summary
Security Legislative Decree (DL security), campaigns for the right to protest, new authoritarian rules, and attacks on cities that refuse to align with the Meloni government: the repressive agenda designed through the Security Decree is becoming reality, while liberal democracy is under structural pressure. By asserting rights, freedoms, and self-protection, it is time to create new paths together
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dESCRIption
An open discussion on the emerging forms of authoritarianism: from the Security Legislative Decree to restrictions on the right to protest, from preventive arrests and the delegitimization of the solidarity movement for Palestine to acts of censorship by the Meloni government at RAI (Italian radiotelevision) and attacks on freedom of information.
But these measures, and the Security Legislative Decree itself, which has gone from an ideological manifesto of the government to reality, are only one piece of the authoritarian project: adding to them there are the Rave Decree, the Caivano Decree, the implementation of Red Zones, the equalization of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, interference in schools and universities, and the Nordio reform that undermines judicial independence.
And there is more, what can be described as a quantum leap in authoritarian distortion: the eviction of social centers and attacks on cities that refuse to align with the Meloni government’s vision of society, carried out through real interventions in municipal administrations. We have seen this in Milan with Leoncavallo, in Bologna during the basketball game with Maccabi Tel Aviv, in Turin against Askatasuna, and again in Rome against SpinTime.
It is precisely where conditions are created for free and conflictual cooperation that opposition and alternatives to global right-wing forces concentrate, and where experiments in grassroots participation and direct democracy take place; it is here, consequently, that the national government acts decisively to expand its power at all costs. This is therefore the moment to reflect on the political and material consequences of this turn, and on the prospects of moving beyond liberal democracy in the contemporary crisis.
It has become urgent to build convergences around new forms of resistance and to strengthen broad networks of self-protection, including lawyers, associations, legal experts, journalists, reporters, and media activists in direct connection with social movements and all those who fight against authoritarianism and for new forms of direct democracy.