When the State Answers With Drones

France 24 reports that Italy prepared for a day of protests in eight cities, including Rome and Milan, against budget cuts and the high cost of living, with authorities announcing heavy security measures — drones and helicopters among them — to monitor the marches. Euronews describes soldiers patrolling the streets of Milan and shops boarding up their windows. Le Monde notes that police carried out dozens of searches and arrests in advance of the planned rallies. These are the facts as the foreign press has them.

We do not dispute the state's duty to keep order, nor do we pretend that last weekend's violence did not happen. But the sequence the wires describe is worth pausing over. Searches and arrests before the demonstration; drones overhead during it; soldiers on the pavement after. A democracy may legitimately do each of these things. Whether it should do all of them at once, in response to young people marching about wages, is a question the coverage raises without quite asking.

There is a wider European frame here that the Guardian's editorial supplies. It argues that the unrest which began with teenagers at a high school has drawn in hundreds of thousands, and that what happens on the streets is shaping the continent's future alongside the electoral calendar. The Guardian also reports that European lawmakers have demanded the EU investigate the role of social media in the protests, with the option of blocking access as a last resort. We note, soberly, that the continent's instinct is increasingly to monitor the crowd rather than to answer it.

The Italian iteration has its own texture. The Local reports that truckers in the south ended a week of protests that had paralysed Campania and emptied supermarket shelves, after the government offered fuel aid. That is what a negotiated settlement looks like: a grievance named, a measure conceded, a road reopened. It is unglamorous and it does not travel well in foreign dispatches. But it suggests the state knows how to respond to material complaint when it chooses to.

The question the wires leave with us is therefore not whether Italy can keep order. It plainly can. It is whether the apparatus of order — the drones, the patrols, the dawn raids — is being asked to do the work that only politics can do. A generation that the world has already labelled lost will not be found by a helicopter. It will be found, if at all, at a table where its demands are treated as demands and not as disturbances.