In Italy, Giorgia Meloni Is Hardening Her Calls for Order

There’s a story doing the rounds. A woman is sitting in a bar in tourist-filled Turin; you can imagine the glass panes looking out onto the square, the little tables for spritzes and olives. Kids and chitchat. Then, out of nowhere, everyone starts coughing and wheezing; she feels a burning sensation in her eyes. The air is filled with white fumes, tear gas engulfing the little tables. Everyone rushes inside, they lock themselves in. Only afterward do they spy, through the fumes, a few hooded protesters running towards the piazza. Only afterward — when they can breathe more easily and slip into the side streets to make their way home — are the squares and streets fully taken over by skirmishes and barricades.

The great Italian critical theorist Furio Jesi, thinking of his native Turin, wrote in 1969 that “you can love a city, and recognize its houses and its street in your deepest and dearest memories: but it’s only in the moment of revolt that you feel like the city is truly yours.” Revolts, Jesi argued, offer up strangely telling moments of symbolism. In the story above, the tear gas arrives before the protests. It smothers the emblematic scene of Italy’s commercial place in the world — its food and monuments, the great Italian hope. The image is engulfed by clouds of authoritarianism. The protesters arrive afterward, few and scattered, but the damage precedes them.

The protests that have rocked northern Italy over the past two weeks represent the outcome of years of repression and criminalization by the political and media classes. On the one hand, they take inspiration from a remarkably international moment. R., an activist from Cantiere — one of Milan’s historic social centers — tells me that young people of North African descent in Milan’s suburbs look to their French equivalents like their big brothers, with their expansive culture of hip-hop, film, and militancy. And similarly, she notes, throughout the street protests you could see not only the ubiquitous Palestinian flags, but also Moroccan and Albanian ones, symbols of other cousins in other streets but in the same struggle. On the other hand, interviews with kids involved in the clashes and protests in Milan and elsewhere underscore the desperation of Italy’s economic conditions: families that simply cannot get by on poverty wages. It is entirely normal in Italy for a month’s salary to be less than €1,000, barely covering rent and bills. Add to this the rising costs of food and gas, and it is surprising that the protests didn’t break out sooner.

While the windows of high-end shops caved in across the city centers in the north, supermarket shelves have been going empty across the south. Motorways and ports have been blocked by thousands of truckers striking against rising fuel costs — with the result that basic produce hasn’t been getting from farm to table. The self-employed truckers have found wide public support, M., an activist from Porco Rosso, a left-wing community center in Palermo, tells me. The social centers and grassroots trade unionists have been coming out to support, but also small business owners from the tourism industry as well as from across the agricultural sector. No fuel, no food and supplies, no business. Less economic miracle than economic mirage.

Making Crimes Doesn’t Pay

The government’s principle reaction to the protests has been to criminalize them. A few days after the aperitivi tables went flying in Turin, Giorgia Meloni announced that she would be pushing through a new law removing legal protections for young people, and establishing harsher sentencing. At the same time, thousands of truckers have been identified by police and hundreds served with fines for blocking the road. Searching for a scapegoat to offer up to the right-wing electorate, decolonial activist Youssef Siher was arrested on “terrorism” charges so fabricated that the courts immediately ordered his release. Giving short shrift to the separation of executive and judicial branches, Meloni attacked the judge’s decision as “shameful,” an affront to the police’s hard work.

Responding to protest with new criminal measures, mass arrests, and undermining the courts are standard elements in the repertoire of any right-wing government, not least in Italy. But these tactics have become a leitmotif of Meloni’s stint as prime minister in particular, for reasons that can be explained through a brief look back over the past five years of Italian politics.

Back in 2021, in the wake of the economic crash and burn of the plague biennial, the European Union once more installed a technocratic government to manage the billions in fiscal stimulus that was to be invested in the country’s economy. Capitalist powers were determined that the cash was not going to be wasted on handouts and kickbacks. Nearly all the main parties, including the hitherto ruling Democratic/Five Star alliance, backed Mario Draghi’s broad coalition, lining up behind the promise of a financial miracle. It was a disastrous political strategy. Only two parties stood out of line, Nicola Fratoianni’s Sinistra Italia (center left) and Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (far right). Casting itself as the underdog and riding a wave of racist anti-immigrant hatred, Meloni’s party picked up enough votes to become the largest single party.

Fast forward to 2026. The EU’s post-COVID stimulus money, predictably squandered in half-baked projects and through a chronic lack of civil service staffing, was directed to Italy more than any other country but failed to save it from stagnation. The result is not only that gas prices are soaring, but that the Italian state lacks the funds, and the will, to dig the working classes out of the hole it has plunged them into. Lacking the economic clout or courage to introduce policies that respond to grievances expressed across every part of society, the Meloni government has consistently turned to boasting about new laws to criminalize dissent.

