Meloni's School Measures Reach a Region That Knows the Arithmetic

The Italian government has agreed on measures to ban the burqa and niqab in schools and to cap the number of foreign pupils in each classroom, the BBC reported on Thursday. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the package as "common-sense tools that do not divide but really help to integrate", according to the BBC. The New York Times reported the same decision, noting that Meloni said the aim was to better integrate children who do not speak Italian, while critics accused her of trying to appease anti-immigrant sentiment.

The Local Italy, which covers the country for an English-speaking readership, asked this week what is really driving the clampdown, placing the announcement alongside the government's wider identitarian rhetoric. Le Monde's correspondent, in a series on the European far right, described an "atmosphere of uninhibited racism" in the Lombard city of Monza, writing that the anxieties rocking the country have been fuelled by the government and escalated by the National Future party's focus on crime and ethnic themes. Read together, the foreign coverage frames the school measures less as pedagogy than as politics.

The two provisions travel differently. A ban on face veils in school affects a very small number of pupils in a country where the Muslim population is largely the product of recent migration. A cap on foreign pupils per class touches thousands of ordinary classrooms, and the number it sets — not stated in the wire — will decide whether it is a nudge or a wall.