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Dish – Sono arrivati a Piazza Europa, alle 14 del 6 marzo, i lavoratori iscritti al sindacato SUDDCobas e hanno cominciato a picchettare le loro tende. Hanno fatto come decine e decine di altre volte in front of the factories of the Prato Macrolotto, unionists and workers who, for over eight years now, have been championing the struggles of migrants, mostly Pakistani, who live and work in one of Italy's most multi-ethnic cities, where one in four residents is foreign. And where, precisely because of this, the Immigration and Reconquest Committee decided to stop after Brescia, Piacenza, and other industrial and logistical centres, in whose warehouses the languages of the whole world are spoken.
The Guardians of the Reconquest
The Committee, founded by CasaPound Italia, Rete dei Patrioti, VFS and Brescia ai Bresciani, and to which many local identity movements are adhering, has launched a popular initiative law – titled “Remigration and Reconquest” – which has already gathered 130,000 signatures in a few weeks. Per remigrazione intende “il rientro volontario e assistito degli stranieri regolarmente presenti sul territorio nazionale nei Paese di origine”. Tra le altre cose, propone di abrogare la programmazione annuale dei flussi per motivi di lavoro, “di ripristinare il riconoscimento della cittadinanza iure sanguinis senza limiti generazionali per i discendenti di cittadini italiani” (art. 16) e di istituire un Fondo per la Natalità Italiana (art.17). La proposta di legge, di matrice eugenetica, si pone fuori dai parametri costituzionali e del diritto internazionale. In particular, due to one of the general principles (Article 2), which states that for the Italian State, “an inviolable principle, there is no intrinsic right to migrate, understood as the individual's faculty to leave their nation of origin to freely settle in another.”Un’affermazione contraria non solo all’articolo 3 della Costituzione italiana, ma anche all’articolo 13 della Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families and the basic principles of’International Labour Organization.
The bill foresees combating irregular immigration and the exploitation of foreign workers: a convenient nod to cities like Prato where there are undeniably also problems linked to certain segments of the immigrant population, especially from China. Collusion, including mafia-style, between foreign and Italian businesses has been exposed several times in recent years. This is, however, a topic that plays on citizenship in economic realities, like that of Prato, where undeclared work is a structural reality, dating back long before Chinese migration. Not to mention, then, the paradox arising from the demand to combat exploited labour by further depriving those who are exploited of rights, and permanently excluding them from political rights.
In Prato, it was the association Etruria 14,most commonly known for its recurring nostalgic evocations of hierarchs and the like and defined fascist from the CGIL, to announce and promote the street initiative. In addition to them, Claudiu Stanasel, the former vice president of the municipal council and Mayoral candidate for the League in the city, close to Roberto Vannacci's faction. Stanasel, of Romanian nationality, is a perfect candidate tokenTheir presence helps to debunk the supposed xenophobic underpinnings of League policies.
La data scelta è stata provocatoriamente il 7 marzo, anniversario del rastrellamento nazifascista avvenuto nel 1944 durante il quale 133 workers in sciopero furono arrestati dalle strade e dalle fabbriche, imprigionati nel Castello dell’Imperatore in Piazza delle Carceri, per poi essere deportati nei campi di concentramento di Mauthausen ed Ebensee. Solo 18 fecero ritorno a casa.
Remigration: from return migration to deportation
In the sociology of migration, remigration (o re-migrationhas always been synonymous with Return migration, return migration, meaning returning to the country of origin after a period spent abroad, explains Giulia Marchetti, a native of Prato and researcher for the Australian Edith Cowan University.
“Although migration should fall under the broader category of mobility, explains the sociologist, in contemporary discourse has established itself a contrast between mobility (of the elite) and migration (of workers); a dichotomy that reasserts all economic and social inequalities on a national and global scale. Marchetti continues: “This political re-semantisation also concerned the term a few decades ago expatriate from expatriate) that in public discourse he has finished to indicate something different from its original meaning: no longer simply a person living abroad, but implicitly a privileged Western migrant living abroad.”
