Stay Human' activists stage a protest outside the Ministry of Transport in Rome, on 11 July 2018. hristian Minelli/NurPhoto/Sipa USA/Press Association. All rights reserved.
After being by far the dominant topic of the last Italian electoral campaign, migration continues to be at the core of Italian politics. Under the coalition between the populist Five Star Movement and the racist party The League, migration has become a byword for economic and social problems and a justification for exceptional security measures. The political debate has shifted from the (misleading) claim of “rescuing refugees, fighting illegal migrants” towards an even more worrying position, one which openly pushes for keeping migrants in Libya in order to prevent them from dying. Thus, the humanitarian discourse has been fully hijacked by a politics of containment.
Migration is also at the forefront of the current scenario of struggles and protests. On 11 July dozens of citizens protested in front of the Ministry of Transports in Rome. They chained themselves to the building, wore life jackets, and held banners emblazoned with “state’s shipwrecks”. Their motto flips the standard social and political understanding of the situation – that the Mediterranean is a deadly frontier – on its head, pointing instead to the direct responsibility of state authorities for migrants deaths at sea.
