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Analysis: Rome mayor’s anti-migrant stance signals a shift to the right for the Five Star Movement

Rome mayor Virginia Raggi has dramatically changed her tune on migration in recent weeks, in a shift to the right echoed by the Five Star Movement party's leader Beppe Grillo. The shift gives an insight into how both party politics and the migrant situation in Italy's cities have changed over the past year, writes migration researcher Nando Sigona.

Published: 22 June 2017 09:45 CEST
Analysis: Rome mayor's anti-migrant stance signals a shift to the right for the Five Star Movement
Raggi pictured earlier this week. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

The mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, believes the Italian capital is facing a new migrant emergency.

“We can’t afford new arrivals,” she argued in a letter sent to Italy’s Ministry of Interior on June 15th. “Rome’s reception capacity is on its knees,” she continued, adding that new arrivals would have “devastating social costs”. According to the Italian interior minister, Marco Minniti, new arrivals in Rome are in line with agreed quotas.

This was not Raggi’s view only six months ago, when she spoke in early December at an event hosted by the Roman Catholic Church to showcase positive responses to refugees in European cities. Raggi, who is from Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) or Five Star Movement, praised the role that cities such as Rome and Barcelona have in welcoming refugees and celebrated the contributions newcomers bring to society. In a post on her Facebook page at the time she added:

We as mayors and our cities face the effects of large immigration inflows. It is our duty to guarantee dignity, shelter and human warmth to newcomers. Negative attitudes and closure offend our human dignity.

So what has happened in the last six months? There are two main explanations for why Raggi’s view has changed. The first has to do with Italian party politics; the second is related to the situation for migrants and refugees in Italy and how it has evolved in the last few years.

READ ALSO: Five things we learnt from Italy's local elections

Political positioning

Italian commentators noted that Raggi’s letter coincided with the M5S underperforming in the first round of municipal elections in early June. Ahead of the second round on June 25th, Raggi’s anti-migrant rhetoric successfully diverted media attention away from her party’s poor electoral result.

The letter to the ministry is seen as part of a strategic alignment of the M5S towards more traditional right-wing politics. Other signals of this shift include migrants with insecure legal status being forcibly evicted from squats, tougher anti-begging measures introduced in Rome and a call by Beppe Grillo for Roma camps to be closed down.

With a potential general election looming in Italy, there are talks of a possible alliance between the far-right Northern League and the M5S against former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s ruling Democratic Party. This hypothesis seems validated by an alleged secret meeting in early June between Matteo Salvini, the Northern League figurehead, and Davide Casaleggio, a senior strategist of the M5S.

When Raggi was elected as mayor of Rome, she was hailed by her M5S colleagues as living proof that Grillo’s anti-establishment party was ready to move from the opposition into government at the national level. But the initial excitement soon vanished and she has gone from one political crisis to the next.

Grillo and his party were ready to distance themselves from her on a few separate occasions, but political opportunism intervened. However, her decisions are now closely monitored by the national party machine, which is why her public statement against migrants in Rome is seen as being sanctioned by the party.

READ ALSO: What is Italy's Five Star Movement?

Destitution among refugees and migrants

The second explanation for Raggi’s letter is the situation facing refugees and migrants in Rome. While it may be true that the numbers are in line with agreed reception plans, on the ground the presence of refugees and migrants has become more visible in the last year, particularly in train stations and public spaces.

Destitution and homelessness are on the increase as Italy struggles to provide medium- and long-term support to help newcomers integrate in Italian society. In the early years of the so-called Mediterranean migrant crisis, the country imagined itself as a transit hub for refugees and migrants on their way to central and northern Europe.

In 2014, for example, while 170,000 people arrived by sea in Italy, only 66,000 asylum applications were lodged. Over 100,000 people – mostly Syrians, Eritreans and Sudanese – travelled through Italy using Milan and Rome as temporary bases. As Simon McMahon and I have shown in our research on Europe’s responses to Mediterranean sea arrivals, during 2015, efforts were made to track the mobility of newcomers via fingerprinting and to channel more people through the Italian asylum system.

