A man is helping his grandson feed the ducks on the moat. Middle-aged ladies on bicycles pedal across a bridge and through a gate set into the perfectly intact medieval walls that encircle Cittadella.
It is market day in this pink-stone gem of a town in the Po valley. Friends and relatives gossip amid the stalls that line the street that leads to the main square, where a quietly unsettling scene is being played out.
Giuseppe Pan, the local secretary of the Northern League, is pressing leaflets into the hands of women passing by. ”The Cittadella branch of the Northern League is offering all women a course in STREET SELF-DEFENCE.”
But is there that much crime? ”Not here,” Pan concedes. ”But in the bigger cities …” He pulls a face to suggest that nearby Padua and Vicenza are today little better than Bogota.
Law-and-order fears, mingled with blatant xenophobia, are providing the anti-immigrant league with lush electoral pastures in the flatlands west of Venice. And its showing here could have a decisive impact on the character of the government that emerges from Italy’s general election on Sunday and Monday.
Silvio Berlusconi, whose conservative Freedom People Party is expected to win, this week sought to reassure moderate voters that he would not be giving his ally, the league’s leader, Umberto Bossi, a seat in the Cabinet. He made the move after Bossi declared the league could take up arms to stop what he claimed was an attempt by the outgoing centre-left government to rig the ballot.
Bossi’s man in Cittadella is Massimo Bitonci (42), the mayor. Last November he became known across Italy for announcing that he intended to vet foreigners applying for residence in his town, and weed out the poor, jobless and homeless. The government in Rome said it was a gross usurpation of its powers. But Bitonci insists he is merely applying existing legislation, and nothing has been done to stop him.
”We demand to see a pay packet. We don’t want people to be a burden on the local welfare system,” he said. ”Then I send the police round to see if they have accommodation and whether it conforms to sanitary regulations.”
Bitonci denies he is racially motivated. But his initiative is among those who have earned the region of Veneto, the League’s stronghold, a reputation as Italy’s most intolerant. In Padua, the local authorities built a wall around an immigrant community — since removed — which it said had become a hotbed of prostitution and drug-dealing.
At Ardo the mayor posted a â,¬500 bounty for anyone turning in an illegal immigrant. And in Treviso a league councillor recently told a session of the council: ”With immigrants, we should use the same system the SS used, punishing 10 of them for every slight against one of our citizens.”
The mayor of Treviso, also a member of the League, once said: ”We ought to dress [immigrants] like lepers to go ‘bang, bang, bang’ with a rifle.” The League’s election poster showed three white sheep kicking out a black one.
Paradoxically, says Massimo Calearo, the sense of apprehension about the arrival of immigrants is much stronger in the small towns of the Veneto than it is in cities, where crime is more common. Before he agreed to stand for Italy’s new centre-left movement, the Democratic Party, Calearo was president of the employers’ federation in Vicenza. His family’s business, which makes aerials, is typical of the medium-sized, often highly specialised, firms whose factories dot the landscape. The province of Vicenza exports more than the whole of Greece. It has acted as a magnet for immigrant workers.
”A country that wishes to grow economically these days cannot do so without immigrants,” says Calearo.
The latest estimate is that legal immigrants make up about 8% of the Veneto region’s population of five million. Romanians are the biggest group, followed by Moroccans and Albanians.
”But the proportion of immigrants in the working population is much higher, between 12% and 13%,” says Bruno Anastasia, director of an employment research body set up by the regional government.
The overwhelming majority have settled in well. A study by the Roman Catholic charity Caritas pointed to the province of Treviso in the Veneto region as the one in which foreigners were most thoroughly integrated.
Yet the League’s campaign, focusing on law and order and immigration, is clearly playing well with the rest of the population. Polls suggest that, in the multi-seat constituency in which Bitonci and Calearo are candidates, the League will double its vote to between 15% and 18% — enough to lift Cittadella’s controversial mayor into the Rome Parliament.
Calearo says this is partly because the League, which won 26 of the 617 seats in the lower house at the last election, has always thrived on protest ballots, and at this election voters disappointed by the outgoing centre-left government are reluctant to turn directly to Berlusconi.
The league is already flexing its muscles in expectation of a Berlusconi victory that is nonetheless expected to leave the right with a scant majority in the senate. This could give Bossi’s followers powerful leverage. This week, after the media tycoon hinted he was ready to give immigrants the vote if returned to power, the League protested and the issue was shelved.
”I can’t see us taking a soft line on that,” said a smiling Bitonci. — Â