If, for example, immigrants from the privileged Western world, provided with visas and strong passports, have become expatriate, the term “remigration”has been co-opted by the European far-right. “In European political and extra-political contexts of the radical right,” Marchetti continues quoting the work of journalist Valerio Renzi, remigration today indicates a political project for the large-scale removal of migrant populations, in order to counter ethnic substitution.
Remigration & The Great Replacement Theory
Nel 2019 c’era già stato, a Prato, un tentativo da parte dell’estrema destra di manifestare in città: un corteo di Forza Nuova celebrava il centenario della costituzione dei fasci di combattimento e si proponeva, contemporaneamente, di salvare l’Italia dall’invasione dei migranti. In quella circostanza, un appello per impedirne lo svolgimento raccolse più di 15mila firme in pochi giorni; il corteo non fu autorizzato dalle forze dell’ordine, sebbene si tenne lo stesso, concludendosi in scontri; le forze antifasciste diedero vita a una manifestazione unitaria in Piazza delle Carceri partecipata da oltre 5mila persone.
Everything that has happened in these 7 years has changed the face of reality. One of the differences is that the far-right is in government today. The biggest is that xenophobic ideas, already normalised among the population, with the serious contribution of political forces that are now in opposition or profess to be left-wing, are now trying to become hegemonic.
The idea of remigration, re-semanticised by the European far-right, is in fact rooted in the Great Replacement rhetoricThe Great Replacement Theory), which provides the central framework for the global white supremacist movement: it is the theory that Western identity Bianca would be threatened by massive migratory flows of non-European populations. A concentration of pure and simple xenophobia, based on demographic anxiety, it is a vision that foments hatred and racism, promoted in the United States starting in 2017 by conservative commentators such as Tucker Carlson and endorsed by Charlie Kirk himself and relaunched by Steven Miller and Steve Bannon, the number 1 strategist of the alt-right and, among other things, a great friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
After the 2008 recession and the election of Barack Obama as President, partly thanks to Bannon's work, the Republican Party's centre of gravity shifted ever further to the right. There have been attempts to stop its advance. Former President George W. Bush himself has condemned the Great Replacement theory, calling it “a blasphemy against the American creed.”.
Despite it have motivated diversi attacchi terroristici, – fra i più gravi l’attacco alla sinagoga del 27 ottobre 2018 a Pittsburgh, con 11 morti, e la strage alla moschea e al centro islamico di Christchurch in Nuova Zelanda nel 2019, con 51 morti – non per questo ha dissuaso la nuova classe politica dal perseguirla. Già nel giugno del 2022, infatti, un sondaggio del Southern Poverty Law Center e di Tulchin Research, esaminando in che misura le convinzioni e le narrazioni estremiste che mobilitano l’estrema destra erano state assorbite, revealed that half of Republicans believed The Great Replacement Theorywhich minority and paranoid ideas had taken hold, despite having motivated massacres in the United States and elsewhere.
Words are important and the American right knows it well, which for years has made the dissemination of hate speech a central tenet of its cultural wars. Already in 2002, Frank Luntz circulated an internal communication to the Republican Party with a list of words never to use, updated in 2006 to “The 14 Words Never to Use”Among these, there were “globalisation”, “global economy”, while “free market economy” was preferred and undocumented immigrant preferred to “undocumented workers”. Nicknamed the Framing wars, the co-option of language has been a central step, for example, in the progressive criminalisation of all migrants (with or without documentation) in the United States. For this reason, the Orwellian elimination of a list of words From federal government documents (including universities), it was one of the Trump Administration's first acts to combat “woke” ideology, but also to signal the definitive shift to a new authoritarian era.
