Behind the Looting in Milan, a Grievance the Troops Cannot Answer

The Guardian reports that luxury shops in Milan have closed and that Italy is preparing to deploy troops in the city after days of protest in which property was looted and vandalised. The BBC frames the government's response as a crackdown on violent clashes. Read together, the foreign dispatches describe a country reaching for the garrison before it has finished asking what the disorder was about.

The wires are, to their credit, clear on the underlying complaint. The Guardian quotes demonstrators saying they are suffocating under housing and living costs, and notes that the same anger has convulsed Spain and France in recent weeks. The New York Times adds a detail that deserves more attention than the barricades: parallel protests in the north and the south, young people in the northern cities and farmers and truckers in the south halting commercial traffic over fuel prices. Two economies, one grievance.

This is where the outside view becomes useful to us. A country reported at one remove is often reported through its most photogenic moment, and a burning street photographs better than a rent statement. But the foreign correspondents have put the cost of living in their second paragraph, and we should keep it there. The Prime Minister, according to the Guardian, has said the Milan march was exploited by hooligans. That may be true of some of those present. It does not dispose of the question of why so many others came.

There is a temptation, when order is restored, to treat the restoration as the end of the matter. We would gently suggest the opposite. The measures now being debated in Rome are security measures, and security measures address the looting. They do not address the rent, the fuel, or the sense among the young that the country's prosperity is somewhere else. A garrison can hold a square. It cannot hold an argument.

The international press will move on within the week, as it always does, and Italy will be left with the harder work. Our hope is that the foreign coverage is remembered less for the images of the weekend than for the sentence in which the Guardian explained what the protesters were saying. That sentence is the story.