In the past year, Turin’s latest face-off — between the state on the one hand, and an alliance of anarchic, neighborhood “citizen committees” and pro-Palestinian protestors on the other — has been intensifying. Last November, one of Turin’s imams, Mohammed Shahin, was arrested and sent to Sicily, awaiting expulsion to his Egyptian homeland, though his deportation was later stopped. Turin has been twinned with Gaza since 1998, and the Torino per Gaza (“Turin for Gaza”) organization regularly brings hundreds of thousands of protestors onto the streets.

Then, on 18 December 2025, following orders issued by the Ministry of the Interior and coordinated by the chief of police, troops stormed the “Askatasuna” social center at the heart of Vanchiglia and expelled all its occupants. It brought to an end almost 30 years during which the squat — the name means “freedom” in Basque — had become a meeting-point for environmental activists. There have been confrontations ever since. When I visited for the 1 May parade, Askatasuna supporters and the riot cops scuffled. It was shields and batons against flag-poles and beer bottles, and I took my compulsory shower from a police-van power hose.

Two distinct forces are lining up against each other: the authorities receiving orders from the Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, and groups of “autonomi” and “attivisti” trying to plant as many Palestinian flags as possible. The clash is asymmetrical because Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is proving more durable than anyone expected. Elected in October 2022, she’s only a few weeks shy of breaking the record for the longest-serving government in Italy’s postwar history. Despite losing a recent referendum on judicial reform, and falling out of favor with Donald Trump, Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party seem firmly in control.

Yet if the clash is uneven, the outcome isn’t inevitable. “Governments are made in Rome,” Turin used to boast, “but fall in Mirafiori.” That’s a nod to Fiat’s mega-factory, south of Turin’s baroque heart, which used to employ over 60,000 workers. The city’s working-class heritage has vanished in recent decades, and the traditional Left is, anyway, scorned by the squatters from “Aska”. These activists don’t aspire to change a government: because they don’t believe in traditional democracy or even the political spectrum as such. Instead, they are attempting a ground-level associationism that echoes some of their city’s most radical traditions.

***

Turin is disorientating. Its overlay of four bending rivers on perpendicular boulevards makes it feel like a snakes-and-ladders board. With the Superga Basilica on the far side of the River Po, and royal palaces all around — the city’s dukes became Italy’s kings — it’s a grandiose but slippery place. Politically, though, Turin’s Left-wing credentials have always been clear, not least given the legacy of wartime resistance. Over 1,000 local partisans are buried in the “Field of Glory” in the city’s monumental cemetery.

Today, though, anti-fascism lacks definition beyond the obvious, and is anyway politically unhelpful: you can’t build the future on a negation. Besides, the mushrooming of citizen assemblies throughout Turin, not least in Vanchiglia, suggests the city’s radicals are now less inspired by Gramsci than David Graeber. The American anthropologist at the forefront of the Occupy protests, Graeber envisaged “a new, open-ended, pragmatic anarchism”, and spoke of occupied buildings as “an exercise in the politics of mutual aid, solidarity and caring. A simple, unauthorized act of love.”

In many ways, Italy pioneered autonomous spaces both in theory and practice. The first CSAs — “centri sociali autogestiti” or “self-run social centers” — were political squats organized by far-Left radicals in the Seventies. But as well as social centers, they also experimented with “back-to-the-landism”. As anti-mafia prosecutors began confiscating mob buildings and farms, many radicals won tenders to set up rehabs and farm shops.

But if Italy has been at the forefront of anarchic congregationalism, it has also pioneered repression. In Genoa, in 2001, one man was killed and a school was raided by riot police looking for an illusory anarchist “black block”. Now, Meloni has increased the pace of the crackdown. In August 2025, in Milan, the Leoncavallo social center was evicted on its 50th anniversary. In Genoa the previous summer, the Burrida, a similar center named after a local seafood stew, was raided and evicted too.

Meloni may well be feeling pressure here from Roberto Vannacci, a former army general and looming threat on her own Right flank. Yet whatever the cause of her sweeps, it’s clear that the Askatasuna case is different, not least in how it’s long been at the frontline of protest far beyond Vanchiglia. Central to this activism is opposition to the so-called “TAV”. The Italian acronym for “high-speed train”, the project eventually promises a new rail link between Turin and Lyon. But with the Alps in the way, the pristine mountain valleys around Turin have been roiled by unrest, with pitched battles between “No-TAV” activists and riot police resulting in thousands of arrests.

