When the World Sees Rioting, It Is Also Seeing the Rent

The Guardian reported this weekend that the protests over housing and the cost of living which have convulsed Spain and France have spilled into Italy and Portugal, with clashes in Milan and a tent encampment in Lisbon. Le Monde recorded a second day of street violence in Milan and noted that the Prime Minister had called a security meeting for Monday. The wire tells the story in the grammar of public order: rioters, property set alight, scenes that recall Paris.

That grammar is not false, but it is partial. A protest that begins with rents and wages and ends with burning bins is reported from the point at which it becomes legible to a foreign desk — the moment it becomes disorder. What precedes that moment, the slow arithmetic of a salary that no longer reaches a flat, is harder to photograph and travels less well. We would not have the Milan march at all in these pages were it not for the foreign wires, and we note what their framing includes and what it leaves at the edge of the frame.

There is a further distance worth marking. The Prime Minister's response, as the Guardian reported it, was that the march had been exploited by hooligans. That may be true of some who joined it. It is also the standard sentence available to any government when a crowd becomes inconvenient, and it has the effect of separating the violence from the grievance. The two are not the same, but they are not unrelated either. A country where a young couple cannot afford a rented room in the city where they work has a problem that predates the first broken window.

Italy is watched from outside through a familiar set of lenses — debt, migration, political turnover — and now, briefly, through this one. The risk is that the lens closes again once the streets are quiet, and the arithmetic is left where it was. We would prefer the foreign coverage to keep its eye on the rent as long as it kept its eye on the fire.