Meloni Answers Economic Discontent with Criminalization Because Her Economic Strategy Has Failed
Source: Richard Braude. "In Italy, Giorgia Meloni Is Hardening Her Calls for Order." October 30, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that Italy's economy and Meloni's economic plans have failed ordinary people, so protests over low wages and fuel prices have erupted. Because she can't or won't fix those problems, Meloni falls back on arrests, tougher laws and attacks on judges, and these mostly don't work.
Conclusion
Meloni's government responds to the recent protests and strikes in Italy by criminalizing and demonizing dissent rather than addressing their economic causes, a pattern that stems from the failure of her economic strategy and leaves her with only repression and rhetoric to rely on.
Premises
- The recent protests in northern Italy and the truckers' strikes in the south are driven by real economic grievances: poverty wages (often under €1,000 a month), rising food and fuel costs, and empty supermarket shelves.
- The EU post-COVID stimulus money was squandered in half-baked projects and hampered by a lack of civil service staff, so it failed to lift Italy out of stagnation, and the state now lacks the funds and will to relieve the working class.
- The government's main response to the protests has been to criminalize them: a new security law with harsher sentencing, mass arrests (including schoolchildren), fines for thousands of truckers, a fabricated terrorism charge against activist Youssef Siher, and attacks on the judge who freed him.
- This approach is a recurring pattern of the Meloni government, which has passed laws and driven investigations against a long list of groups (ravers, environmentalists, squatters, protesters, sea-rescue missions, striking unions, doctors and others) over four years.
- These measures have mostly failed in practice because the relatively independent courts, lawyers' networks and solidarity movements have blocked them, and the government's judiciary-reform referendum was voted down.
- Fuel price rises tied to the US-Israeli war on Iran, which Meloni's government backs, and costly fuel-tax relief that Italy cannot afford under EU fiscal rules leave her without credible economic responses, only partial subsidies for diesel-dependent businesses.
Assumptions
- The protests are primarily expressions of economic and social grievance rather than mainly opportunistic rioting or looting.
- Meloni's government has the capacity to address these grievances but lacks the will or courage, rather than facing genuinely insurmountable constraints.
- The pattern of laws and investigations reflects a deliberate strategy of political scapegoating, not a set of unrelated responses to real public-order problems.
- The Siher arrest was fabricated and politically motivated, as the author asserts.
- Correlation in timing between economic failure and increased repression indicates that one explains the other.
- The reported accounts from activists (R. and M.) are representative of broader public sentiment.