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Perhaps because of its environmental tinge, the No-TAV movement has also gained supporters beyond the radical Left. One insider, Martina, describes it as “truly popular”, bringing together “mayors, Catholics and ordinary people”. In recent years, meanwhile, the war in Gaza has also fueled local outrage. The criminalization of protest — with certain words banned altogether — means that many Torinesi are furious. “What have we got to do?” asks an activist named Karim. “Wait until they’re all dead before we say it’s a genocide?”

Turin’s distinctive architecture provides gathering places for these varied if overlapping groups. Because of mass immigration from the South during Turin’s postwar boom, this most industrial of cities has dozens of so-called case di quartiere (“suburb halls”), as well as a gaggle of circoli operai (“workers’ clubs”) and case del popolo (“people’s houses”).

Askatasuna’s former building is only a two-minute walk from the banks of the Po. A vast, cherry-colored palazzo, squarely facing the buzzing traffic on the Corso Regina Margherita, it’s surrounded by schools. Given the intense police presence, that forces parents and children alike to cross through checkpoints every day. Yet the area behind the building is pedestrianized, and it’s here, flanked by walls decorated with portraits of anti-fascist martyrs, that Askatasuna still does its outreach.

Riccardo arrived in 2006, 10 years after Askatasuna was first occupied. “This is where I found hospitality,” he says. He’s at the end of an open-air “laboratorio” about reimagining education. Thirty people — from children to pensioners — have sat in a circle all day. The Carabinieri, Italy’s militarized national police force, rev their engines at both ends of the pedestrianized zone, making it hard to hear.

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At the end of the workshop, Riccardo describes Aska as a kind of “bring-us-your-needs” listening point, what he and his comrades call a sportello (“help desk”). People drop by with a problem, and the group helps to find a solution. A woman who can’t afford to fix a leak is put in touch with a pro-bono plumber. A victim of eviction is found emergency housing.

Gianluca Vitale, a lawyer who represents Mohamed Shainin and a number of No-TAV activists, says that marginalized suburbs like these — often with large immigrant populations — are being squeezed for reasons of “urban decorum”. Turin is gentrifying fast, largely thanks to tech start-ups and tourism, and pockets of “marginality”, paying low rent on precarious contracts, are easy targets for Fratelli d’Italia politicians urging “redevelopment”.

Throughout all this, the activists are passionately and ideologically opposed to involving the state in their affairs. “There’s a huge problem of drug-dealing and delinquency in our suburb,” admits one. “But we don’t call the police because I know my neighbor.”

***

At its postwar peak, Mirafiori covered three million square meters of Turin’s south side, or the equivalent of 420 football pitches. Inside, some 60,000 workers glued, soldered and riveted along almost 25 miles of assembly lines. What they made were cars: millions of them. Fiat was Italy’s most important factory, and the firm’s Agnelli owners were as rich as royalty. They also owned Juventus, the footballing jewel of Turin and Italy’s most famous team.

Born in 1943, in a small town west of Milan, Pietro Perotti left school at 11. He soon went to work in a baker’s, waking at 2am and working until midday. In 1969, not much taller than he was at 11, he moved to Mirafiori, working as a repair-man on the shop floor. One day, Perotti was moving between units when he saw Southern workers start an innovative form of protest. Some, he recalls, “picked up an empty oil can and started banging on it like a drum”. Others joined in, as word spread of an injury or complaint. These former sharecroppers, newly arrived from Sicily or Calabria and bewildered by Taylorist production lines, even used their tools to start “making trumpets and whistles and musical instruments”.

In all this, Perotti saw a recreation of the “saint’s festivals” in the South, “where the sacred and the profane coexist”. It was the turning point of his life, for he realized that the order of things had to be inverted through in-situ merriment. Perotti began drawing political graffiti in the bogs. His art — Marx hung on the factory frontispiece, Agnelli with his trousers down — was made on the shop floor.

But throughout the Seventies, the atmosphere darkened. During the Anni di Piombo — the “Years of Lead” of extremist terrorism of both Left and Right, with the Italian secret services squatting murkily in between — many idealistic workers were drawn towards bombings and executions. Perotti, for his part, joined both Lotta Continua and Avanguardia Operaia, two groups later accused of funneling activists towards violent struggle.

