Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Northern League, has accused the Democratic party of flooding Italy with immigrants to replace Italian workers, thereby transforming the nation into a giant refugee camp. He declares that immigrants bring drugs, theft, and violence.
Silvio Berlusconi and his allies have for years been encouraging hatred against foreigners, demonising them and creating a situation in which violence against them seems inevitable. Migrants were “a social time bomb ready to explode”, he warned, promising that if elected, he would deport 600,000 of Italy’s 630,000 migrants.
Berlusconi, a TV mogul who has called Islam “an inferior religion”, uses his networks to promote fear and hatred of foreigners. His Channel 4 features a weekly show called The Fifth Column that reports on crimes committed by immigrants.
One of his party's candidates, Attilio Fontana, has said that all immigrants threaten the survival of “the white race”. He even bragged in Italy’s main newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, newspaper that his proudly racist views boosted his popularity.
The Macerata attack by the gunman Luca Traini, a candidate for the Northern League in last year’s local elections, who went on a two-hour shooting rampage, who gave a fascist salute as police led him away and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was not an aberration. It is the product of an increasingly racist mainstream political discourse
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