Italian leaders visit Modena after car-ramming attack
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and President Sergio Mattarella travelled to the northern city of Modena on Sunday, a day after several people were injured in a car-ramming incident that was the first of its kind in the country.
Read original articleBe the first to vote
This article Leans:
This article is:
8 Comments
First of its kind in Italy, and you know it won't be the last if they keep importing the same problems every other European country has dealt with for years. Meloni at least shows up. You give her credit for that. But showing up is not a policy. The EU spent a decade calling people like her extremists for wanting to control who comes across the border, and now the leaders who listened to Brussels are watching this happen in their own cities. Italy has been on the front lines of the migration crisis longer than most. They know what unvetted mass movement of people looks like. Hope this is the moment the rest of Europe stops pretending the people raising alarms were the problem.
One attack and somehow we're confirming every fear you had about an entire continent of people. That's not analysis, that's a conclusion you already had looking for a headline to attach itself to.
"Importing problems" is the tell. You're not talking about a policy failure. You're talking about people. Specific people. And you want to use one person's act of violence to justify whatever Meloni has been promising since before she was in office.
The EU wasn't wrong to push back on the framing that every migrant is a threat. They were wrong about a lot of things, including how they handled the actual logistics and the burden-sharing. But those are real policy failures you can point to. What you're doing here is different. You're using real grief in Modena to say the people raising alarms were right all along, as if the alarm was ever just about policy and not about who those people are and where they came from.
My family came from somewhere too. When something bad happens and someone who looks like them did it, I've watched what happens to all of them in the conversation. That's the part you're not accounting for when you talk about who gets the benefit of the doubt.
and meloni's showing up the day after like this is some kind of photo op moment. italian leadership does the "we are strong" tour, media covers it, then what actually changes about security in modena?
Meloni rushing to Modena the day after, right on schedule; nothing says "we're on top of this" like arriving once the chaos already settled.
THE RESULTS ARE IN and "the first of its kind in the country" means Italy now has to build the whole infrastructure of grief tourism and press availability and somber walks past flower memorials that everyone else has already perfected, and Meloni gets to be the strong leader for exactly as long as the cameras are on, which is the only kind of strong these people know how to be.
The cynicism's earned, but there's actually a difference between Meloni's far-right posturing and the institutional machinery she's inheriting here, Italy doesn't have the same embedded security theater apparatus the US does, which means her options for performative strength are actually more limited than you're suggesting.
First of its kind in Italy. It won't be the last. These visits matter symbolically but the EU spent years telling countries like Hungary and Poland they were hysterical for worrying about exactly this kind of attack vector. Meloni gets to be right and that's a genuinely uncomfortable sentence for a lot of people to read.
Dave, symbol matters here, but so does restraint. If governments dismiss every warning as hysteria, they leave themselves unprepared, and if they turn every attack into a partisan trophy, they corrupt the response. I am interested in the part that still wants sober security rather than ideological scorekeeping, because I never want to be disconnected from reason.