“Here, in Mirafiori, there were seven of us in a workers’ cell,” Perotti recalls. He was ordered to go into hiding but refused. Five of his band of seven ended up in the Red Brigades, the most infamous far-Left group of all, which in 1978 would kidnap and murder Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister. As for Perotti, he stayed at Fiat until 1985, organizing invisible protests like the “bodywork jump” — when for every 10 cars that passed through the production line, one would be ignored.

Perhaps because he saw the bloody Seventies, Perotti is frustrated by the confrontational nature of the Askatasuna protests. He instead argues that agitation needs irony, and that on the 1 May event, the protestors “should have taken the mick”, finding new slogans of disdain and giving “biscuits to the children to offer the riot police”.

Certainly, Perotti is a wily manipulator of the contemporary political narrative. His foam puppets Trump and Meloni have often been published by newspapers, alongside the usual images of batons and tear gas. But he’s not the only one trying to channel rage in positive directions. Ortensia, part of the Comitato di Vanchiglia, another grassroots “committee”, is a psychologist who says that she and her colleagues try to find words “that land with everyone, that are gentle, and not use words like ‘battle’.”

But the mood is darkening. Ortensia describes “a polarization” in which neither police nor protesters can back down. A friend of hers, an Englishwoman, tells me that, a year ago, the Comitato was only talking about flower-beds with the elderly; now they’re in a militarized zone having their papers checked.

At sunset, I stop in a casa di quartiere in San Salvario, a district of long streets and dense postwar apartment blocks. The casa itself used to be the old public baths, and is now another edgy village hall, all street art, table tennis, noisy teenagers, and grandmothers with pushchairs. There I meet Nicoletta, Rosa and Giulia, part of an informal organization called Mamme in Piazza (“Mums in the Square”). These mothers — about a dozen in all — came together after seeing their children criminalized during the No-TAV protests. Their intent wasn’t to excuse crime, but to understand their kids and the anger animating them. “We don’t always share the practices of the struggle,” says Rosa, “but we defend the struggle against repression.”

These mothers talk a lot about anger: anger with their children, with their spouses, with themselves, with the state and its repression. But as usually happens when mothers take to the streets, they’re listened to because they have a language that, as Nicoletta puts it, “isn’t studied: it’s emotional, instinctive, naïve if you like about certain things”. The women have megaphoned outside the city’s prison, and have gone on countless marches with their banners. They perform regular balcony concerts. “We abstain from judgment,” says Rosa, “but we do see a loop. Exaggerated and frightening repression radicalizes you. It fucks you off.”

***

The fact that even these peaceful mothers are swearing shows the degree of anger in the city. There’s a deep grievance about economic malaise and judicial persecution, and Turin’s radicals have receded from any faith that mainstream politics can offer solutions. The last time that happened, 50 years ago, many frustrated revolutionaries turned into armed killers. No one expects the chaos of the Seventies to return — but the issue of violence is where the debate almost always ends up.

For its part, the Right accuses protestors of a variety of crimes, pointing to the storming of La Stampa‘s newspaper offices, and a January attack on a policeman, as evidence that their movement is invariably brutal. But if you put that to Askatasuna members, the reply inverts the accusation. “For us,” says Riccardo, “‘conflict’ is a key term. But today, there is a system that inflicts daily violence on all the citizens living in our communities.”

Meloni’s much-trumpeted “Pacchetto Sicurezza” is meant to sort it all out. This new security legislation, passed in February 2026, allows for the creation of “red zones” with militarized presences, and legitimizes pre-emptive arrest. Turin is key to this crusade. The first capital of a united Italy, and home to kings and Fiat, it can’t be seen to fail on something as simple as “public order”.

For Vitale, the lawyer, this is dangerous territory. “We’re talking,” he says, “about particularly sensitive topics and about the manifestation of a thought.” He maintains that “an opinion might not be endorsed [by you] but it’s an opinion. An opinion can’t be punished, it doesn’t represent a crime.” “It seems,” adds Vitale, “that in Turin we’re seeing a clash between rival visions of the state: either government legislation is submitted to what is legal according to the Constitution, or else the judiciary has to obey a legislative act.”

That clash between judiciary and executive is ancient, but for those in Vanchiglia itself, the situation feels bizarre. When you talk to mothers outside schools, dropping off their kids, they say they’re insulted by police. “You have the right to shut up,” one officer apparently told Ortensia.

