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Racism reaches the Italian polls

Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, favorites to win this Sunday. / EFE

The foreseeable victory of the right-wing parties in the legislative elections on Sunday, with a very harsh discourse against immigration, can make life difficult for foreigners

Some plastic flowers, a sad electric candle and a small paper sign on which you can barely read her name remind Alika Ogorchukwu of the place where she was killed. They are placed in the planter of a tree in front of number 40 Corso Umberto I, the main shopping street of Civitanova Marche, a small city in central Italy located on the shores of the Adriatic. It is one of those quiet, clean and tidy towns to which German and Austrian tourists travel in search of sun, beach and the beauty of the Italian landscape. It also attracts immigrants trying to make a living, like Alika, who was selling scarves and other trinkets in the early afternoon of July 29 when she was unlucky enough to run into Filippo Berlazzo and his girlfriend, Elena. .

“Ciao, bella,” this Nigerian immigrant said to the woman trying to get her to give him some change. Berlazzo didn’t like it and responded by throwing himself on top of her. She tore off the crutch with which Alika helped herself to walk after having suffered an accident and she began to hit him until she knocked him to the ground. Once immobilized, she continued to assault him until she killed him by suffocation. Pedestrians passing Corso Umberto I at that hour called the police, but they did not dare to separate the two men. However, there were several people who took out their mobile phones to record the attack. The video, reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd in the United States at the hands of a police officer, did not take long to reach the media, although the case was soon forgotten in a summer marked by the electoral campaign ahead of the elections of this Sunday.

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The polls predict a victory for the conservative bloc that includes Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy) and the League, two parties that advocate a strong hand against illegal immigration and that promise to put an end to the landings of foreigners who cross the Sicilian Channel from North Africa. The statements on this issue by Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, which sometimes border on xenophobia, worry Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo, professor of Right to Asylum at the University of Palermo. “If finally there is a new right-wing government, it will develop Italian-style sovereignty, with laws that will make it difficult to access humanitarian protection and arrivals at ports, so that immigrants will be abandoned in the Central Mediterranean, returned to North Africa or condemned to clandestine exploitation”.

The foreseeable rebound in migratory flows due to the consequences of the war in Ukraine and their eventual criminalization by a new Executive make Vassallo Paleologo fear that there will be “an upsurge in racism” in Italy. Racial hate crimes are no longer unusual in Marche, the region in which Alika was murdered and where, in 2018, a ‘skinhead’ left six immigrants injured in the city of Macerata. He explained that he started shooting all the blacks he found out of rage at the death of a young Italian girl at the hands of a Nigerian.

Charity, Alika’s widow, poses with a photo of her husband. /

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Alika’s widow, Charity, doesn’t want to get wet when asked if her husband’s murder was motivated by racial hatred. “It has to be Filippo who says if he acted like this because of racism or for another reason,” she replies, referring to the aggressor. «I have been in Italy for 20 years and I have always felt that people treated me well». Sitting on the sofa in the humble flat where the Ogorchukwu family lives in San Severino Marche, a town just under an hour’s drive from Civitanova Marche, the woman demands justice and says with a broken voice that her husband’s murder has left her “a heavy weight” on the heart.

«They have killed Alika for nothing. I can’t get it out of my head. When I close my eyes I can’t sleep and I think about him all the time,” says Charity through tears. “My son can’t sleep either. He is 8 years old. He’s all the time asking me where his father is. I cannot accept that Filippo spends a couple of years in jail and then gets out. He must pay for what he has done ».

“No one helped him”

Alika’s widow cannot explain why no one intervened to stop the attack, even though it took place in broad daylight on a busy street. «No one helped him, but people took the mobile to record everything, as if it were a wrestling exhibition. If someone had acted, my husband would still be alive today », she laments as she looks at her wedding photos. Francesco Mantella, a lawyer for the Ogorchukwu family, explains that the aggressor has alleged that he suffers from mental problems, for which he has undergone a psychiatric examination, the results of which are not yet known.

“The motivation for his gesture, lucid and fierce until the end, is not understood: four minutes of aggression that were intended to end his life. There was no provocation, “says Mantella, who hopes that through psychiatric expertise and the process it will be known if there was a racist motivation. “It is something that cannot be excluded.”

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