A patronal project, met with struggle
At the Remigration Summit held in May 2025 in Gallarate, in the province of Varese, the first in Europe dedicated to remigration, the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, has invited “Don’t be afraid of strong ideas.” From the United States to Italy, the “globalisation of their theories,” to use a term they hate but which suits them well, is having effects here too, among the popular legislative proposals and attempts to occupy public squares.
But if that was meant to be a blatant provocation towards the Prato residents, the city was not caught unprepared on Saturday, March 7th.
Already on 28 February, at a lively and well-attended assembly of political groups, movements and associations, Toscana Rossa representative Antonella Bundu had sounded the alarm and called for a reaction: “The policy of re-migration is as close as can be to the racial laws,” she explained, hoping for “a united front against fascism at this time.”.
Già consigliera comunale a Firenze, con la lista Toscana Rossa, Bundu è stata protagonista di un importante exploit elettorale alle ultime elezioni regionali; tuttavia, a causa di una legge elettorale specialmente penalizzante verso le candidature non di coalizione, è rimasta esclusa dal Consiglio regionale, nonostante sia stata più votata di diversi altri consiglieri eletti. Le preferenze personali che ha ricevuto avrebbero infatti di per sé superato il quorum, ma quelle alla sola lista si sono fermate un pelo prima. Toscana Rossa ha fatto ricorso al TAR, che ha respinto la loro richiesta; la lista ricorrerà ora anche al Consiglio di Stato.
Nel frattempo, Bundu si sta facendo carico di promuovere, partendo dalla Toscana e dai legami territoriali, ma con una immediata proiezione verso il territorio nazionale, un incontro di forze e personalità di taglio radicale, fortemente schierato per i diritti di lavoratori, immigrati, women, giovani, conflittuale sebbene non antagonista, aperto al mondo e alle sollecitazioni internazionali, con un occhio attento alla solidarietà verso i popoli.
It was precisely at the Florence assembly that groups like the exGKN Collective, SUDD Cobas, and others affirmed the importance of preventing the piazza of Prato from becoming the exclusive domain of the far right.
“La remigrazione è un progetto finanziato dal Capitale internazionale”, ha spiegato in quell’assise Francesca Ciuffi (SUDDCobas), in quanto riguarda in primis i principali soggetti che compongono il proletariato e la classe lavoratrice in Italia: gli immigrati e le immigrate. “È orientato a tenere in scacco la classe lavoratrice, a farla vivere con la paura delle deportazioni, a tenere la testa bassa rinunciando a tutte quelle conquiste che in questi anni si sta prendendo”, facendo riferimento alle lotte vincenti – che abbiamo raccontato su Kritica – ottenute dai lavoratori immigrati sindacalizzati nel territorio pratese.
From the afternoon of March 6th, therefore, led by SUDDCobas, activists from the April 25th Committee, the ex GKN Collective, and NUDM Prato, around a hundred people occupied the square that had, on paper, been granted to the far-right. Despite threats of eviction and pre-emptive arrests, for thirty hours “Piazza Europa Antifascista defied the new security decree,” forcing the Police Headquarters to move the demonstration by the Remigration and Reconquest Committee to another square.
The union, never having been cleared from Piazza Europa, claimed a victory for a free and anti-fascist working-class Prato.
Present and striking, despite the difficulties due to Ramadan (on the morning of the 6th there was a public meeting immediately after the’Iftar), there are many foreign workers. They are, on the other hand, the first victims of the proposed law. An attack on the multi-ethnic world of work, but above all on the solidarity between those who are exploited and those who do not accept being exploited, between those who suffer racist violence and those who fight it.