On a street corner I bump into Alice Ravinale, a representative of the Left-Green Alliance in the regional parliament. “This is all just show”, she says, pointing at two riot vans with blue lights flashing. “Every day we ask ourselves what they’re scared of.” The answer, perhaps, is that they’re scared of people who refuse to acknowledge the need for them. That, as Perotti knows, is the best form of attack: not to take authority figures too seriously.

***

Additional reporting by Cecilia Rigattieri.

In recent times, however, these brotherly bonds have been placed under severe strain. For the last year, France and its most-cherished former possession, Algeria, have been locked in a diplomatic cold war. And perhaps the most prominent figure to be caught in the dispute is none other than Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque.

Over the past few days, Hafiz, a native of Algiers who pledges support for the French Republic, has been accused of playing a shady double game. On the one hand, the Left-wing (and pro-Republican) newspaper Libération has called him “Algeria’s secret Ambassador to France” or the “eye of Algiers” in France: in other words a spy. All the while, the Algerians increasingly suspect him of working for the French secret services, while also sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies of Algeria’s secular regime. Hafiz’s dilemma, then, is a neat encapsulation of the challenge facing both France and Algeria: how to dovetail two very different realities — grounded not on fraternal affection but in long years of mutual contempt?

In April this year, the French government announced that relations with Algeria are at their worst since 1962, the year Algiers gained its independence from Paris following a bloody and protracted war of liberation. That same month, the French ambassador was recalled from Algiers while 12 Algerian diplomats were expelled from France: after Paris accused them of espionage. The immediate cause of these tit-for-tat expulsions was a French police investigation into the involvement of an Algerian official in the temporary abduction of a TikTok influencer called Amir Boukhors. A vociferous critic of the Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the man known as “Amir DZ” boasts over a million online followers. For its part, the Algerians have accused Boukhors of fraud and what they call “infractions terrorists” — though his supporters argue he’s being targeted for supporting the Algerian version of Hirak, a youth movement that’s flourished in several Arab countries since the Arab Spring. Boukhors had been in France since 2016, and was given asylum status in 2023. During this time, Algeria issued nine international arrest warrants against him, but the French consistently refused to extradite him.

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In truth, though, the spat over Amir DZ is part of a far wider dispute. The current crisis arguably date back to July 30, 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron, in a letter to the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, wrote that “the present and future of the Western Sahara were part of Moroccan sovereignty”, even as he backed Rabat’s 2007 plan to take control of the region. This was partly to reward Morocco’s developing and successful business relationships with France. This was an unexpected and direct affront to the Algerians, who have long supported the pro-independence Sawhari Polisario group, which claims the desert territory as its own. No formal ceasefire in the Western Sahara conflict has ever been announced — the French, then, had jumped the gun, swerving ongoing negotiations over the territory and offending Algiers in the process. Algiers, for its part, then took the offensive and recalled its ambassador from Paris.

Since then, the Algerians have refused to back down, accusing the French, among other things, of “destabilizing” Algeria via the DGSE (its equivalent of MI6). At the same time, France has said Algeria had refused to repatriate citizens suspected of terrorism. For this, France threatened to drastically reduce the number of visas given to Algerians, the largest immigrant population in France. Tensions have been further heightened by Macron’s call for Algeria to free the 71-year-old Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who has been condemned to five years in prison on dubious charges of “undermining the integrity” of the nation.

In a further provocation, the 36-year-old French football journalist Christophe Gleizes, a specialist in African football, was arrested in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and has recently been given a seven-year sentence for “supporting terrorism”. His “crime” was interviewing a local football manager who was also known to be associated with the pro-Berber MAK (the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie), which the Algerian government proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2021. Despite the intervention of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and the pro-Muslim Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Algerians have so far refused to free the unfortunate Gleizes.

For many observers on both sides of the Mediterranean, there is a wearying familiarity about the current conflict. Journalists in the Algerian media have necessarily been unable to voice their criticisms of their government publicly. El Watan, the distinguished French language newspaper in Algiers, has been strikingly neutral on the issue, fearful that funding cuts from the government will finally drive it into the ground. Online, however, there is a consensus among Algerian dissidents, at home and in France, that this overseas bickering is merely a distraction from Algeria’s deep domestic crisis.

Worse still, Algeria looks like it is being left behind by its Moroccan rival. At roots, the country’s woes are economic: which is why the government faces such fierce opposition from Hirak and other dissidents, who can plainly see from France and elsewhere that for all its beautiful beaches and historical wonders, Algeria remains a poor and isolated state stuck in last century’s anti-colonial mindset.