The sheer range of activities and people targeted by the government through new laws and decrees over just four years is truly astounding. Ravers, anarchists, people smugglers, youth gangs, families employing surrogates, environmentalists, squatters, anti-Zionists, protesters in prisons, protesters in detention centers, the parents of protesters — and, of course, street protesters in general — have all been targets for new legislation threatening administrative fines or harshened prison sentences. To this growing list of subversives we can also add a whole series of criminal proceedings and investigations that have effectively been spearheaded by the government, against sea rescue missions, striking trade unionists, the Palestine solidarity movement, and, most recently, doctors supporting patients threatened with forced deportation.

The vast majority of these laws and investigations have not actually led to social activists and other rebels being given longer sentences or thrown in prison at a greater rate. This is largely thanks to the relative independence of the Italian courts (along with constant work by lawyers’ networks and solidarity movements), that have challenged these laws at every turn, often leading to pernicious reforms being blocked by judges. The government’s response has been to support a smear campaign against the “red robes” — i.e., left-leaning judges — culminating in March’s government-driven referendum to reform the judiciary. This led to the first real chink in Meloni’s public image, however: the reforms were voted down.

Despite the failure of the strategy on any practical level, the government has little to lean on by now except for such threats and rhetorical attacks. It came as little surprise, then, that the main response to the riots in the north and the strikes in the south was a wave of arrests (including schoolchildren arrested at the school gates), high-profile investigations, resurrection of the old boogeyman of “organized crime,” and the announcement of yet another security law.

Announcing the new law on TV, Meloni focused on the petty looting. “I want to be clear: no political ideal, no opposition to the government, justifies destroying a shop to make off with the goods. Behind that window there’s a family who has made lifelong sacrifices, workers who risk losing their jobs, citizens who have the right to experience their own city without fear.” But you can look through a window from two sides. From one side you see the commodities; from the other you look out to the street, where there are indeed workers, families and citizens — the very same people who form that grand litany of subjects that the government has threatened and bullied over the last four years. People who, in a moment of revolt, perhaps really did experience their city without fear.

Wartime Elections

The underlying causes of — and future prospects for — the current conflagrations cannot be separated from international politics, including Italy’s relationship to the United States.

If, in 2022, the watchwords had been the job market and the EU stimulus program, now they are the old couplet of fuel prices and global warfare. And though once a thorn in the EU’s side, it is now the Meloni government that has tried to appease European politicians and capitalist forces by backing the Israeli-US war against Iran and the genocide in Palestine — while also attempting to second guess Donald Trump’s military erraticism, whipping between support for Ukraine and Russia like a tattered flag in a storm.

The fuel dispute that has been burning all year strikes at the heart of the problems facing Italy and Italians. The US-Iraeli war on Iran has shot gas prices up by 25 percent since January. Attempting to soften the blow, the government’s response was to cut fuel taxes across the board, lowering the prices at the pump. This has been an extremely costly solution for a government desperately trying to avoid an EU infringement procedure: the fuel tax cuts cost the budget half a billion euros every month — which is why Meloni was winding the policy down, to the truckers’ ire.

That policy has now been replaced — thanks to the truckers’ wildcat strikes — by subsidies specifically aimed at supporting diesel-dependent businesses. While this may appease some of the more militant and organized logistics workers in the south, it does not provide a response to the impact of fuel costs more generally. Meloni is aware of this, and promptly flew to Kuwait to smooth out a deal on price capping fuel imports in exchange for military assistance to the US-allied petrostate.

Leveraging Italy’s geopolitical position to resolve economic problems at home has been Meloni’s horizon throughout her premiership. But, as I have argued before, the gamble hasn’t been paying off. In large part, this is because these alliances are being rejected by the electorate. Despite the opinions of the mainstream press and industrialists alike, Italians increasingly oppose arming Ukraine, and — as last year’s vast if ephemeral demonstrations proved — are generally supportive of Palestinian liberation. Much depends on the turnout for the upcoming national strikes by Italy’s small but militant grassroots Unione Sindacale di Base as well as the giant left-wing Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, both of which rightly demand higher salaries and criticize arms spending.

Still more, next year Italians will go to the polls. The Italian left has a historic opportunity: to unite around an internationalist antiwar platform and propose radical economic change that resolves the structural problems of Italian society — rather than knee-jerk policies that just shove cash into one worker’s hands while handcuffing another’s.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.