Le Monde Turns Its Far-Right Series on Monza, and Lombardy Reads Itself

Le Monde has trained its series 'Europe's far right takes root' on Monza, describing the Lombard city as gripped by an 'atmosphere of uninhibited racism'. In the fourth instalment, published on Thursday, the French daily calls Monza one of the calmest cities in Italy and says it has been caught up in the anxieties rocking the country, fuelled by the Meloni government's identitarian rhetoric and escalated, in its account, by the National Future party's emphasis on crime and ethnic themes.

The choice of dateline matters for how the story travels. Monza sits at the northern edge of the Milan metropolitan area, inside the wealthiest region in Italy, and is not the setting foreign correspondents usually reach for when they write about Italian nativism. Le Monde's framing places the phenomenon in the country's industrial and financial core rather than at its margins, which is precisely the argument the series appears to be building.

The dispatch is one of several this week in which the international press has examined the Meloni government's identity politics through a specific local lens. The BBC reported on Thursday that Italian ministers had agreed to ban the burqa and niqab in schools and to cap the number of foreign pupils in a class, measures the Prime Minister described as 'common-sense tools that do not divide but really help to integrate'. The New York Times reported the same decisions under the headline that Italy was moving to cap foreign students in its classrooms, noting that critics accused the government of trying to appease anti-immigrant sentiment.