No wonder, then, that the philosopher André Comté-Sponville, writing recently in the pages of the business magazine Challenges, argued it was easier for the Algerians to “surf the wave of anti-French resentment than to modernize the country”. Comté-Sponville also pointed out that the French had largely moved on from their war with Algeria, and that the legacy of the pieds-noirs (French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962) and the harkis (Algerians who fought for the French and either settled in France or were killed in vast numbers back home) were now part of history.

But this is apparently not the case for the Algerians who, argues Comté-Sponville, have been caught up in a post-colonial fantasy of “hysterical” revenge against their old enemy. Citing Freud, the philosopher describes the Algerians as trapped in their own neurosis, refusing to see reality.

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Certainly, it is true that the complicated love-hate relationship between France and Algeria has as much to do with psychoanalysis as with politics. To an extent, this has its tangled roots in the poisoned soil of Franco-Algerian history. Soon after the French occupied Algeria, they turned the country into a département of France. This had the effect of immediately disenfranchising the Muslim majority population: which did not qualify for French citizenship, or otherwise couldn’t reconcile their faith with the demands of a secular state (something that’s still true in contemporary France). The result was a deeply divided society whose tensions defined the cruel and bloody tactics used by both sides during the War of Independence.

This has remained true since 1962. Most significantly, however, neither the Algerian government nor France has ever admitted their murky complicity during the so-called “black decade”, between roughly 1992 and 2002, when the Algerian authorities fought an insurgency of well-armed and well-organized Islamists. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people died during this period, though in many of the massacres it wasn’t always clear who was doing the killing: Algerian security forces and the French DGSE were both alleged to have been involved in secret operations.

While the eyes of the world have lately been on the Middle East, meanwhile, France and Algeria have found themselves once again in a Mexican stand-off, where further aggression on either side is liable to tilt dangerously. In geopolitical terms, the strategic stakes for France could not be higher, as the country has withdrawn from Burkina Faso and Mali and needs to keep Algeria onside to strengthen its hand in the Maghreb. There is a wider European dimension here too: the Maghreb is a kind of international buffer against migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the instability and chaos of the Sahel region.

In the meantime, few French presidents have ever done as much as Macron to curry favor with the Arab world. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Elysée Palace pledged at the end of July that France would join Spain, Ireland and Norway — and now possibly the UK — in recognizing a Palestinian state. In the meantime, France has begun encouraging other European and Middle Eastern states to recognize Palestine too, working tentatively with Saudi Arabia on a two-state solution to the deadly stalemate in Gaza.

Macron’s deference to the Arab world is unsurprising: he wants to leave a legacy as a world statesman and peacemaker, as well as placate his own restive Muslim population — the largest in Europe. It is also in line with one of France’s oldest objectives in foreign policy: to be “une puissance musulmane” (“a power in the Muslim world”). This is an ambition which dates back to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798, and includes the occupation and division of Syria and Lebanon, protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and the annexation of Algeria. But as France tries once again to make its mark in the Middle East, it is Algeria, once France’s most prized jewel, which is proving to be the sharpest thorn in the French diplomatic side.

All the while, France’s economic presence in Algeria, long dependent on a shared history, is now been rivaled by China and even Italy — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warmly praised President Tebboune on an official visit to Rome and said that relations between Algiers and Rome were at an all-time high. At the same time, Algeria has been building links with Russia and Turkey, which have also been maneuvering aggressively against the French. They’re especially keen to take an interest in Algeria’s oil economy, which has flourished in the wake of the Ukraine war.

For its part, Algeria needs to reassert itself as the leader in the region after decades of retrenchment, which has seen it be overtaken by Morocco as the West’s most favored client. As it is, Algerian paranoia towards the West, and France in particular, has only hardened with a sense that the country is being surrounded by enemies. For the time being, then, there is no easy way out of the impasse, even if the Grand Mosque remains as charming and alluring as ever.

Not every Syrian who has crossed back from Lebanon has faced Bashar al-Assad’s wrath so directly — yet in her poverty and her desperation, Laila is far from alone. Around 440,000 people are estimated to have fled Lebanon to Syria since Israel escalated its military offensive in September. Like Laila, most are Syrians: some 1.5 million fled the Assad regime during their country’s bloody civil war. And, just like Laila, they now face a Catch-22: either taking their chances in Lebanon, dodging Israeli bombs, or else returning home to the same dangers that forced them to flee in the first place.