The establishment of EU Hot Spots, which screened arrivals, in four Italian ports played an important role in this process. More asylum applications were followed by higher rejection rates and an increasing number of people left destitute on the street, unable either to leave Italy or to regularise their position.

Increased visibility has had an impact on public attitudes regarding the “refugee crisis” which have become more negative in recent years. Repeated media and political attacks on NGOs running search and rescue operations at sea have further contributed to a renewed sense of uncontrolled migration in Italy.

Raggi’s solutions of capping arrivals and evicting squats is short-sighted as it doesn’t address the causes of growing destitution among refugees and migrants in Rome. These lie in myopic EU policies that have created buffer zones, particularly since 2015, at the southern borders of Europe where migrants and refugees are stacked for months, unable to rejoin their families and friends and unable to integrate in Italian society and the job market.

The ConversationSo, while Raggi’s anti-migrant stance is related to what her citizens see and perceive on the ground, it is rooted in political opportunism that ignores the real causes of the problem.

READ ALSO: The changing face of the Mediterranean migrant crisis

Nando Sigona, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity, University of Birmingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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POLITICS

Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

The year 2024 is a bumper one for elections, among them the European elections in June. Italy is of course a member of the EU - so can foreign residents vote in the elections that will almost certainly affect their daily lives?

Published: 3 May 2024 15:25 CEST
Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

Across Europe, people will go to the polls in early June to select their representatives in the European Parliament, with 76 seats up for grabs in Italy. 

Although European elections usually see a much lower turnout than national elections, they are still seen as important by Italian politicians.

Giorgia Meloni will stand as a candidate this year, hoping use her personal popularity to give her Brothers of Italy party a boost and build on her success in Italy to “send the left into opposition” at the European level too.

When to vote

Across Italy, polling takes place on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th June 2024.

Polling stations will be set up in the same places as for national and local elections – usually town halls, leisure centres and other public buildings.

You have to vote at the polling station for the municipality in which you are registered as a resident, which should be indicated on your electoral card.

Polling stations open at 8am and mostly close at 6pm, although some stay open later.

Unlike in presidential or local elections, there is only a single round of voting in European elections.

Who can vote? 

Italian citizens – including dual nationals – can vote in European elections, even if they don’t live in Italy. As is common for Italian domestic elections, polling booths will be set up in Italian consulates around the world to allow Italians living overseas to vote.

Non-Italian citizens who are living in Italy can only vote if they have citizenship of an EU country. So for example Irish citizens living in Italy can vote in European elections but Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. cannot.

Brits in Italy used to be able to vote before Brexit, but now cannot – even if they have the post-Brexit carta di soggiorno.

If you have previously voted in an election in Italy – either local or European – you should still be on the electoral roll.

If not, in order to vote you need to send an application more than 90 days before the election date.

How does the election work?

The system for European elections differs from most countries’ domestic polls. MEPs are elected once every five years.

Each country is given an allocation of MEPs roughly based on population size. At present there are 705 MEPs: Germany – the country in the bloc with the largest population – has the most while the smallest number belong to Malta with just six.

Italy, like most of its EU neighbours, elects its MEPs through direct proportional representation via the ‘list’ system, so that parties gain the number of MEPs equivalent to their share of the overall vote.

So, for example, if Meloni’s party won 50 percent of the vote they would get 38 out of the total of 76 Italian seats.

Exactly who gets to be an MEP is decided in advance by the parties who publish their candidate lists in priority order. So let’s say that Meloni’s party does get that 50 percent of the vote – then the people named from 1 to 38 on their list get to be MEPs, and the people lower down on the list do not, unless a candidate (for example, Meloni) declines the seat and passes it on to the next person on the list.

In the run up to the election, the parties decide on who will be their lead candidates and these people will almost certainly be elected (though Meloni would almost definitely not take up her seat as an MEP, as this would mean resigning from office in Italy).

The further down the list a name appears, the less likely that person is to be heading to parliament.

Once in parliament, parties usually seek to maximise their influence by joining one of the ‘blocks’ made up of parties from neighbouring countries that broadly share their interests and values eg centre-left, far-right, green.

The parliament alternates between Strasbourg and Brussels. 

Find out more about voting in the European elections from Italy on the European Parliament’s website or the Italian interior ministry’s website.

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