The young African couple joined the checkout line in a small supermarket in a town in Campania, Italy’s southwest region famous for a dramatic coastline, ancient ruins, Naples and the Camorra — one of Italy’s top crime mobs. The couple were clutching some basic food items, including milk, bottled water and pasta, and a small plastic bag bulging with change — mostly 1- and 5-cent coins, the proceeds of begging.

Already eyed disdainfully by Italian shoppers, they were met with exasperation and rejection by store clerks when they proffered their money bag to pay. The disdain of the shoppers turned to rage, with shouted calls for the Africans to stop holding up the line and get out.

The Ghanian husband and wife, both in their twenties, one university-educated, who arrived in Italy last year after a hazardous sea crossing from Libya, didn’t leave empty-handed — a fellow shopper, a north European, stepped forward to pay in more manageable money, earning grumbles from others for encouraging the Africans.

Much of the media coverage by metropolitan-based reporters of Italy’s increasingly bad-tempered parliamentary elections has focused on Rome and the northern cities of Milan, Turin and Venice, where the big flag-waving rallies of the 21 competing parties in a sprawling, messy election are taking place.

But a third of Italians don’t live in the big cities or their suburbs, and the voters of small-town and rural Italy will be critical in shaping Sunday’s results.

The minor episode in the coastal supermarket illustrates a deep, seething anti-migrant anger in Campania, one on display daily in incidents large and small, that risks undercutting the vote of Italy’s ruling Democratic Party (PD) in a region where it runs also the regional government.

Campania’s small towns and villages have become ground-zeros when it comes to a migration crisis that has roiled Italian politics, strained the country’s resources and tried the patience — and compassion — of Italians. Locals have become infuriated by the record influx of mainly economic migrants from sub-Saharan African countries.

“Yes, it has become more difficult in recent months,” said Manu, who shrugged off the disdain he encountered when trying to pay for his groceries with a pile of small coins. He says he and his wife made the perilous journey to Italy with the aim of securing jobs somewhere in Europe and improving their lives.

“Italian hearts have hardened,” he said.

Anti-migrant campaigning

Locals acknowledge their attitude indeed has changed because of the sheer numbers of migrants on their streets and their sense of being invaded, as well as the highly public, desperate and mostly Nigerian street prostitution trade on the wind-swept, trash-strewn roads running along the coast north of Naples.

Like much of Italy, anti-migrant fervor has been shaping campaigning in Campania, where the maverick, anti-establishment Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) is co-opting the votes of the PD by feeding off local anger toward asylum-seekers and blaming the government of Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni for failing to come to grips with the influx and of finding ways to halt it.

It is a region M5S leader Luigi Di Maio, a suave, boyishly telegenic 31-year-old, knows well, having been born and raised in Pomigliano d’Arco, a small municipality on the outskirts of Naples just north of Mount Vesuvius.

Di Maio also knows what arguments to make when trying to counter the campaigning of challenger Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition made up of the 81-year-old former prime minister’s Forza Italia and three other parties, including Matteo Salvini’s far-right populist Lega, which has called for the mass clean-out of migrants. Di Maio is as uncompromising about migrants but is less specific about what his party will do about them.

The governing PD desperately needs to hang on in the south, especially in the 15 electoral districts of Campania, to avoid a crushing, historic national defeat. PD strategists are hoping the recognizable names of the party’s parliamentary candidates — long-serving politicians well known to the communities — will be enough to stave off electoral humiliation.

But long service brings dangerous baggage.

Mafia mob

Campania is home to one of Italy’s most powerful Mafia mobs, the Camorra, which is enmeshed in the politics of the region. The public image is of a mob that makes most of its money from drugs and prostitution.

But anti-Mafia prosecutors say that while narcotics and sex trafficking are both highly important revenue streams for the Camorra, the big money is made in public-sector fraud, construction contracts and waste management. The longer the public service, the more likely a politician has had to make deals with the mobsters, public prosecutors tell VOA.

As the election has unfolded in Campania, politically damaging leaks about police probes into PD politicians have multiplied — the most embarrassing for the party involving an investigation into the son of regional Governor Vincenzo De Luca. The governor claims the whole thing is a setup. Nonetheless, in such a tight election the news of the police probe could have a major impact.

“Campania is the Ohio of Italy,” said Paolo Russo, a center-right politician. He argues the greatest risk for Berlusconi and his electoral alliance, which has been pushing a plan for major tax cuts, is that the PD vote collapses to well below 20 percent, which he believes could benefit M5S and ensure the maverick upstart emerges from the voting as the largest single parliamentary party, preventing the right-wing electoral alliance led by Forza Italia from securing an overall parliamentary majority.