While returnees are currently coming from nearby Lebanon, meanwhile, Syrians could yet return from far further afield. In mid-October, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy urged EU leaders to explore strategies to enable the return of Syrian refugees, as they discussed hardening the bloc’s migration policy at a summit in Brussels. Ahead of the meeting, Meloni stressed the need to work with “all actors” to make this happen, including the Assad regime itself. And while the talk right now is of “voluntary” returns, some Syrians already fear that the Europeans may yet use coercion — conveniently dumping their liberal agenda and condemning many more people to disappearance or worse.

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For Syria is far from safe. That’s clear enough from the numbers, with the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reporting at least 26 cases of returnees who have been arrested and detained by government forces. SNHR’s September report recorded 206 arbitrary detentions across the country. That included nine children and 17 women, even as almost a dozen returnees were swept up too. Government forces, for their part, were responsible for 128 of these cases — but Kurdish and Islamist factions were also involved.

Dovetail that with countless anecdotal stories of torture, expulsion and murder, and it’s little wonder that so many Syrians are reluctant to head east. But what of those who do decide to take the plunge? The journey into Syria is itself fraught with danger. Many are also obliged to travel on the backs of pickup trucks, or struggle through on foot to avoid arrest. Some returnees prefer heading through opposition-held territories to avoid being picked up by government troops, though that carries its own risks: of extortion by opposition militias and bandits.

If they chose to return via official channels, there is a cost: $100 upon re-entry. “People scrape some clothes and valuables, rush away, and are forced to walk,” says Mohammad Al-Abdullah, director of the SJAC. “Nothing in those returns is voluntary, safe or dignified. And though Damascus has often made promises of amnesty for returnees, these rules don’t apply to those thousands of Syrians who were previously detained for peaceful political protest. In any case, Al-Abdallah says that government forgiveness cannot be trusted, describing Assad’s proclamations as a PR exercise aimed at Western countries eager to dump their Syrians.

After 13 years of war, these refugees are returning to a land of shattered cities, fallow farms, and inflation hovering at 120%. They usually arrive with very limited resources: nine out of 10 refugee families in Lebanon live in extreme poverty. Even if they do have funds, meanwhile, they’re likely to find their homes in ruins, or else discover they’ve been confiscated by the state. Flour, oil and other basic food stuffs are hard to find, and the government certainly won’t help new arrivals secure them. In fact, there’s some evidence that returnees are actively discriminated against for aid and shelter, even as electricity, water and healthcare are in desperately short supply too.

All told, it’s unsurprising that Syria is in the midst of a humanitarian disaster: with 7.2 million people displaced inside their own country, some 70% of the population needs humanitarian help, while a full 90% live in poverty. Yet despite the fact that the UNHCR has warned in July that conditions in Syria are too unsafe to promote large-scale voluntary returns, several foreign governments seem keen to promote just that.

Across the Mediterranean, Meloni has led the way. In July, she reappointed an Italian ambassador to Damascus, making Italy the first EU to formally restore relations with Assad after he dragged his country into bloodshed about a decade ago. That diplomatic move came a few days after eight EU countries, including Italy, called on the bloc to “review and assess” its policy on Syria — with the apparent aim of creating conditions for “safe, voluntary, and dignified returns” of Syrian refugees.

It’s hardly surprising that European politicians such Meloni are so keen to prod Syrians back across the sea. If nothing else, anti-migration sentiment is good politics. It’s also telling that, notwithstanding their rapprochement with Assad, leaders like Meloni equally seem to accept the country isn’t really safe. How else to explain the efforts by some EU states to establish “safe zones” within Syria, whereby returning refugees would be sent to live away from their hometowns?

Al-Abdullah is unimpressed, noting, among other things, that it risks exacerbating sectarian tensions in what remains a traumatised, suspicious country. That’s even before you reflect on the huge pressure such a plan would put on basic services.

No less important, SJAC’s director points to serious consequences if normalisation with Assad’s government proceeds, especially if some EU states finally move from a voluntary scheme towards active deportation. “This is only a temporary fix,” is how Al-Abdullah puts it, warning of the suffering that would inevitably be inflicted on returning Syrians, surely breaching the human rights obligations of European states.

