Meet Italy’s answer to Boris
Gianni Alemanno, Rome’s new right-wing mayor, tells John Laughland that it’s time for the Eternal City to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ approach
The city’s finances are not the only mess Alemanno is trying to clear up. His next priority are the vast gypsy encampments which have sprung up all over Rome and other parts of Italy since the early 1990s, and whose numbers have swollen since the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007. There are about 85 such camps in the capital of which only 11 are legal, with some 20,000 inhabitants living in squalor (including vast numbers of children), often without electricity or running water. The unemployment rate is 90 per cent and when the children are not out begging, they are out stealing. Organised crime also prospers; burglary, car theft and gang murders in Rome have exploded.
Although Alemanno insists that the problem of the camps is one of vagrancy rather than race — he regularly emphasises the need for legality, and constantly rebuts accusations of discrimination — he also accepts that the Italian Right is ‘without complexes’. ‘For us, immigration and crime are two separate questions. But now there is a temporary overlap between the two. Out of the 40,000 crimes committed in Rome every year, 20,000 are committed by non-Italians. The Left has always completely denied any link. The problem in Italy is that for too long there has been an absolute lack of any immigration policy at all.’
To deal with the problem, the Berlusconi government announced that it will compile a register of the camps’ inhabitants, which started on 17 July. Perhaps because they sense the coming sweep of a new broom, I did notice that the various bums who for years used to beg on the Piazza Trilussa and the Ponte Sisto seem to have shimmied off. But although it is a requirement in nearly every EU state that all citizens register their residence with the police, and although this register is being conducted in co-operation with the Red Cross, the Left has gone wild with fury, attacking it as racist. The European Parliament even voted a resolution condemning it as incompatible with European values, which provoked a vigorous response from several Italian ministers, whose Euroscepticism can make Bill Cash look like Kenneth Clarke.
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Wilhelm
July 25th, 2008 9:37amlovely piece
carole chapman
July 25th, 2008 1:24pmHow refreshing to read a piece about Italy telling it like it is and without the mewling PC whinges of the majority of the UK press. I live in Italy and the lack of PC is so refreshing, as is the lack of CCTV, speed cameras, intrusive council busybodies. Italy may have its problems but it could teach New Labour a thing or three.
Richard Bates
July 27th, 2008 6:46pmAlemanno is actually one of the brighter members of the right-wing establishment, and one of the few ministers in the previous Berlusconi government to be even half-way competent. But your correspondent is being less than candid in describing him simply as the former head of the youth wing of the post-fascist party. I think you'll find he has a much more colourful past than that, and if the left tends to demonise its opponents, it has to be said that their opponents go out of their way to give them an easy job of it. If the same stigma does not attach to Gianfranco Fini that is mainly because of the unremitting blandness and banality of everything he says.
But there is nothing remotely normal about the political scene of a country with a Prime Minister whose past (and present) is even more questionable, and who would simply be unelectable anywhere else.
And can your correspondent really mean it when he says: "there is a liberty in Italian political discourse which is refreshing after the stifling political correctness of Britain"? To find equivalents in mainstream Brtish political life for many of the statements made by leading members of the Northern League, one would have to go back to the 1963 Smethwick by-election - though along with the relentless obscenities and insults addressed to the Roma, to Africans and foreigners generally, there is also the occasional variant of good old-fashioned anti-Semitism as well - which, in its way, is, I suppose, part of the European mainstream.
Chris Andersen
July 28th, 2008 5:27amWonderful article. Too bad such forthright reportage is so rare, and I have to access a U.K. publication to find it. The U.S. press, both right and left, are incapable of such a simple piece and must, instead, put an American slant on everything they write, appropriate or not.