ROME (The Guardian) - The Italian government has been accused of ramping up divisive rhetoric to try to court far-right voters ahead of next year’s general election after it passed a decree aimed at capping the number of newly arrived migrants in classrooms and banning the burqa and niqab in schools.
The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who leads the far-right Brothers of Italy party, said her government had approved what she called “commonsense measures that do not divide but genuinely help to integrate”.
Writing on social media, she said the measures included: “A limit of 30% in classrooms for students who do not adequately know Italian, plus tools to learn our language and a halt to burqas and niqabs in school.”
The announcement was a toned-down version of comments she had made earlier in the week at an event organized by Brothers of Italy’s youth division. “It cannot be that in the classroom it is Italian children who feel left out because they’ve become the minority,” Meloni said as she vowed to “legally set the number of foreign students per class”.
Thursday’s decree also sets out that in cases where students show persistent problems with integrating or struggling to learn the language, their parents will be referred to social services and will have to take free literacy and Italian language classes. Parents’ failure to comply could result in fines of up to €1,000.
Rights campaigners were swift to link the measures to next year’s election, in which Meloni’s premiership is facing an unexpected challenger on the right.
“She’s creating an emergency that is not a real emergency at all,” said Daniela Ionita, of the campaign group Italians Without Citizenship, pointing out that an estimated 60% of the pupils who could be described as foreign were born in Italy but faced a myriad of hurdles when it came to accessing citizenship. “Because there are now new parties pushing from the right, I think Meloni is scared,” she said.
Ionita said the ramped-up rhetoric was an attempt by the government to mask how little it had accomplished during its time in power. “If you remove every decree linked to security or to migrants, the government’s political and economic program will fall apart, and very little concrete remains of one of the longest-serving governments of the last years in Italy,” she said.