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Criticising the bloc for “closing its eyes” to the situation on the ground, Philippe Dam of Human Rights Watch believes Brussels is “repainting” Syria to suit its agenda. “There’s a risk,” he says, “that the Assad regime’s violations might be understated for short-term convenient goals of some EU leaders.”

In any case, the EU is already working with non-EU nations to push Syrians home, despite an obvious lack of safeguards. In May, for instance, the EU pledged a €1 billion financial assistance package to Lebanon, partly to fund the country’s border force. Not unrelated, almost 14,000 Syrian refugees were forced over the border into Syria last year. It’s a similar story in Turkey, with the EU paying Ankara to facilitate returns.

That, of course, still leaves one question: what’s the alternative? Dam suggests the EU could put political capital into improving Syria’s human rights situation. Al Abdullah, for his part, argues European governments should continue pushing for a peaceful settlement to the country’s war.

But with Syria casting off its pariah label — despite 13 years of brutal war — it’ll take actual incentives for Assad to soften. One option here is sanctions: not slapping on more, but reducing them, albeit if the regime makes genuine efforts to protect returnees. The bloc might also engage with Syria’s Arab neighbours, encouraging them to offer Assad financial support in return for good behaviour. If nothing else, this approach could prove mutually beneficial: there are around a million Syrians currently in Jordan, and anything that encouraged them to leave voluntarily would surely please the Hashemites.

Unfortunately, though, nothing so thoughtful seems likely — not from the Jordanians and certainly not from the EU. Rather, the bloc seems set to pursue its own interests above all else, and rely on liberal pieties until they’re no longer useful.

Those days are long gone. Since her triumph in 2022, and as some of us foresaw, Meloni has eased herself into the Euro-Atlantic consensus. Adopting a conciliatory attitude towards the EU, she’s also ensured Italy’s full compliance with the bloc’s austerity-driven economic framework. Meanwhile, the Italian premier also became a vocal supporter of Nato hawkishness in Ukraine, building strong ties with Joe Biden.

Taken together, then, you get the sense that Meloni gambled her political survival on shedding her populist image and rushing in the opposite direction, becoming more pro-European and more pro-American than your average European centrist. Now, however, the liberal media is aflame once more. Chatter about Meloni’s political journey started in September, when she was presented with a “Global Citizen Award” at the Atlantic Council in New York. Beyond the think tank’s Atlanticist flavour, what really got politicos talking was who gave Meloni her prize: one Elon Musk. This has fuelled speculation about a potential political (re)alignment with Trump on Meloni’s part. Given the mercurial South African’s financial and political support for Trump’s presidential run — and the (denied) allegations of a burgeoning romance between the businessman and the Prime Minister — these claims don’t feel completely fanciful.

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Meloni, for her part, hasn’t done much to dampen the rumours of a reactionary revival. She’s admittedly been careful not to endorse either candidate in the US election, stressing she’ll work with whoever wins. But it’s also clear that she’s well-positioned to become one of Trump’s key European partners should he reclaim the White House in November. In part, that’s thanks to her long-standing ties to the broader MAGA movement. In 2018, to give one example, Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon was a keynote speaker at a political festival organised by her Brothers of Italy party. 

That’s reflected by more recent moves too. In a clear nod to national conservatives in Washington, Meloni told her audience at the Atlantic Council that “we should not be ashamed to use and defend words and concepts like nation and patriotism”. At the same time, Brothers of Italy’s recent decision to vote against a European Parliament resolution allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons on Russian soil should also be seen as a nod to MAGA’s scepticism of Western support for Ukraine — and an indication of Meloni’s willingness to shift Italy’s foreign policy if Trump wins in November.

Taken together, and especially given the looming American elections, Meloni’s decision to receive her prize from Musk could therefore be part of a wider strategy. Aimed at rekindling ties with American conservatives, that surely makes sense, especially when Musk’s influence is expected to be significantly boosted by the tycoon’s re-election. As Francesco Giubilei, a Meloni acolyte, lately told Le Monde, the Prime Minister must be both “a force for struggle” and a force for government. “She’s very cautious, waiting to see who will win the election and maintaining her ties with Trump’s world to benefit should he win.” 

