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IMMIGRATION

How Italy’s migrant model town Riace veered far-right

The sign reading "Riace, land of welcome" still hangs in the small town, but its dream of migrant integration is over after the far-right's "Italians first" election victory.

How Italy's migrant model town Riace veered far-right
Photo: AFP

The new mayor of the one-time “global village” in southern Italy's rural Calabria elected on May 26th with the support of Matteo Salvini's anti-migrant Lega party, Antonio Trifoli, has so far left the sign up.

“We will welcome refugees again,” he told AFP.

“But we can't have 500 to 600 asylum seekers in a town with 1,500 residents,” said the former town policeman.

Trifoli was first on the independent “Riace reborn” list, backed by the Lega, whose supporters provided many of the 41.8 percent of the 1,103 votes he won.

Until just a few years ago, the Lega was a separatist party at the other end of the country which sneeringly referred to southerners as “bumpkins” or worse.

“The problem is that we had too many migrants and we lost the spirit of openness there was initially,” said Trifoli.

“A whole economic system developed with the migrants, but without making the village dynamic again… The model destroyed itself,” he said.

Former mayor Domenico “Mimmo” Lucano encouraged migrants and refugees to come to the village to counter a gradual decline of inhabitants and workers and show how migrant integration could be done.

But now he is no longer even a member of the town council after his left-backed list lost in the elections, and he has been barred from the town.

Lucano is due in court next week to face charges including that he failed to put to tender a garbage collection contract that went to a migrant-linked cooperative.

German director Wim Wenders made a documentary in 2010 featuring the leftist mayor and Riace's refugees, but Lucano was last year placed under house arrest for allegedly setting up fake marriages to help foreign women stay in the country after their asylum applications were rejected.

The debacle came after a populist coalition formed by Salvini, the country's hardline anti-immigrant deputy prime minister who also holds the interior ministry portfolio, and Luigi Di Maio's anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) formed a government in June last year.

The shops and workshops previously occupied by migrants are now shuttered.

The village's historic streets are largely deserted, with funereal music occasionally punctuating the silence.

Colourful, multi-ethnic murals can still be seen on walls, testimony to the experiment that took place here and the hopes for migrant integration it spawned in Italy and beyond, before it failed amid alienated locals and allegations of fraud.

“Here, we need order and discipline,” said agricultural engineer Claudio Falchi, a Milan native who moved here 25 years ago.

Three years ago he became Lega leader in Riace.

“They were fighting among themselves, they didn't want the crucifix, or the creche,” Falchi said of the migrants.

“It's not racism, it's just that this is our home. We welcome them and then they make problems.”

Locals are reluctant to talk about the past or discuss the predicament of the village, which, like so many in Calabria is seeing its youth leave in search of work as the elderly slowly die off.

“People wanted things to change. After 15 years of talking only about welcoming and refugees, they got tired,” said mayor Trifoli.

“Taking in refugees gave Riace prestige around the world but its inhabitants lost interest.”

Over the years the town took in around 6,000 migrants, opened shops and workshops and even launched its own currency stamped with the heads of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King.

But that model of tolerance and inclusion has disappeared.

“Almost everyone has gone. There aren't even any more children,” said Daniel, a 37-year-old Ghanaian, in perfect Italian.

The Lega was the big winner in last month's European parliamentary elections, taking more than 34 percent of national votes.

On the southern island of Lampedusa, where many migrants arrived after making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, the Lega won more than 45 percent of votes.

READ ALSO: Italy's migrant 'hot spots' vote for anti-immigration League

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CRIME

Germany mulls expulsions to Afghanistan after knife attack

Germany said Tuesday it was considering allowing deportations to Afghanistan, after an asylum seeker from the country injured five and killed a police officer in a knife attack.

Germany mulls expulsions to Afghanistan after knife attack

Officials had been carrying out an “intensive review for several months… to allow the deportation of serious criminals and dangerous individuals to Afghanistan”, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told journalists.

“It is clear to me that people who pose a potential threat to Germany’s security must be deported quickly,” Faeser said.

“That is why we are doing everything possible to find ways to deport criminals and dangerous people to both Syria and Afghanistan,” she said.

Deportations to Afghanistan from Germany have been completely stopped since the Taliban retook power in 2021.

But a debate over resuming expulsions has resurged after a 25-year-old Afghan was accused of attacking people with a knife at an anti-Islam rally in the western city of Mannheim on Friday.

A police officer, 29, died on Sunday after being repeatedly stabbed as he tried to intervene in the attack.

Five people taking part in a rally organised by Pax Europa, a campaign group against radical Islam, were also wounded.

Friday’s brutal attack has inflamed a public debate over immigration in the run up to European elections and prompted calls to expand efforts to expel criminals.

READ ALSO: Tensions high in Mannheim after knife attack claims life of policeman

The suspect, named in the media as Sulaiman Ataee, came to Germany as a refugee in March 2013, according to reports.

Ataee, who arrived in the country with his brother at the age of only 14, was initially refused asylum but was not deported because of his age, according to German daily Bild.

Ataee subsequently went to school in Germany, and married a German woman of Turkish origin in 2019, with whom he has two children, according to the Spiegel weekly.

Per the reports, Ataee was not seen by authorities as a risk and did not appear to neighbours at his home in Heppenheim as an extremist.

Anti-terrorism prosecutors on Monday took over the investigation into the incident, as they looked to establish a motive.

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