A fortnight tomorrow, Italians will go to the polls in an election that was ill-tempered enough before the horror show in Macerata.



The EU’s failed migration policies and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of African migrants on the Italian coast had already made immigration one of the two big issues in the election on March 4. The other is Italy’s dismal economy, currently buried under £2 trillion of national debt. Macerata has raised the stakes even higher.



Most Italians I meet blame their politicians for ineptitude and the EU for abandoning them. They are in a vengeful mood.... Berlusconi’s coalition partners are the hard-Right League or ‘Lega’ (previously the breakaway Northern League) and the even-more-Right-wing neo-fascist Brothers of Italy. Despite the name, they are led by a woman and their candidates include Rachele Mussolini, granddaughter of the wartime dictator.



As for the Left, things are looking bleak. Italy’s centre-Left Democratic Party (PD) is the only one sharing the vision of ever-closer European union peddled by France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel. But Italians want less Europe, not more.



Even diehard supporters of the PD admit this is not their year. Their great hope, the shiny Macron-style Matteo Renzi, was prime minister for five minutes, but destroyed his career with a botched referendum on the constitution in 2016 and had to be replaced by a caretaker PM.



Once the country has voted a fortnight hence, Italy seems likely to join the EU’s anti-Brussels nationalist awkward squad of Poland, Austria, Hungary and others.



There is, though, little appetite for a Brexit-style break with Europe — there will be no ‘Quitaly’ just yet — largely because the country could not stand the economic shock.



But Brussels is viewed with utter contempt. And politicians across the board are now capitalising on the Macerata situation. Berlusconi himself has warned of a ‘social bomb’ as a result and says that just 5 per cent of Italy’s 600,000 migrants are legitimate refugees who should be allowed to stay.



The newspaper La Repubblica has carried a pre-Macerata opinion poll showing that 40 per cent of Italians ‘strongly or very strongly’ agree that migrants represent ‘a danger to public order and personal safety’.



Here in Macerata, 150 miles north of Rome, I find zero appetite for greater European integration — and this is a Left-wing university town.



Historically, it would have been firmly behind the liberal consensus.



Not any more. Even the liberals talk like Ukip, while those on the Right talk of mass deportations.

Regime change is coming soon to Italy.I'm definitely pro-Lega and pro-Salvini. Berlusconi is getting all the attention, of course, but Salvini is the much more serious player and he's going to be around a lot longer than Silvio. I don't think Italy is psychologically ready to shed the burden of the EU yet, but people dislike it a LOT more than they did back when it was Euros flooding into Italy instead of Africans.But again, notice the difference between the strength of the reaction and the numbers involved. The European nations will defend themselves before it is too late and they will survive.

Labels: EU, immigration