So could Meloni’s recent moves be signalling a return to her radical roots? I think not. At its core, rather, this story is less about policy — and more about cold hard cash, both in Italy itself and further afield. That’s clear enough if you put aside the trees, Meloni and Musk, and instead focus on the woods: the Atlantic Council that offered Meloni her prize. The think tank euphemistically describes itself as a nonpartisan organisation that “galvanises” US global leadership and encourages engagement with its friends and allies. In plain English, that means that the Atlantic Council exists to promote the interests of US corporations — and American imperial interests more generally. Founded in the Sixties, to boost political support for Nato, today it remains active on transatlantic security issues. 

More to the point, the organisation’s corporate partners and funders include many of the US’s largest firms, operating across finance, defence, energy and tech. A range of Nato governments also supports the Atlantic Council, as indeed does the alliance itself. No wonder it’s gained a reputation for aggressively lobbying for American financial and corporate interests worldwide. In 2014, for instance, FedEx teamed up with the Atlantic Council to build support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed trade agreement between the EU and US aimed at shielding transnational corporations from public oversight, and which was ultimately abandoned in the face of public opposition. 

More recently, WikiLeaks’s US diplomatic cables leak revealed that the Atlantic Council worked closely with Chevron and ExxonMobil to undermine a Brazilian legislative proposal to grant Petrobras, a local state-owned corporation, chief control of the oil fields off the country’s coast. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, meanwhile, the organisation has distinguished itself for its very hawkish approach to the conflict, perhaps unsurprising given the number of defence companies among its backers. 

Given all this, one might reasonably speculate that the Atlantic Council’s grooming of Meloni has little to do with US partisan politics — the organisation is, in fact, quite distant from Trumpism — and more about expanding the influence of US capital in the Bel Paese. Even Musk’s cosy relationship with the Prime Minister seems to be about more than just “shared values” and soft feelings. In June, the Italian government approved a new regulatory framework that grants foreign space companies permission to operate in the country. It’s no secret that, in this context, Musk aims to make Starlink the country’s main “white area” internet provider, in other words for places not covered by wired or mobile alternatives. That, in turn, has the potential to displace domestic rivals like Open Fiber and Tim, which Musk accuses of obstructing the rollout of his high-speed internet.

Nor is Musk the only US investor ingratiating himself with Meloni. After returning from her bash in New York, she also met with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. With assets worth $10 trillion, the firm boasts the equivalent of Germany and Japan’s combined GDP. In Italy itself, BlackRock is comfortably the largest foreign institutional investor on the Milan Stock Exchange, owning substantial stakes in some of the country’s largest listed companies. The firm is bolstering its Italian presence elsewhere too. Earlier this year, for instance, Meloni oversaw the sale of Tim’s entire fixed-line network to KKR, a US fund that boasts BlackRock among its main institutional investors. 

Beyond the fact that the network represents a strategic national asset, with its sensitive user data now effectively under foreign control, these varied moves represent the culmination of a long sequence of privatisations and selling-off of Italian public and private assets beginning back in the Nineties. Once you dovetail that with BlackRock’s future plans — among other things, it hopes to snatch up Italy’s highway and railway networks, currently under public or semi-public control — the country looks set to become little more than an outpost of American capital, losing what little is left of its economic sovereignty. 

That this should be happening under a nominally “sovereigntist” prime minister is remarkable enough — but what really matters is the way US investors, notably BlackRock, are using Italy as a Trojan horse to expand their influence right across Europe. Consider the example of Germany. Unlike other countries, companies in Munich or Hamburg largely remain in the hands of the families that founded them. Local investors have substantial influence too, as does KFW, the public bank dedicated to supporting the Federal Republic’s industrial development.

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In practice, that means the penetration of BlackRock and other US mega-funds in the German economy remains relatively marginal. That’s an anomaly that US capital now seems intent on fixing, using Italy as its battering ram. Last month, for instance, Milan’s UniCredit bank announced a surprise hostile takeover of Commerzbank, effectively becoming the Frankfurt outfit’s largest shareholder. Though this caused some patriotic fervour among Italian commentators — an Italian bank taking over a German rival! — the reality is that the move was likely spearheaded by BlackRock itself, which executed the move with the help of other Anglo-American funds, all to consolidate its control of Germany’s financial system. No wonder Larry Fink welcomed the move. “Europe,” he said, “needs a stronger capital markets system and a more unified banking system.” 

What we are witnessing, in short, is the economic cannibalisation of Europe by US capital. Not that we should be surprised. As Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, writes in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd continues, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of Rome and Berlin from the imperial centre in Washington. The fact that this is happening under the auspices of a self-described “patriot” like Meloni only highlights the grotesque weakness of European politics.