In Italy’s schools, Meloni makes migrant kids pay the price for her culture war

Last Sunday (20 September), prime minister Giorgia Meloni decided to put the onus of the massively-underfunded, divisively-debated struggle for migrant integration … onto children.

Speaking to her party’s youth section, the Brothers of Italy’s leader lectured her country’s future electorate by ingraining hate towards their already marginalised counterparts.

“It’s unthinkable that in the classroom, it’s Italian children who feel left out because they’ve become the minority,” Meloni said, proposing a quota on the number of foreign-born students in each class, as well as bidding to integrate children by obliging their parents to learn Italian. 

And in a grand finale, the darling of Europe’s far-right vowed to ban the burqa and niqab from use in schools, an announcement which sent roars of excitement and standing ovations rippling through the impressionable crowd. 

Perhaps it’s the backdrop set by the towering Fascist architecture in Rome’s “Eur” district ( the 1930s neighbourhood built by Mussolini), or the surging triumph of one youth over another, that evoked images of a recent dystopian past. 

Matters of migration and integration have always been top of Meloni’s policy agenda aside from education, despite only 11.6 percent of Italy’s students being foreign nationals.

Hidden behind gender parity and cultural assimilation, the PM’s fiery remarks were tacitly put back in their place by the Italian president’s own back-to-school address.