Last November a new protest movement spread, quite unexpectedly, across Italy. At first glance its participants seemed rather silly. The ‘sardines’, as they called themselves, occupied to overflowing Bologna’s famous Piazza Grande, bearing images and placards of the eponymous fish, a symbol which, according to the organisers was to represent togetherness, non-violence and freedom on a massive scale.
Over the next few weeks the demonstrators – mainly young, mainly from the service sector of the middle classes, high on education qualifications but low on jobs, repeated in an extraordinary fashion the Bologna feat. 90 piazzas were briefly occupied, the overall numbers involved in spontaneous protest being the greatest since the Second World War. The pre-eminent objective of the sardines was a simple one – to prevent the racist and fascist League of Matteo Salvini (running at around 33% in the national polls), from taking over the prosperous and leftist region of Emilia-Romagna in the upcoming regional elections. Their target, though, is not just the Lega, but the deeper corruptions of present-day political discourse and action, both on Right and Left. As the participants prepare for a new year of mobilisations Jamie Mackay spoke with the historian Paul Ginsborg about the history of civil society movements in Italy, and the challenges ahead.
