Commentary
Melonism had a chance to imagine a new world: It created Gotham
The right’s calling card is reaction in its purest form – indeed, pre-emptive reaction against struggles that are only just taking shape. To confront this level of repression and authoritarian drift, those struggles will sooner or later have to unite.
Approved with a confidence vote, the so-called “security” decree is now firmly grafted – horrors and all – into Italy’s legal system. It must be read as the governing right’s calling card. No wonder that the senators who defended it in Parliament looked pleased for once. This was not about slipping through yet another petty handout, or patching a sloppy decree by rubber-stamping a new one in silence, or stacking one more brick onto the already-rickety wall of anti-migrant rules. This time, Melonism had the chance to draw up an entire world of its own making.
Listening to those right-wing senators, you would think Italy’s cities are teetering on the brink of collapse from crime: pervasive insecurity, purse-snatchings and pickpocketing by women “armed” with children, riots on every street corner, shopkeepers gripped by terror, shoot-outs, legions of migrants landing with crime as their sole aim, homes expropriated, the elderly people robbed, evicted, swindled too.
And there’s no point jailing the culprits, in their view, when prisons are “like hotels” and bleeding-heart judges turn everyone loose right away. The police, in short, have “their hands tied” – just like in the 1970s cop thrillers (which, incidentally, dealt with state-committed abuses, an old habit of the security services that this decree now legalizes). The right is not only untying those hands, but equipping them with a second firearm that officers can take home during off-duty hours – and hopefully not pull out in a fit of road rage on the way.
Out in the real country, far from Parliament, where the right is free to draw up its own world and imposes it with a confidence vote, the numbers of thefts and robberies are essentially flat, murders have fallen, the prisons are bursting at the seams, and businesses need migrant workers and can’t find enough of them.
But manufacturing emergencies is not – or not only – a mere paranoid knee-jerk reaction. It is, above all, a deliberate method of governance. We saw the decree’s groundwork laid in all those afternoon TV reports: breathless segments depicting a “national Gotham City” to justify the coming clampdown. The repressive turn now formalized will not hit petty criminals, who never cared about stiffer penalties (while serious organized crime carries on, undisturbed and often tacitly condoned). It will hit the poor, the marginalized, and the social protests and labor struggles that disturb the status quo. It’s no coincidence that the new rules resemble a set of straitjackets tailored for precarious workers, climate activists and every movement that dares to raise its voice.
The right’s calling card is reaction in its purest form – indeed, pre-emptive reaction against struggles that are only just taking shape. To confront this level of repression and authoritarian drift, those struggles will sooner or later have to unite.
A glimmer of hope came from Saturday’s demonstration, whose chief achievement was to prove that people can openly challenge the law’s illogic and its blatant unconstitutionality. Other oversight powers – the judiciary and the Constitutional Court – will have to step in, after the right breezed past what were supposed to be the safeguards of the President’s Office and Parliament.
The opposition would be wise not to lose focus now that the legislative process is over. A bit of theatrics on the Chamber floor are all well and good, but they must be followed by soul-searching over their own share of responsibility in turning “security” into a golden calf. And they have one easy promise to make: when they win the elections, their first act will be to scrap this decree in its entirety.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/gotham-city-e-la-reazione-preventiva on 2025-06-05