To break the solidarity between social segments
È stata frutto della stessa logica la grave intimidazione rivolta, nei giorni precedenti, ad Haji, la studentessa del Liceo Machiavelli Capponi di Firenze, parte del Collettivo K1, segnalata ai Servizi Sociali a febbraio per aver partecipato alla protesta degli operai iscritti al SUDDCobas della Stireria Alba, davanti al negozio di Patrizia Pepe in Piazza Duomo a Firenze, a novembre scorso. La ragazza, al momento dei “fatti incriminati” ancora minorenne, è stata convocata con i genitori per un colloquio (un interrogatorio, di fatto) e poi si è vista la casa ispezionata, in sua assenza. Una violazione grave del diritto in assenza di un reato. Haji è stata poi invitata a non partecipare più a manifestazioni “per evitare conseguenze più gravi”. Un’intimidazione, diretta verso una cittadina italiana di origine marocchine, una ragazza come tante che però indossa l’hijab, and who, according to the union, was chosen as she was the only second-generation student among those demonstrating that day.
The lack of a specific charge and the very opacity of the proceedings (it is not known Who (would have made the report) indicate a climate in which there is an attempt not only to discourage solidarity but to criminalise it.
In Toscana la stretta è ancora più serrata; non tanto perché si tratta di una Regione guidata dal centro sinistra, ma perché le lotte dei SUDDCobas stanno scuotendo le basi di un sistema di sfruttamento, e lo fanno riuscendo a costruire solidarietà fra operai immigrati, students di ogni provenienza geografica e cittadini comuni.
Divisions that respond to different visions
The “single bloc against fascism” called for by Bundu, however, did not materialise: there were two anti-fascist demonstrations, quite distinct from one another.
In Piazza delle Carceri, la manifestazione istituzionale con circa 400 persone, tante bandiere sindacali (specie della Cisl), ma anche un’enorme bandiera della pace. Lì sono confluiti PD, M5S, AVS, i sindacati confederali, ANPI, ANED, ARCI, assieme a Eugenio Giani, che He/She/It spoke of Tuscany as a “Region of welcome and integration”, and to the PD deputy for Agliana (PT) Marco Furfaro. Many continued to wonder why there wasn't a single square.
In Piazza Duomo, alongside the immigrant workers of SUDDCobas, who had just finished their protest in Piazza Europa, were the movements, other associations, Rifondazione Comunista, and especially, many young people.
On one side, the stage and live music, on the other a truck and a sound system for the speeches. In the end, the Piazza Duomo demonstration flowed into the historic Piazza delle Carceri. As if they had never been separate.
Why all this difficulty in immediately taking the same side? It's legalism, passed off as respect for legality, that prevents one from taking the side of those occupying a square to prevent it from being conquered Who would want new racial laws? Or is it complicity with Capital, which is aligning with xenophobic policies, throwing multiculturalism out the window?
If “reconquest” sinisterly evokes the Crusades, the Bishop of Prato Giovanni Nerbini, has openly declared himself against it, in line with Pope Francis's message on the subject. “In the encyclical Brothers All reminds us that ‘a person and a people are only fruitful if they know how to creatively integrate openness to others within themselves’. When the feeling of fear and the attitude of closure make us face and understand reality, the consequence can only be intolerance, and the next step is inevitably racism.” Nerbini he also recalled the very poor political representation enjoyed by second-generation citizens in multi-ethnic Prato, launching the idea of creating a foreign residents' council.
It has done so more robustly and proactively than institutional politics, which is always too busy with electoral calculations, and which should not limit itself to testifying in defence of memory and constitutional values. It is no longer enough, and perhaps never was. To side with an occupied square, with the struggles of foreign workers, with so many students and supportive people, is the only possible answer to those who would want us all silent in the face of exploitation, subservient in turn, accustomed to a life of just work.
The division of the two anti-fascist squares in Prato echoes current divisions at the national political level; and it is symptomatic of the fact that the real target of the Great Replacement and Remigration theories, namely immigrant workers, their children, the social class they collectively constitute, are considered a foreign body even by a slice of politics that calls itself progressive. But which in fact, in Tuscany and elsewhere, shares with the right a reluctance to accept that Italian society today also consists of these social segments, and that these social segments demand dignity and“A beautiful life”, just like everyone else.
PHOTO CREDITS: © Silvia Giagnoni