In short, Berlusconi’s alliance needs the PD to do poorly, but not too poorly. A few hundred votes either way in Campania could make all the difference nationally.

And such a tight race raises the question of the Camorra. Vote-buying, regardless of party affiliation, is a habitual practice in Campania, prompting Italy’s interior minister, Marco Minniti, to question the outsize dangers that poses.

“There is a concrete risk of the Mafias disrupting electors’ free vote,” Minniti said last week as he presented an annual report to the Anti-Mafia Commission in Rome. “The Mafias are able to shape institutions and politics.”
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Leaders from Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia have criticized the presence of Russian troops in their countries saying they are a destabilizing presence in the three ex-Soviet republics.

The parliamentary speakers from the three countries issued a joint statement Friday saying they were “profoundly concerned about Russian troops” in Moldova “and Russian occupation and other forms of military intervention,” in parts of Georgia and Ukraine.

The statement at the end of a one-day security conference in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, also expressed displeasure at “coordinated foreign support for separatist movements,” and social media “operations” to discredit their pro-European governments.

It said the governments should enhance their capability to counter hybrid attacks and called on the European Union and U.S. to support them.
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Italians are preparing to cast their ballots on Sunday in a general election observers say has a highly unpredictable outcome. In a country where frustrations are running high over unprecedented levels of migrant arrivals, anti-establishment parties are thriving. A large number of Italians are still undecided over how they will vote and this time they will be casting their ballots with a new electoral system many do not even understand.

One major issue has dominated the Italian electoral campaign: immigration. The debate ahead of Sunday’s elections, the first national vote since 2013, has highlighted growing racial tensions. More than 600,000 people have arrived in this country from North Africa in the past five years and there has been growing discontent among the population over how the government has been dealing with the migrant emergency.

Right-wing parties, including the League and its leader Matteo Salvini, have advocated mass expulsions and this has led to concerns among the migrants that have made it to Italy, some facing horrific hardships along the way. Mohammed Tijawi, a 17-year-old from Ghana, is terrified that he may have to go back to a land that has nothing to offer him. “They are saying that after the election they will take us back to our country, so we are begging the Italian government to help us,” he said.

The horrific killing and dismemberment of an Italian woman at the hands of Nigerians in the town of Macerata last month has the African community in Italy extremely concerned with what will occur next.

Alfie Nze, a Nigerian film-maker who has lived in Milan for many years, says the incident has spread a sense of collective guilt among migrants.

“The foreigner community, especially the Africans that I know of, you have this feeling like you’re hoping from day to day that nothing, no crime is committed in Italy in this period by an African,” he said.

Nze believes there is a growing sense of paranoia among Italians, fed by a political class that is using the immigration issue as a useful distraction. Italians, he says, are focusing on the number of migrant arrivals instead of the real problems that need urgent attention in this country, like the lack of jobs for young people and an economy that has shown some signs of recovery, but very slowly. Nze adds that never has he felt this unsafe as a black man in Italy.

“You really have the feeling that here you have to watch your back, while you move [through] the streets of Italy today and sometimes personally I avoid to go to events where I know I have to come home at night.  I’m alone, you know, and that has never happened in over 20 years of living in Italy.”

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is banned from running for office, has emerged as an unlikely kingmaker showing a united front of his Forza Italia party with the League and the nationalist Brothers of Italy party. Berlusconi recently said that undocumented migrants in Italy are all “ready to commit crimes,” creating a “social bomb about to explode.”

Anne Robichaud is an American tour guide, married to an Italian, who has lived in the central region of Umbria for 40 years. She says across the country Italians feel there is no positive aspect that comes with the wave of foreigners arriving in search of a better life.

“There’s this aura that they’re coming in, they’re taking our jobs, they’re dealing with drugs, they’re a threat to the Italians.”

She says the Italian situation is not dissimilar to what has been happening in the United States with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and the so-called “Dreamers,” hundreds of thousands of now grown up children who had been brought into the U.S.  by undocumented parents.

“Salvini, the same thing. He’s almost a repetition of America First, his cry now is Italia first,” said Robichaud, citing President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.

Legitimate concerns have existed for some time in Italy around mismanagement, corruption, and inadequate integration measures. In addition, the failure of other European Union countries to share responsibility with Italy for those arriving has also fueled anti-European sentiment in the run-up to the vote. Observers say that with the existing political fragmentation, the most likely outcome is that no coherent parliamentary majority will exist after March 4, paving the way to a provisional government and an all too common scenario of instability in Italy.

 
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