisonment for other unrelated offences - an ingenious manoeuvre that took their colleagues by surprise.
The amendment was supported by the centre-left PD, the soft-left Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL), the centrists of Mario Monti’s Scelta Civica and even the centre-right GAL, which had been part of Berlusconi’s electoral coalition in February. Only Berlusconi’s own Popolo della Libertà (PdL) and the racist-regionalist Lega Nord voted against the change in the law. The PdL response is best exemplified by the comment of Maurizio Gasparri, a Berlusconi loyalist with a notorious past as a prominent and longstanding member of first the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano and then the ‘post-fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale: “To use the immense tragedy of Lampedusa for demagogic and hurried interventions on the Italian law is a massive error.”
The day after the M5S senators put themselves in the vanguard of parliamentary anti-racism, taking the initiative out of the hands of the PD and SEL, they found themselves the object of a thunderous denunciation by Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio (the co-founder of the M5S, who taught Grillo everything he knows about the internet), on Grillo’s official blog. The duo angrily explained: “The M5S was not born to create Dr Strangeloves in parliament without control.” They continued: “If we had proposed the measure during the general election campaign, the M5S would have obtained the percentages of a telephone prefix”, inferring that almost all of their voters were not only racist, but saw immigration as the primary issue, which is hardly credible, even if a sizeable chunk of the M5S’s northern electorate may have been drawn from disillusioned supporters of the Lega Nord, known as Leghisti.8
They followed this up with an appalling piece of rightwing populism: “… substituting themselves for public opinion, for the popular will, is the common practice of the parties that want to ‘educate’ the citizens, but it is not ours.” They elaborated on this by saying changing the law would be “an invitation to migrants from Africa and the Middle East to set sail for Italy … How many illegals are we able to receive if one Italian in eight does not have money to eat?”9
In conclusion they referred to a more general procedural issue: “The amendment had not been discussed in an assembly with other M5S senators and did not form part of our programme.”10 It is worth pointing out that M5S parliamentarians have already put forward proposals in favour of extending gay rights and decriminalising soft drugs, neither of which is referred to in the 20-point election programme of the M5S used in February, so the parliamentary group is not only being reprimanded for its anti-racist initiative in calling for the repeal of the key clause of the Bossi-Fini law, but is even being told that they have no right to put forward any policy initiative whatsoever.
Subsequently Grillo and Casaleggio reacted with their habitual arrogance and intolerance towards any criticism of their racist blog posting. In particular Grillo attacked Il Fatto Quotidiano, the daily paper closest to the M5S - since the virtual collapse of its original political reference point, Italia dei Valori - because of an editorial written by its deputy editor and star journalist, Marco Travaglio, which attacked Grillo and Casaleggio over their attitude to immigration, complaining that “the two leaders of the Five Stars have lost an opportunity to keep quiet”. Grillo and Casaleggio argue that it is necessary to consult the internet on all controversial questions. As Casaleggio put it, “If the method is not respected, we become a party like the others. Without the internet, it is finished. And direct democracy vanishes.”11
It has been notable in recent months that, whenever the majority of internet opinion has criticised the M5S leaders, in particular in relation to their intransigence towards the PD, Grillo and Casaleggio have just ignored it and blamed any dissent on trolls in the pay of the PD. In reality, of course, Grillo is not just responding to either an internet consensus or even opinion poll findings on Italian attitudes to immigration. Grillo is a dyed-in-the-wool racist as is evident from a May 2011 statement, preceding his entry into national electoral politics. He was quoted in the centre-right daily Corriere della Sera on October 11 2013 as saying: “An illegal immigrant is forever … To receive somebody in your home, you must dispose of the resources to do it. To give him dignified work, to give him a bed, to organise his integration. Otherwise you must ask yourself if you are playing with dynamite and the future of your nation.” We must add that Grillo’s more recent refusal to countenance the idea of allowing the children of immigrants brought up in Italy to take up Italian citizenship demonstrates that he does not believe in integration anyway.
So far the M5S parliamentarians have not backed down. This rebellion is far more widespread than any of the previous ones against Grillo or Casaleggio by M5S senators or deputies - it involves some figures previously considered to be very ‘orthodox’ by those M5S senators which the mainstream media have seen as potential rebels. Although a handful of M5S parliamentarians have been expelled or resigned as a result of previous conflicts with Grillo over the last seven months, up until now Grillo and Casaleggio have been able to maintain party discipline, despite continual rumours about large groups of dissidents plotting a collective rebellion. That might have come to a head, had Berlusconi brought the grand coalition down in early October and Letta, or some other PD leader, attempted to form an alternative parliamentary majority based on the PD and SEL on the basis of intransigent opposition to Berlusconi.
Grillo and Casaleggio have announced that they will have a face-to-face meeting with the M5S parliamentarians in Rome within the next week. This may prove to be a turning point in the evolution of the M5S, which is currently torn between the rightist and racist populism of its founding duo and the confused left populism of some of its parliamentarians.
Notes
1. By October 16, 364 bodies had been recovered from the October 3 shipwreck - see The Guardian October 16.
2. This should serve as a powerful reminder that despite his belated and electorally unsuccessful shift to the centre after his dramatic falling out with Berlusconi, the former fascist, Gianfranco Fini, is rather less sincerely repentant than many indulgent mainstream commentators are prepared to admit.
3. This does not imply that ill-treatment of black Africans in Libya ended with the dictator’s fall; in all probability his successors’ behaviour may be worse - racist pogroms against black Africans were a very marked feature of the rebels’ behaviour during the civil war that precipitated the dictator’s demise.
4. While the disaster on October 3 involved Eritreans, the second shipwreck on October 11 was of a vessel whose passengers were mostly Syrians. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the third biggest country of provenance is Somalia, another state gripped by civil war. Between them these nations account for more than 18,000 arrivals in Italy this year.
5. Letta failed to honour his initial promise that the Italian government would hold a state funeral in Lampedusa itself for the hundreds of Eritreans who died off the coast, replacing it with a memorial ceremony in Sicily in the presence of government representatives but none of the dead. This angered Giusi Nicolini, the mayor of Lampedusa. She said: “I am extremely saddened that this commemoration, even though it is belated and for bodies which have already been buried, is not being held in Lampedusa. My community does not deserve to not be involved and to be made to fit in with a decision already taken. I have said it before: if they had told us they would be taking away the coffins, we would have arranged for these people to have, if not state funerals, at least national funerals.” See The Guardian October 18.
7. It is worth pointing out that Buccarella had been involved with the Girotondini - a leftish anti-Berlusconi protest movement largely made up of students and intellectuals such as Pancho Pardi and Paul Ginsborg - about a decade earlier.
8. It was no surprise that Bossi’s interview, conducted in the aftermath of Grillo’s blog post and published in La Repubblica (October 11), acknowledged common ground with Grillo over immigration. Lega Nord parliamentarians disrupted a debate the day after the vote to repeal the Bossi-Fini law by waving placards with racist slogans against immigrants.
9. This sentence is taken from Lizzy Davies’s translation in The Guardian (October 10).
10. My translations from a report in La Repubblica October 11.
11. Casaleggio quotations taken from La Repubblica October 13.