Late last Saturday morning, 3 February, news started to come in from Macerata, a small county town in central Italy – shots had been fired from a moving black Alfa Romeo 147. On Facebook, the mayor encouraged everyone to stay indoors because “an armed man has opened fire from a car”.

A couple of days earlier in Macerata, the body, cut up in pieces, of a young woman, Pamela Mastropietro, had been found in a suitcase and a Nigerian drug-pusher, Innocent Oseghale, had been arrested for murder. Oseghale is still in prison, accused of contempt and concealing the corpse.

But to return to that Saturday: uncertainty reigned only very briefly before the first pictures began to circulate of a young man by the name of Luca Traini, picked up by the carabinieri, the Italian tricolour draped around his shoulders. There are six wounded, all immigrants. Shots had also been fired at the headquarters of the centre-left Democratic party (PD) in Macerata. Shooting at immigrants, the fascist salute, the tricolour – what more do you need to call what happened by its true name?

So why did the Italian media have such trouble defining what happened as a fascist-inspired terrorist attack? I was immediately put in mind of a tweet that Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega Nord, the xenophobic party allied to Silvio Berlusconi in the forthcoming elections, had posted two days prior to the attack, referencing the death of Pamela Mastropietro and the arrest of Oseghale: “What was this worm still doing in Italy? […] The Left has blood on its hands.”

The moral instigator of the Macerata attack was then Matteo Salvini, who for years now has been sowing hatred without a thought for the consequences of his words. But why such timidity from the media and other politicians?

“The act of a madman”; “Let’s not talk fascism”; “Keep quiet so as to avoid it being exploited.” These are some of the comments that were made – some immediate and off the cuff, but others cool and considered. Very few politicians talk about the victims of the attack because to take the side of the immigrants means losing votes. Only one small party, the Potere al popolo (Power to the people), straight after the attack visited the wounded in hospital. Wilson, Jennifer, Gideon, Mahamadou, Festus and Omar are their names, all very young people trying to make their way in Italy.

Social phantoms always emerge in moments of crisis. Hatred of the foreigner is the result of a lethal cocktail of bad politics, irresponsible information and economic crisis. Now in Italy all bearings have been completely lost and a climate of endless electoral campaigning has triggered a chain reaction that no one seems able to keep in check: the entire political campaign is focused on the subject of immigration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio – his party will contest the forthcoming elections in March. Photograph: Pacific Press/Shutterstock

Immigrants are perceived as the prime reason for the longevity of the economic crisis and even of the risk of attacks taking place. Though it should be noted that the only attack that could be considered a genuine massacre has been perpetrated by an Italian against foreigners.

But you might have read this before, certainly in Italy – it crops up in articles that end by saying: “But if Italians are afraid, there must be a reason for it.” It’s almost a waste of time providing data and stressing that immigration is not a crisis, but a phenomenon that, when managed responsibly and with foresight, we are able to control.

A waste also to note that there exists something called good practice and that there are excellent examples we could follow. It’s also pointless to comment on the falling crime rates because, someone will assert – and they will have much less trouble than I do at sounding a popular note – that if Italians feel at risk there must be a reason for it. Today, feelings – whatever they are – are more important than reality.

And then there are the voices of caution: care should be taken not to attach too much importance to a violent episode. The more I talk of migrants, the more I am accused of encouraging hatred of them. It’s a kind of back-to-front logic: how is it possible, I wonder, that if I relate what is happening in Libya in the detention centres, if I speak of the mud-slinging machine against the NGOs who are operating in the Mediterranean, I manage the opposite of what I am trying to achieve?

Even if you explain that migrants are a fundamental resource in an Italy that is demographically moribund, I hear the earnest plea: keep mum, don’t mention it, find something else to do.

The stories that are told about migrants are the result of electoral calculation and one that has emerged to fill the space that has always belonged to the Lega Nord and which the Five Star Movement (M5S) has slipped into with a new narrative, one that goes as follows: right and left no longer exist; what does exist, though, are Italians with problems and who come before everyone else.

After the attack, something happened which in Europe up to now has been unprecedented: Matteo Renzi, secretary of the PD and Luigi Di Maio, leader of the M5S, urged everyone to keep silent about the events. Why? So as not to lose the votes of the xenophobic electorate: this is their fear, the consequence of a now vacuous political system.

Does not the fact that Luca Traini, the terrorist who opened fire on unarmed individuals simply because they were Africans, and who had been a candidate for Lega Nord, tell us that Salvini’s party is putting up criminal and violent extremist candidates for election? Absolutely not – it tells us something that is valid about all the parties, and that is that there is no longer any substance to them, that they can no longer field candidates on the ground because they have now lost all contact with the real world.

Nowadays, when a politician, a journalist or an intellectual starts out with statements such as: “Whatever you think about immigration”, they must realise that they are acting irresponsibly. In a period as delicate as the one we are living through, no flippancy can be tolerated. On paper, on the small screen and on social media, each and every word should be weighed – and weighed heavily.

Roberto Saviano is the author of Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia